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.
Author: Verónica González-List
Several authors analyze the contrast between how the traditional media frames news and what circulates on social networks. This article addresses this issue, with a methodology that allowed theorizing about the detached political interactions on X. With qualitative interviews and analyses with semantic networks, a theoretical category was established related to the opposition between framings used by traditional media and those on X, observed by the detached. The detached are ordinary people, users of X unknown to the media, who interact politically on the network without hashtags and trends, outside of electoral periods, and who go unnoticed by social studies. The constructivist grounded theory was applied to analyze data obtained from the interviews with the detached. One of the results shows that the framing of news from traditional media is opposite to that circulating on social networks among detached users. This article is about that discovery. Keywords: The detached; framings; mass media; X; Atlas.ti; grounded theory
Authors: Camila Feix Vidal e Giovanna de Lima Pereira
The objective of this research is to analyze the role of Freedom House as a private apparatus of US hegemony working to destabilize the Hugo Chávez government in Venezuela. Mobilizing Gramscian approaches, we present how the US government instrumentalized Freedom House by using the promotion of 'democracy' and indicators of 'freedom', to empower opposition circles and destabilize the socialist project in Venezuela. To do this, we collected data from the institution's annual reports for the period between 1999 and 2013 and documents from government agencies. The Iramuteq software was used for Lexicography, Similitude Analysis, and Descending Hierarchical Classification. As a result, we show that Freedom House worked with US government agencies, contributing to and legitimizing hostile measures towards the Chavista government, in addition to empowering the opposition in Venezuela.
Authors: Thiago Moreira e João Cardoso L. Camargos
This article investigates the stability and consistency of political ideology in Brazil, particularly following the rise of the far-right and the polarization caused by Jair Bolsonaro. We used machine-learning analyses, panel data, and dimensionality reduction techniques to assess voters' ideological self-placement and the stability of their beliefs. The results show an increase in ideological identification during the Bolsonarist period but reveal that this ideology remains volatile and inconsistent. The findings challenge the notion that strengthening of ideological identification leads to a more cohesive and stable electorate. The article also contributes to the literature by exploring how ideological perceptions are organized in Brazil and presents methodological innovations for future research.
Author: João Feres Júnior
This article contributes to the debate on the nature and functioning of Bolsonarism by clustering data on political behavior to identify the main profiles of Bolsonaro’s electorate in 2022. The analysis reveals the existence of groups of Bolsonaro supporters with distinct combinations of moral values, economic positions, and political preferences, challenging interpretations that conceive the phenomenon as an integrated and coherent reactionary or conservative discourse. At the same time, it also diverges from interpretive sociology, which identifies multiple types of Bolsonaro supporters but fails to distinguish majoritarian from marginal profiles. Thus, the purpose of this research is to contribute to the field of political behavior studies and expand it by identifying previously unexplored patterns of preference combinations among Bolsonaro voters.
Authors: Eryka Galindo, Marco Antonio Teixeira, Melissa de Araújo, Lucio Rennó, Larissa Loures, Milene Pessoa e Renata Motta
This article analyses the situation of food insecurity (FI) and food security (FS) in Brazil, highlighting their determinants and unequal occurrence among population groups. Based on data from a 2020 opinion survey, the concept of food inequalities is used to interpret the results, considering three dimensions: multidimensionality, spatial scales, and intersectional markers. It also examines the role of the Bolsa Família grant and Emergency Aid in mitigating FI. The article concludes that the economic and political crises aggravated by the pandemic intensified FI, particularly among vulnerable groups, and that although public policies alleviated its effects, they were insufficient to mitigate FI, suggesting the need for more robust policies.