Current 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.
Authors: Alejandra Armesto e Caroline Beer
How did the Covid-19 pandemic influence support for redistribution? Research on the impact of the pandemic on redistributive preferences does not yield conclusive results: it finds positive, negative, and null effects. Support for redistribution can be explained either by material interests or by values. Negative economic experiences can alter the expected benefits of redistribution or shape values related to the role of luck in individual achievements. The analysis of survey data from the project Multilevel “Governance and Political Behavior during the Covid-19 Pandemic”, conducted in May 2021 in Mexico, shows that negative economic experiences during the pandemic increase the likelihood of supporting redistribution and do not correlate with changes in values related to merit.
Authors: Ramon José Gusso, Igor Ferraz da Fonseca e Daniel Pitangueira de Avelino
This article examines the trajectory of national conferences in Brazil based on the concepts of democratization, de-democratization, and the pendulum of democracy. To this end, an unprecedented systematization of primary data from administrative records was conducted, which found that 172 national conferences were held between 1941 and 2022. Analysis of the conferences as a whole shows that their quantitative intensity, objectives and institutional designs varied during different socio-political contexts, and were strongly impacted by the greater or lesser support that democratic and social participation models have had in Brazilian history. The typical-ideal model assumed by the literature corresponds to a specific moment in the trajectory of this participatory institution (IP), which can change in contexts of democratic backsliding. The fragility of conferences as participatory instruments was accompanied by flexibility and adaptive capacity, which allowed these processes to remain resilient and long-lasting for more than eight decades within the scope of national public policies, although their importance have varied significantly over time.
Authors: Augusto Neftali Corte de Oliveira e Ricardo e Silva Martins
This article analyzes parliamentary political communication by examining the interaction between speeches in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies and social media posts, considering the case of debate over Proposed Constitutional Amendment 135 (on implementing printed ballots), debated between 2019 and 2021. It applies text mining to investigate how deputies articulated these two arenas and whether this communication challenges the ideals of deliberative democratic theory by amplifying risks to democracy. The study finds coherence between parties, voting behavior, and discourse, with strategic use of social media for mobilization, confrontation with opponents, and dissemination of conspiratorial meanings. The research contributes to understanding the transformation of political communication in the legislature, especially in contexts of democratic risk in Brazil.
Authors: Isabella Mudesto Dias Costa, Luiz Ademir de Oliveira, Paulo Roberto Figueira Leal e Carla Montuori Fernandes
This article focuses on hate speech as a negative factor in political and electoral processes. It analyzes posts directed at successful female candidates in three cities in Minas Gerais state: Margarida Salomão (PT) in Juiz de Fora, Marília Campos (PT) in Contagem, and Elisa Araújo (Pode) in Uberaba. Content analysis, based on Bardin (2011), identified 339 hateful comments on the candidates' Instagram pages during the 2020 elections. The categorization revealed patterns of gender bias and digital dynamics. The results show incivility and disrespect, with Araújo receiving more incivility and Salomão and Campos more disrespect. Explicit hate speech, predominantly political, was more common against PT candidates, including insults intensified by aggressive emojis.
Authors: Clayton M. Cunha Filho, João Carlos Amoroso Botelho, Robert Bonifácio e Jakson Alves de Aquino
The party system in post-democratization Bolivia was shaken by MAS, which originated from Indige-nous and rural organizations and became politically hegemonic under the leadership of Evo Morales. The article analyzes support for MAS in five presidential elections (2002, 2005, 2009, 2014, and 2020) and finds that self-identification as Aymara or Quechua and residence in the highlands or cen-tral valleys are, separately and in combination, predictors of voting for the party’s presidential can-didates. Of the five Indigenous peoples analyzed (Aymaras, Quechuas, Guaraníes, Mojeños, and Chiquitanos), Aymara individuals are the most likely to vote for MAS. Support for democracy and satisfaction with the regime are also greater among Aymaras and Quechuas, which shows that In-digenous mobilization has a positive effect on democracy in Bolivia.
Authors: Bruno Bolognesi, Ednaldo Ribeiro, Adriano Codato e Bruno Fernando da Silva
Studies that classify Brazilian political parties by ideology face the same problem: they are unable to include all existing parties. This article presents the results of a classification that encompasses all Brazilian parties in two electoral years (2018 and 2022). Through an online survey conducted with the community of Brazilian political scientists and Brazilianists, parties were placed on an eleven-point ideological scale. The main finding is the disappearance of the ideological center, resulting from subtle institutional incentives and the elasticity of the party system. Programmatic alignment remains concentrated among left-wing parties, while fisiologismo (clientelistic pragmatism) is predominant on the right. Overall, ideological polarization has intensified, driven by the action of parties with strong programmatic identity and the influence of charismatic leadership.
Authors: Patricio Navia e Catalina Vergara Ayca
The way the police does its work, perceptions of insecurity, and current issues affect trust in the police. In Chile, trust in the Carabineros national police fell from 18.9% to 6.9% between 2015 and 2020, while distrust increased from 10.6% to 39.1%. Using Latinobarómetro surveys between 2015 and 2020, we show that trust in the legal system and perceptions of corruption in the Carabineros, more than perceptions of insecurity, are associated with trust in the institution. In Latin America, trust in the police influences the legitimacy of democracy and the ability of democratic institutions to execute their functions. We suggest that to restore trust in the police, focus should be placed on combating corruption in the institution and improving trust in the country's legal system.
Authors: Mario Fuks e Pedro Marques
This article investigates the relationship between right-wing ideological positions and support for antidemocratic demonstrations, such as those opposing the results of the 2022 elections that culminated in the invasion and vandalization of the national congress, supreme court and presidential palace in Brasília on January 8, 2023. Based on survey data, we analyze whether Bolsonaro voters with more extreme political preferences were more likely to support or participate in these mobilizations than voters with more moderate preferences. The results indicate that support was significantly higher among voters with more right-wing preferences, suggesting that support for the demonstrations and participation in them were not solely driven by loyalty to Bolsonaro but also by a programmatic alignment. This finding highlights the growing role of ideology in shaping Brazilian voters’ political behavior.
Authors: Daniel Abreu de Azevedo, Aimãn Ibrahim Mourad e Gustavo Sousa Resende
This article analyzes, through the lens of the concept of populist violence, the invasion of the Praça dos Três Poderes in the federal capitol on January 8, 2023, seeking to identify spatial patterns that may help elucidate still unknown aspects of that event. Utilizing an original database, the study employs spatial mapping and statistical regressions to reveal that the importance of agriculture to a municipality's economy, geographic proximity to the Federal District, and road infrastructure are key factors that made the insurrection viable. Contrary to expectations, the growth of the evangelical population proved relevant in the analysis, albeit in a negative manner. The results align with previous studies highlighting the role of financing from agribusiness actors' in mobilizing individuals. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of the interrelations between populism, geography, and political violence in contemporary Brazil.
Authors: Cláudia Feres Faria, Eduarda Vogas e Marco Túlio Damas Chaves
Since 2016, Brazil and other countries undergoing de-democratization witnessed regressive changes in different areas of public policy, notably those related to human rights. Studies of the national parliament and executive branch show the discursive and decision-making effectiveness of the neoconservative coalition in revoking rights and policies for the most vulnerable segments of the population. However, the subnational legislature has received little attention from scholars of the subject. This article aims to fill part of this gap by analyzing the actions of the neoconservative coalition in the Legislative Assembly of Minas Gerais regarding sexual and reproductive health (SSR) between 2015 and 2022. The data, analyzed using combined methods, indicate that this coalition reacts regressively to the expansion of legislation related to sexual and reproductive health, except in relation to domestic violence.