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.
Author: André Borges
This article seeks to understand the reorganization of the Brazilian right in reaction to the PT governments (2003-2016). It argues that the new right in the electoral and legislative arenas is comprised of two distinct strands. The new evangelical right emerged as part of a reaction to progressive changes to public values and policies and it distinguishes itself from the rest of the political right by its ultraconservative positions on moral issues. The other strand of the new right emerged from liberal, anti-PT and anti-corruption movements that organized during a series of political and economic crises between 2014 and 2018. While previous studies emphasized the ultraliberal agendas of these movements, what distinguishes these political forces is their antiestablishment profile. To demonstrate these claims, the article analyses party programs and data from surveys conducted with federal deputies in 2019.
Authors: Leonardo Barros Soares, Catarina Chaves Costa, Marina de Barros Fonseca, Victor Amaral Costa, Ana Paula Alvares Costa e Yasmin Nascimento Moita
The objective of this article is to answer the question: why are some Indigenous Lands demarcated, while others are not? It first lists the institutional and non-institutional variables suggested by the specialized literature that can influence the demarcation process. It then applies the Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) technique on a crisp set composed of 40 cases of Indigenous Lands in various regions of the country. The article demonstrates that: 1. Intragroup cohesion of indigenous leaders in conjunction with acts of mobilization and indigenous protest account for most cases of demarcation verified; 2. The possibility to obtain demarcation by means of purely bureaucratic factors. The conclusion indicates the importance that the Brazilian state, in its treatment of the different indigenous groups in the country, does not act to aggravate their possible internal divisions, which could neutralize a crucial factor for guaranteeing the territorial rights of this population segment.
Authors: Rodrigo Rossi Horochovski, Ivan Jairo Junckes e Neilor Fermino Camargo
The article analyzes data from candidacies and their campaign finance filings from Brazil's 2014 and 2018 elections to respond to the following question: What are the effects of the ban on corporate electoral financing and the introduction of the Special Fund for Campaign Financing (FEFC) on electoral financing networks? We collected data from the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) and analyzed them with the Social Network Analysis methodology and complementary statistical techniques. As a result, we confirmed our three hypotheses: (H1) the topology of the electoral financing network remained highly asymmetric; (H2) without companies, political parties increased their centrality in the financing network; and (H3) electoral success remained strongly related to the occupation of central positions in the financing network, with no significant changes in the profiles of the most competitive parties and candidates.
Authors: Fabiana Luci de Oliveira, Luciana Gross Cunha e Luciana de Oliveira Ramos
The article examines the public image of the Brazil’s Supreme Court (STF), seeking to identify which factors help to explain public trust in this institution, based on data from a public opinion survey that interviewed a sample of 1,650 Brazilians between November 2020 and January 2021. In dialog with the literature on trust in the US Supreme Court, four explanatory hypotheses for trust in the STF were tested, considering 1) the level of familiarity with the court; 2) the level of loyalty to the court; 3) the perception that Justices engage in politics in their own way that is distinguishable from ordinary politics and 4) the perception of the performance of the court in cases related to Covid-19. The results of the logistic regression model led to the conclusion that in the case of the Brazilian and US Supreme Courts trust seems to be explained by a combination of short and long-term evaluations of the institution, although, in Brazil, differently than in the US, short-term perceptions have greater predictive power, impacting institutional trust more strongly.
Authors: Thiago Moreira e Lucio Rennó
Current analyses make clear that the candidate Jair Bolsonaro (PSL) managed to galvanize a latent conservatism of the population, which was waiting for a leadership capable of expressing expectations poorly represented in presidential races. These studies suffer from an endogeneity problem: after all, would Bolsonaro also be able to leave the electorate more conservative? To shed light on this issue, we use a Differences in Differences technique to produce an experimental framework that minimizes omitted variable biases and concurrency issues. As a result, we propose that the voters' ideological link with Bolsonaro does not reside only in the ability to attract the conservative portion of the electorate, but in the change in voters' positions during the election to align with the ideas presented by the candidate, which we call the "Bolsonaro effect".
Authors: Ivan Daniel Müller e Luciano Fedozzi
This article analyzes the city of Porto Alegre’s Participatory Budget process (1989-2022) to identify the character of the changes that have taken place in this participatory administrative model. Using the theoretical scope proposed by Charles Tilly (2013) to assess the historical dynamics of democratic regimes, categories are adopted that allow adapting this approach to the analysis of the changes that occurred in the long-term this participatory institution. The article proposes an analysis model capable of identifying distinct periods in the life of Porto Alegre’s participatory budget. From secondary sources, constituted by official data from the municipal administration, and academic research about this process, the study demonstrates that over time the dynamics of participation lost democratizing characteristics over time, steering this institution to a dedemocratizing path.
