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.
Authors: Sue Iamamoto, Rani Teles e Luciano Pita
This article analyzes the consequences of narratives about the June 2013 protests in Brazil on trajectories of activists. It is based on twenty in-depth interviews with young left-wing, right-wing, and Black cultural activists in the city of Salvador. We found that the interpretations of the June protests consolidated what we call “anti-June”, an image that guided these young people in protests between 2015 and 2018. This led to other forms of activism, such as the adoption of less contentious street protests by the right, the institutionalization of the agendas of the militant left, and the distancing of the Black movement from national political disputes. The case analyzed demonstrates how narratives of protests informed chains of causality that explain unintended effects on the trajectories of activists.
Authors: Luís Felipe Guedes da Graça, Cíntia Pinheiro Ribeiro de Souza e Tiago Daher Padovezi Borges
This article explores the possibility that titles linked to religion or state security force rank serve as informational shortcuts for voters, benefiting candidates who hold them. The expectation is that these titles function similarly to well-established party identities, by suggesting the positions and values of the candidates to voters at a low cost. Our central hypothesis is that possessing these social identities offers electoral advantages to candidates. To test this, we used data from the 2018 elections for federal and state representatives, analyzing models with complete datasets assembled through matching. Our findings indicate that, at least in the 2018 elections, the identification of state security force rank had strong electoral effects. However, for religious candidates, we could not identify effects discernible from zero, which contradicts recent findings in the literature.
Author: Lucas Nascimento Ferraz Costa
The objective of this article is to identify patterns and particularities in the constitutionalization of social rights throughout Brazilian history, when compared with a sample composed of eighty-three other countries. We show that Brazil was unique in that labor rights were constitutionalized much more than other collective, or individual social rights dissociated from the condition of formal work, a standard surpassed only after 1988 when Brazil attained the world average. The analysis was carried out using a database generated by the application of the Constitutional Social Score Model (CSSM), which expresses as a score the probability that a social right would be enforced as a function of constitutional provisions.
Author: Eduardo Grin
This article on intergovernmental lobbying in Brazil analyzes the National Front of Mayors (FNP) and the National Confederation of Municipalities (CNM) from 2001 to 2018. It uses research of documents, journalism, opinion surveys, and interviews and tests three hypotheses The first is whether the economic, political, and social context and federal policies induce local lobbying to seek regulatory and financial protection from the central government. The second is whether the number of associated cities influences the relationship with the leaders of the entities, which was partially confirmed. In the CNM and FNP, some topics generate agreement and others disagreement, while there is more internal unity in the CNM. The third hypothesis is that lobbying arenas are effective as long as they generate benefits, which was tested with the Federative Articulation Committee, in which the CNM and FNP participated, but which gradually lost status. The findings show the usefulness of the hypotheses for studying municipal lobbying.