Opinião Pública – Vol. 29, Nº 3 2023
Articles in this issue
Author: Daniel Buarque
Brazil is an emerging country with tremendous potential and the ambition to become a major player in global politics. Achieving high international status, however, depends not only on aspiration, but on the intersubjective perceptions of states that are already established as great powers. Brazil’s rise is connected not only to its attributes of power but to how the country is perceived by others. This article advances the study of Brazil’s status by analyzing the image of the country according to the perceptions of the foreign policy community of the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council. It contributes to International Relations scholarship by addressing the relation between images of a nation and its level of prestige. The article argues that knowledge about Brazil is limited even among global elites and is mostly associated with superficial stereotypes.
Authors: José Francisco Soares e Maria Teresa Gonzaga Alves
The article presents a measure of socioeconomic status (SES) for nearly all Brazilian schools. Primary indicators – calculated with data from questionnaires answered by students in educational assessments – and secondary indicators – which characterize the schools' social contexts – were aggregated into an SES scale through an Item Response Theory model. The SES was calculated for more than 180,000 schools. The methodology gave visibility to small schools or ones in remote areas that, until now were invisible to public policies since they had not participated in educational assessments. The relationship between educational outcomes and SES represents the inequalities in the country. The schools' SES are useful for academic research, and can help improve public policies aimed at reducing educational inequalities.
Authors: Lizandro Lui, Lígia Mori Madeira e Lilian Rita Macedo Zorzetti Camara
The article analyzes how the use of scientific evidence was instrumentalized by the Federal Supreme Court (STF) when judging lawsuits concerning policies to combat COVID-19. Conceptually, the article relates two fields of study: judicialization of public policies and evidence-based public policies. We began by collecting lawsuits that sought constitutional review (known as ADIs and ADPFs) involving the competing themes of Covid-19 and healthcare, reaching a universe of 46 lawsuits, of which 25 are ADIs and 21 are ADPFs. We identified that the STF justices, in an attempt to limit the initiatives carried out by the federal government, began to use scientific knowledge as an argumentative operator to legitimize their decisions and counter the president's perceived negationist stance. There is a need for more studies on how STF ministers base their decisions and use scientific knowledge from fields other than law.
Authors: Alvaro J. Pereira Filho e Robert Vidigal
Research on partisan voters in Brazil have demonstrated a decline in both partisanship and feelings toward political parties. How is party identity maintained in this situation? We affirm that even when voters do not evaluate their own party positively, their party identification persists through their inter-party feelings, which have deteriorated in recent years. Data from the Brazilian Election Studies (ESEB) for the period from 2002 to 2018 suggest that partisan voters are less enthusiastic about Brazilian political parties, and the relationship between partisan feelings has strengthened in the most recent electoral context. The results about the relationship between party sentiments, to use a quadratic term, indicate that the main alternatives to support for the Worker’s Party (PT) justified a party identity based on the ‘lesser of two evils’ strategy. This indicates the use of a greater deterioration of the image of a political opponent as a mechanism to justify ambivalence in relation to their own partisan position.
Author: Viktor Chagas
The objective of this article is to understand the dynamics concerning political actions, carried out through hashtags on Twitter. Its main goal is to determine if the monitoring of trending topics can help to identify moments of acute political tension. Based on an analysis of rank flows, the main hypothesis raised by this investigation is that, as indications of online public opinion, trends can operate as a thermometer of the climate of opinion in networks. In addition, it is possible to note, through the use of hashtags as markers of support and disarray, the use of astroturfing tactics to achieve visibility and repercussion on social media. The study undertook a systematic collection of the main trends in Brazil, between January and July 2019, to evaluate strategies related to the competitive capacity of these groups.
Authors: Claudio Luis de Camargo Penteado, Marcus Abilio Pereira, Emerson Urizzi Cervi, Helga do Nascimento de Almeida, Bruno Anunciação Rocha e Julia Marks Santana Chaves
This paper presents a study of the dimensions that involve the discursive conflicts between groups of political supporters in the public debate on digital platforms. Through the case study of the conflict that developed on Twitter around the dismissal of Weintraub from the Ministry of Education in Bolsonaro's government, the article presents an analysis that highlights three dimensions of the discursive conflict: (a) the chronology of behavior of discursive interaction networks related to the issue; (b) the issues that were raised; and (c) the profile of the more active users. The results show that the discursive conflicts are dominated by 1) the replication of original messages (retweets), 2) the intersection of themes that involve the leading personalities in and the context of the conflict, and 3) the great activity of non-institutional profiles in the dissemination of messages, associated with their ideological positioning.
Authors: Isabelle Christine Somma de Castro e Ignacio Javier Cardone
The Tri-Border Area between Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay is often seen as a lawless region, which ignores its character as a center of energy resources, commerce, and tourism. The focus of this article is to identify the representations about the region in Brazil’s two most widely read newspapers, the Folha de S.Paulo and O Globo, and if they reinforce these images. To do so, the concepts of framing and agenda-setting are used. A qualitative analysis was complemented by the use of NVivo software to detect the words most frequently associated with the region. The results indicate a predominance of issues related to illegalities in the press coverage, especially terrorism. Of the total texts about the Tri-Border Area published between 2011 and 2019, 55.5% in O Globo and 47% in Folha contained references to illegalities. The root terror- was present, respectively, in 39% and 40% of the texts. We conclude that the press coverage of the region does not follow specific events (event-driven). Members of security forces are the preeminent sources of reports, and the absence of dissonant voices tends to reinforce the region’s image of insecurity and the need for solutions that involve support border surveillance and control solutions.
Author: Vinícius Silva Alves
For over two decades, two political parties played the leading role in the Brazilian presidential elections, which led some scholars to consider that the national party system is focused on the presidential race. However, recent studies highlight the significant influence of statewide elections on understanding the Brazilian party system. This paper applies a negative binomial regression model to examine electoral data from 1994 to 2018 and tests the hypothesis that gubernatorial elections are more influential than the presidential campaign in the allocation of seats in the Chamber of Deputies. We highlight the following findings: (i) leading a presidential coalition does not increase the number of seats in the Lower House; (ii) launching gubernatorial candidates raises the number of national representatives elected by each party.
Author: Lidia Ten Cate
Based on a study of individual budget amendments allocated to municipalities, we seek to analyze factors related to the chances of a municipality receiving these resources and the effects of receiving these funds on their electoral and budgetary dynamics. The analyses explore the topic by examining amendments allocated between 2015 and 2019, using a quantitative approach, through linear regression models and Propensity Score matching. The conclusions indicate an active role of municipalities in the allocation of these resources and the interference of their political and budgetary characteristics in the propensity to receive amendments. In addition, different budgetary and political returns are identified between amendments allocated to health, education and urban policy, the latter being responsible for the largest budget expansions and electoral returns.
Author: Matias López
After observing similarities between the presidential candidates Enéas Carneiro and Jair Bolsonaro, in this article I test whether there is a common profile among their constituencies. I use electoral and survey data to show how the territorial distribution of Enéas’ vote converges with that of Bolsonaro and how the most efficient predictors of the vote for Enéas also predict the vote for Bolsonaro. The results point to a small but stable niche in support of radical right-wing candidates over time: young white men, with above average years of formal education and higher income. The study informs the debate about the existence of a core constituency of the radical right in Brazil, pointing to possible mechanisms related to the frustration and anger of young white men following redemocratization.