Authors: Paolo Ricci, Larissa Rodrigues Vacari de Arruda, Lucas Massimo e Jaqueline Porto Zulini
What impact did the 1932 Electoral Code have on representative government? We respond to this question by analyzing unpublished data on three constituent dimensions of representative government: electoral participation, political competition, and the profile of political elites. We conclude that representative government changed (1) the format of political participation substantively, mobilizing a significant number of voters; (2) political representation profoundly, giving access to the opposition; and (3) political elites to a limited extent in terms of their biographical attributes, although more markedly in terms of their circulation. The article's findings lead us to affirm that this historical period should be more deeply studied, considering that it shares the founding principle of representative government: the selection of representatives through elections, even without democracy.
Authors: José Teles e Frederico Castelo Branco
The police are among the most visible state representatives. Yet, little is known about how police-citizen contacts affect political attitudes. In Brazil, police stops have been central to public security measures since the late 1990s. These stops often violate citizens’ civil rights. Drawing upon panel data representative of the city of São Paulo, we investigate whether being stopped or being stopped at gunpoint by the police affect citizens’ satisfaction with democracy. To conduct this analysis we apply the panel match model that combines difference-in-differences with matching. We also test a causal mechanism that relates police stops to satisfaction with democracy considering perceptions of police procedural fairness. Our results indicate that police stops at gunpoint reduce satisfaction with democracy because the stops reduce perceptions of procedural fairness.
Authors: Marcos Leite De Matos Todt e Rafael Machado Madeira
What space exists for post-developmentalist ideas based on strong sustainability in government programs presented by left-wing candidates in contemporary Brazil? With this research question, we analyzed the proposals of the parties of the Brazilian left that presented their own candidates in the 2018 presidential election and interviewed members of these parties. The evidence indicates that among the country’s leftist parties, with the partial exception of the Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL), proposals are limited to the developmentalist paradigm. Although the PSOL program in 2018 had a developmental focus, the portion dedicated to the environment contained proposals referenced in the international debate on alternatives to development. This indicates that, in this party, strong sustainability has conditions to dispute space with developmentalism.
Authors: Renata Mirandola Bichir, Sergio Simoni Junior e Ursula Dias Peres
This article uses the lens of multi-level governance to advance the debate on the consequences of federalism on Brazilian social policies, focusing on the National System of Social Assistance (SUAS). Methodologically, the article is innovative for analyzing performance indicators of this policy at the municipal level using multilevel regression models with explanatory variables that refer to budgetary governance, state capacities and socio-state interactions at the vertical and horizontal levels, as well as local dimensions, in addition to socioeconomic and demographic controls. Brazilian municipalities are our unit of analysis, and the final year of the Municipal Management Improvement Pact, 2017, is our time reference. The results indicate the importance of the different levels for explaining municipal performance in the provision of social assistance services. In particular, the results highlight the decision-making space of sub-national entities in a nationally regulated public policy, and allow new lines of investigation to be opened.
Authors: Huáscar Pessali, Elizandra Flávia Araujo e Rubia Thieme
The National Food and Nutritional Security System (SISAN) and its participatory bodies have been operating since 2006. Local councils are its lowest level parts. Their institutionalization has mostly been linked to their legal creation rather than their regular operation. In this context, we collected evidence of their activities in Paraná between 2018 and 2022. This period was peculiarly adverse to councils, given the federal government's strong anti-participatory position between 2019 and 2022, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Has their institutionalization continued or collapsed? Three swings of activity were found. First, activity increased in 2019, declined sharply in 2020, and recovered to 2018 levels by 2021. Councils with stronger ties to SISAN, formal mechanisms, in larger municipalities, and in those with better state capacities displayed stronger institutionalization.
Authors: Bruna Eloy de Amorim e Drielli Peyerl
In this article, we investigated the Brazilian sovereignist discourse about the Amazon, analyzing how it reflects and shapes policies of the Brazilian state for the region. To do this, we used Content Analysis and Discourse Analysis (particularly the Argumentative Approach developed by Maarten Hajer) to examine statements about the Amazon made by Brazilian representatives from 1972 to 2021. This methodological combination allowed identifying the main storylines that contributed to legitimizing the sovereignist discourse, which is grounded in the affirmation that there is a recurring foreign threat to the forest. We conclude that the incorporation of this discourse by different social groups allowed successive governments to prioritize geopolitical and national security interests in the formulation of policies for the region, often at the expense of local socio-environmental problems.
