Opinião Pública – Vol. 31, Nº 1 2025
Articles in this issue
Author: Lea Heyne
Why do losers like democracy less than winners? Although the fact that social status influences support for democracy is empirically established, it is often overlooked in the literature. This article analyses the effects of subjective and objective social status on citizens' expectations and evaluations of democracy. Results show that low status citizens value democratic dimensions differently - they prefer social justice over liberal criteria. Low status citizens also evaluate the performance of their own democratic system in all dimensions significantly more critically than their higher status counterparts. These two effects combined create a larger 'distance' between low-status citizens' expectations and evaluations, especially in the social dimension, causing them to be more prone to democratic dissatisfaction. Moreover, subjective social position has a significantly stronger effect than objective position, pointing to the relevance of status perceptions for democratic attitudes.
Authors: Marcelo de Souza Marques e Vanessa Marx
Since the cycle of protests in Brazil (2013-2016), the presence of “new collective subjects” has become more clearly observed, and their potential innovations have been discussed. In this article, we approach contemporary cultural collectives through a processual-relational perspective, to reflect on what can be understood as innovations within these organizational experiences. Research data have allowed us to highlight innovations related to the development of new patterns of interaction with the state sphere, multiple artistic-cultural languages, and the pursuit of multiple agendas. In addition to a literature review, the research employed a structured qualitative study involving interviews with activists and survey data collected from cultural collectives in Espírito Santo, Brazil. The findings suggest that while collectives may not constitute a “new sociological phenomenon”, they can be understood as innovations in the sense that they have been contemporaneously (re)emerging by reclaiming methods, forms, and organizational practices when shaping their own organizational model.
Author: José Veríssimo Romão Netto
This article reflects on relations between democracy and cultural policies. It emphasizes that there is no necessary connection between cultural policies and democracy and that in democracies cultural policies take on specific institutional forms of governance that involve citizen participation throughout the policy cycle. Drawing on the epistemological framework of ideational neoinstitutionalism and using content analysis as a tool, the study examines the ideas contained in the government programs and victory speeches of Bolsonaro (2018) and Lula (2022), as well as the political contexts and images of these moments. It argues that the "causal beliefs" in their programs directly influenced the organizational design of the Ministry of Culture in both administrations (2018; 2022), creating two images of cultural policies: culture as fear and culture as hope.
Authors: Arthur Ituassu, Marcelo Alves, Aline Lopes e Raul Pimentel
The 2018 election brought a record renewal to the Chamber of Deputies. Four years later, 64% of those elected were newcomers or at the end of their first term. This renewal occurred amid the emergence of non-traditional actors strongly related to digital media. The objective of this article is to analyze how this new group related to online tools in the 2022 election. We do this based on the equalization/normalization debate, which discusses the effects of digital media on electoral competition. Thus, we investigate the digital campaigns of the renovative group, looking for signs of equalization through statistical analysis of social media interactions and the investment in digital ads. Our results show that, in general, renewal is related to digital media, but not all renewal can be considered equalization.
Authors: Natália Martino e Raquel Magalhães
The objective of ombudsmen is to control the material acts of the state. To do so, they must have some characteristics, such as autonomy and social participation, to shape themselves as external control agencies. Many of these entities, however, were based on a model from the private paradigm and lack these characteristics. This article begins from this theoretical perspective to fill a gap in the knowledge about penitentiary ombudsmen. Created since the beginning of this century, these entities for penitentiary control have spread across the country, but their institutional designs are varied and still unknown in the academy. With interviews, document analysis and the organization of data obtained from the Information Access Law, 19 of the 21 state ombudsmen offices are described, and then classified on a scale that ranges from the private to the public paradigm.