Opinião Pública – Vol. 16, Nº 2 2010
Articles in this issue
Author: José Álvaro Moisés
Have the opinions and guidance of Argentines and Brazilians on politics and the state changed over the last twenty years? Several social changes during this period suggest that the political culture of these countries has also experienced a transformation. This work addresses this issue by emphasizing the social support for state intervention in the economy. The research results confirm the logic of change in political culture; however it shows a pattern of increasing emphasis on state action, which is not considered in the current debate. This pattern could be explained by historical, social and political characteristics of Latin American countries.
Authors: Sonia Luiza Terron e Gláucio Ary Dillon Soares
The debate about the distancing between Lula and the Workers Party (PT) gained acceptance in the 2006 election, when the popularity of Lula and his government did not extend to the PT, as expected. For the first time the party did not improve performance in the voting for the Chamber of Deputies regarding the previous election. We analyzed the electoral bases of Lula and the PT in the last four elections for president and federal deputies (1994-2006), and we prove the distancing between them. We studied the spatial distribution of votes at the municipal level with maps, statistics and spatial regression. We identified the detachment of the candidate’s and party's electoral territories every election, and the regressions measured the growing spatial-temporal independence of the votings: the coefficient fell from 0.85 in 1994 to 0.15 in 2006. There was a process of geossocial distancing in the period 1994 to 2002, and a "divorce" between the electoral bases in 2006 when the territories seemed to be nearly unrelated to each other.
Authors: Daniel Jaime Capistrano e Henrique Carlos de O. Castro
Many scholars have written on money and elections, especially on how expenditures can explain the performance of the candidate. Our paper aims at describing some features of finance campaign for the Brazilian National Congress in 2002 and 2006, based on the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) data. We tried to capture: a) donations and expenditures variation of incumbents and challengers; b) regional variations, given the socioeconomic cleavages of the electoral district, that may affect donations and expenditures; c) cameral variations, given the incongruent character of the Brazilian bicameralism; d) party variations, that is, if there are candidates that cost “more” or “less”, depending on party affiliation.
Authors: Leany Barreiro Lemos, Daniel Marcelino e João Henrique Pederiva
Many scholars have written on money and elections, especially on how expenditures can explain the performance of the candidate. Our paper aims at describing some features of finance campaign for the Brazilian National Congress in 2002 and 2006, based on the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) data. We tried to capture: a) donations and expenditures variation of incumbents and challengers; b) regional variations, given the socioeconomic cleavages of the electoral district, that may affect donations and expenditures; c) cameral variations, given the incongruent character of the Brazilian bicameralism; d) party variations, that is, if there are candidates that cost “more” or “less”, depending on party affiliation.
Author: Pedro Santos Mundim
This article presents the construction and test of a model developed to measure the effects of the press coverage in voting. The period of analysis are the presidential elections of 2002 and 2006. The dependent variable are the historical voting intentions series of the main candidates. The main independent variable was constructed from the content analysis focusing on the electoral coverage by the following Brazilian newspapers: Folha de S. Paulo, O Estado de S. Paulo, O Globo and Jornal do Brasil. The test results showed that the model worked well, and that the press coverage was indeed an important factor in the electoral disputes of 2002 and 2006. In both elections the voting intentions of six among the eight main presidential candidates were affected by the information flows coming from the press coverage.
Author: Camilo Aggio
The growing importance of the uses of digital tools and devices related to the internet by candidates, parties and political campaign´s crews in almost twenty years of the online campaign´s existence produced emblematic cases like the election of Barack Obama in 2008. This paper organizes the major questions, discussions and contributions of the online campaign´s literature. The whole work here is designed to organize, in a chronological manner, the advances of the preoccupations related to the use of the internet by candidates and political parties. In the same way, we bring in to the light the dynamic of changes in the treatments of the questions and the potential of the new technologies in the electoral contests. Our results indicate that the literature changes the main focus of the preoccupations, discussions and de design of the empirical researches along the years, beginning with the interactivity potentials of the internet as well as the importance of the unmediated political information until reaching the actual phase of the online campaigns that emphasizes the engagement and mobilization potentials of the digital communications in line with the web 2.0 principles.
Authors: Rafael Cardoso Sampaio, Rousiley Celi Moreira Maia e Francisco Paulo Jamil Almeida Marques
This paper aims to examine how political conversations take place on the online forum offered as part of the Digital Participatory Budget (OPD) in a Brazilian city, Belo Horizonte. The authors propose an analytical model based on deliberative theories in order to investigate the discussions over this participatory program. The main sample consists of the messages posted by the users (n=357) on the commentaries section. The results show that reciprocity and reflexivity among interlocutors are rare; however, the respect among the interlocutors and the justification levels in several arguments were high during the discussion. The authors conclude that, even in a situation in which there is no empowerment offered by of the digital tools, the internet can effectively provide environments to enhance a qualified discursive exchange. In spite of low levels of deliberativeness, the case study shows that there are important gains concerning social learning among the participants.
Authors: Edison Nunes, Félix Sanches e Vera Chaia
The aim of this present article is to make a characterization of the political culture in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, by examining attitudes and perceptions about the political system, forms of citizenship and availability for the associations and political action. It discusses two competing hypothesis, but not excluded: 1) The classic question of a sociological nature of the relationship between socioeconomic context and urban culture and politics, and 2) the consideration of this process as influenced by local and national history and its connections. It emphasizes the political experience of citizens as independent variable in relation to political culture and that presents a causation between the cross-institutional framework and the assumption by which agents formulate their preferences.
Author: Jairo Pimentel Jr.
This article to analyzes the role of emotion in the electoral choices during the 2006 Brazilian presidential election. Specifically, it analyzes in which way the emotions of the voters in relation to the candidates affect and stimulates the evaluation and the vote for them. In the first place, we demonstrate forms of measuring emotions in quantitative terms through surveys conducted during the electoral period. Second, we demonstrate that the retrospective evaluation government’s can better be understood if we comprehend in which way the government’s evaluation interacts with emotional states of the voters. Thus, denying the long tradition that opposes reason and emotion in politics, we point out the thesis that feelings constitute an important variable in the information processing and, consequently, in the vote decision.
Author: Danilo Enrico Martuscelli
This paper analyzes Collor’s government crisis and the political tactics of the Workers’ Party (PT) at the conjuncture of Collor’s government crisis. We consider that the Workers’ Party didn’t escape of the dominant trend of the pro-impeachment movement, adhering to the campaign for the ethics in politics and attacking president Collor from a moralist point of view, which relegated the critics and denouncement of the class character of the neoliberal politics to the second plan. The Party was limited to join the accusations about the recessionary trend of Collor’s government, which meant a tactic inscribed in the fight against the effects of the neoliberal politics but not against its nature. This political behavior can be considered as an indicator of the process of passive acceptation of the neoliberal proposals from the PT.