Authors: Fernanda Rios Petrarca e Carlos Henrique Filgueiras
This article analyzes the how the Brazilian corruption investigation known as Operation Car Wash used social media to both promote social support for the political-legal project of this operation and to turn evidence of corruption into the "biggest scandal the country has ever seen". The empirical universe of this research is a series of posts on digital platforms, particularly Facebook, from the personal accounts of prosecutors in Operation Car Wash. The interpretive frames of reality presented by these posts are examined and how they became a resource to promote credibility and public engagement. The analysis allowed highlighting two key aspects. On the one hand, populist rhetoric appeared as the more general principle that organized the framings created. On the other hand, political voluntarism, as the ideology of public service, was fuel for the right-wing populism that became the moral and political grammar of Operation Car Wash.
Authors: Adrian Gurza Lavalle, Hellen Guicheney e Carla de Paiva Bezerra
We argue that state-level regulatory regimes expand territorial presence and strengthen the operation of participatory policy councils in municipalities under their jurisdiction. We examine three policy areas that correspond to types of councils with known patterns of territorial diffusion and decision-making types driven by federal regulation: Heritage, Environment, and Social Assistance. They are explored through separate regression models by area. The results confirm the hypotheses presented. The expected effects of regulatory regimes on councils occur with greater intensity in councils that are less regulated by the federal government. However, the results also suggest that such a relationship is stronger for councils with either low or high federal regulation but weakens for those in intermediate positions. In these cases, local factors specific to municipalities, such as size, social actors pressure, or technical-administrative capacities, also become relevant.
Authors: Catarina de Melo, Mônica Dias Martins, Jakson Alves de Aquino e Gaudêncio Material Alves
The Frente de Libertação de Moçambique (FRELIMO) has been victorious in every presidential election since the country's independence, and has advocated a policy of building the Mozambican nation by overcoming tribal culture and colonial thinking. The purpose of this article is to verify the relationship between support for FRELIMO, ethnic identity and national identity. Regression analyses reveal that, although FRELIMO supporters have a stronger sense of belonging to the nation, when controlled by the respondents' province, ethnic identity has little influence on nationalism and support for FRELIMO. This research uses Afrobarometer data to analyze the relationship between ethnicity and politics in Mozambique, something highly relevant to national construction in a multi-ethnic country.
Authors: Ana Regina Villar Peres Amaral, Marcus Vinicius Chevitarese Alves e Symone Maria Machado Bonfim
This article analyzes political representation from a gender perspective. The objective is to investigate whether the increase in the occupation of seats by women extends to other dimensions. The main hypothesis is that female representation in Brazilian legislative production is low, as is the approval of legislation of interest to women, although female occupation in spaces of power has been growing in parliament. Based on a model with four-dimensions – formal, descriptive, symbolic, and substantive – we developed a methodology with three indicators: composition of parliament, legislative production by women representatives, and spaces of power. The results indicate an increase in the legislative production of female authorship in a proportion higher than their number of seats, but this has not translated into a greater approval of important and/or substantive norms, nor in the occupation of spaces of power in the Congress.
Author: Eric Nogueira Andrade
The mixed electoral system is often described as an important institutional arrangement that provides stability with proportionality. It is often associated with the solidity of German democracy and therefore is indicated as a reference for reforms in other democracies. An analysis of the political consequences of this electoral model in German elections since 1949, however, reveals a continuing debate about the need for reforms. Through a case study of Germany, this article examines the consequences of adopting mixed-member proportional representation on both proportionality and party competition. In particular, I emphasize two often neglected elements: split-ticket voting and the “contamination effect”. Empirical analysis shows that the combination of the two votes brings countless complications to the German political system due to the unpredictability of results in terms of proportionality.
Authors: Manoel Leonardo Santos, João V. Guedes-Neto, Asbel Bohigues e Breno A. H. Marisguia
Is the left-right scale a good proxy for the views of Latin American parliamentary elites on economic and moral issues? This article addresses this question using two strategies: Principal Component Analysis and regression analysis. The results show that the further right on the ideological spectrum, the more parliamentarians consistently support economic liberalism. However, paradoxically, they exhibit a peculiar kind of liberalism: liberal in economic matters but conservative regarding individual freedoms. This conservatism, in terms of moral values, is strongly influenced by religiosity.