Current issue
Authors: Frederico Batista Pereira e Felipe Nunes
Polls in the first round of Brazil's 2022 presidential election diverged from the official results, leading to criticisms that they made mistakes. This paper examines an alternative explanation: that actual changes in vote intentions occurred between the polls and election day. Although unpopular, this explanation finds theoretical support in the scholarship based on two main processes: strategic voting and delayed decision-making. Using an experiment conducted a week before the election, we show how undecided voters and voters for less competitive candidacies displayed high propensity to change their minds after watching campaign videos. We also use data from one of the last polls conducted before the election to develop models that identify voters most prone to late swings in vote choice and reallocate such votes to adjust vote estimates. The results suggest that late swings in vote intentions can be a more than plausible phenomenon in recent Brazilian elections.
Authors: Fabiano Santos, Rafael Moura, Camila Vaz e Yago Paiva
The goal of this article is to assess whether, and to what extent, the deindustrialization of the Brazilian economy has affected the geography of voting in the last two decades. Particular interest is given to examining the inflection of the vote in the Workers’ Party (PT). The study considers deindustrialization as an exogenous economic shock that, by changing the income and nature of employment available in localities, alters electoral support for the nationally incumbent party. Our main sources of empirical data are: the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE) and the Superior Electoral Court (TSE); and our spatial units of analysis are municipalities. Our results confirm the hypothesis that deindustrialization negatively affected the Workers’ Party vote. We also emphasize the regional characteristics of this process, which is fundamental, above all, to the understanding of the 2018 electoral result. The article is original because it fills a gap in electoral studies by treating structural changes in Brazilian capitalism as a primordial explanatory vector.
Authors: Flávia Biroli, Luciana Tatagiba e Débora Françolin Quintela
The article is inserted in the debate about the backlash against feminist politics. In Brazil, these reactions were understood to be a political guideline during the government of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022). During this period, the anti-feminist countermovement had access to the public administration, occupying positions in a convergent coalition government. By that we mean a heterogeneous government alliance, which did not include groups oriented towards the promotion of gender equality. The study analyzes who these actors were and the effects of their work on gender agendas in three ministries: Women, Family and Human Rights; Health; and Education. We collected data on the trajectories and role of the actors in the state, highlighting the policies in which they were involved. The data point to the importance of conservative Evangelical and Catholic actors, who were allied in actions to block feminist agendas and propose policies that affirm the traditional family order.
Authors: Flávio Contrera, Paulo Cesar dos Santos Gregorio, Bárbara Lima e Mércia Kaline Freitas Alves
The objective of this article is to understand partisan competition in the Free Electoral Broadcast Airtime during the Brazilian presidential election of 2022 based on the Saliency Theory. Thus, it contributes by discussing the explanatory power of this theory, originally developed with a focus on campaign manifestos, within the realm of television campaigns. Mobilizing techniques of Content Analysis and Social Network Analysis, we attest to the extension of the reach of the theory to televised propaganda, a space where parties tend, as in manifestos, to emphasize issues advantageous to them. However, this reach does not necessarily apply to the scope of interaction with opponents during the electoral campaign. The argument that the "selective emphasis" strategy is employed to the detriment of the "confrontation" strategy cannot be universally applied. By explaining the later through the concept of strategic interaction, we show that the 2022 election configured a network with two competition spaces: the first occupied by PT and PL, and the second opposing “third-way” candidates to PT and PL.
Authors: Marcela Barba e Michele Massuchin
Considering the importance of evangelicals to the national political scenario, this research seeks to identify how candidacies are permeated by discourses, appeals and signals of a religious nature. To this end, the content published on the Facebook pages of mayoral candidates whose ballot name includes the term pastor during the 2020 election period was analyzed. The posts of candidates without religious nomenclature are included to verify the distinctions and similarities between the groups. Five thousand and thirty-five posts were analyzed using content analysis. Elements that approximate the candidates were identified, such as public policy issues, while religious references and ethical-moral themes are more valued by pastors. Focusing on the specifics of the ecclesiastical group, we found that the emphasis on religious influences differs according to the party’s ideological classification.
Authors: Marcelo Alves dos Santos Junior e Afonso de Albuquerque
This paper contributes to political communication research by proposing an ideological classification of informational sources according to multiparty attention in Brazil. To this end, we replicate the methodology for classifying multiparty media attention on Twitter (Benkler; Faris; Roberts, 2018; Giglietto et al., 2019). We extracted an original database of 2.95 million tweets posted between 2019 and 2020 by 1,346 users. The results demonstrate a reality more complex than described by the classic concept of political parallelism. Most informational sources distribute attention among various party groups. Insular sites are less cited and reproduce broader political-ideological identities, without exclusive alignment or audience of one party. In conclusion we discuss the implications of the results for the theory of political parallelism.
Authors: Tatiana Dourado, Sabrina Almeida e Victor Piaia
This paper investigates the presence of actors, conspiracy and moderation in online content with unfounded allegations of electoral fraud published during the 2020 municipal elections in Brazil. The study is based on the understanding that the intensification of conflicts between political elites influences the political system, and consequently the stability of democratic institutions and norms. The article uses a corpus of 1,426,687 posts from Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to examine the position of influence of those who post about electoral contestation. The objective is to understand the spread of these contents between media and the characteristics that give them a conspiratorial appeal. The paper shows that this agenda is mobilized by politicians and other opinion leaders of the radical right. The vast majority of this content is based on political opinion, without mentioning sources, and is eminently conspiratorial in nature.