Representatives and the Represented: Political Parties, Participation, and the Brazilian Protests in 2013 (original) (raw)

From 2013 protests to political polarization: challenges to democracy and citizenship consolidation in Brazil

This article aims to carry out a contextual analysis of the recent protests phenomenon in Brazil starting from the protests of June 2013. It traces the political polarization occurring in the protests, which came up as a sign of how Brazilians have been dealing with political dissatisfaction. Our proposal is to explore, from the various motivations identified for the mobilizations of the masses, the gaps in the Brazilian democracy in terms of consolidating the Rule of Law and citizenship. Based on these issues, we will reflect on the relationship between citizenship and democracy in Brazil, addressing the classical concept of citizenship proposed by Marshall, and noting how the civil, political and social rights have found obstacles to its consolidation in the country. Apart from the historical and contextual approaches, the analysis of some data from the Brazilian Electoral Studies was conducted, aiming at reflecting on citizens' perceptions about democracy and political institutions in Brazil. In order to study how the Rule of Law is practiced, we will use elements of Institutionalism, aside from the elements identified by 2 Charles Tilly on contentious policy, so that light may be shed on the relationships between state and civil society as far as dissatisfaction with the inefficiency of the democratic regime is concerned.

Participatory Democracy and the Representation of Minority Groups in Brazil

This paper takes Brazilian national public policy conferences as a case study that enables one to argue that the institutionalization of participatory mechanisms of deliberation within representative institutions may actually enhance the political inclusion of minority groups, by advancing their preferred policies, fostering their rights and consolidating their identity. Moreover, the paper aims to present empirical evidence on how participation and deliberation may be turned into representation, or more specifically how minority groups can improve their political representation in the Legislative branch regardless of the formal mechanisms of electoral democracy. The paper claims that institutional practices of social participation and deliberation may not only provide further accountability and legitimacy to electoral democracy and its traditional institutions, they may also indicate a shift on representative government. Once proved true, the Brazilian case may allow for a step for...

Book Review: Activating Democracy in Brazil: Popular Participation, Social Justice, and Interlocking Institutions

In Latin America, the transition to democracy prompted the opening of the political system to new forms of citizen participation. The first initiatives observed in the region were developed at the local level in the late 1980s, promoted by the arrival of new social movements or leftist parties in the local government with the aim of renovating democracy from the inside. Examples of this wave are the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT) in Brazil, the United Left (Izquierda Unida, IU) in Peru, the Broad Front (Frente Amplio, FA) in Uruguay, and the Radical Cause (Causa Radical, CR) in Venezuela. The experience of Brazil stands out as the only one of the group that has been able to maintain momentum, while the other experiences either have come to nothing (initiatives promoted by CR and IU), or the local democratic innovations played no major role in policymaking at the national level (Uruguay). Focusing on an in-depth case study of Brazil, Activating Democracy in Brazil offers answers oriented toward understanding the survival and success of the Brazilian experience. Brazil presents an ideal case for analyzing what is labeled a new " participatory citizenship regime " because of the longstanding and ever growing presence of participatory institutions. But as acknowledged in the introduction, there is tremendous variation in how citizens and public officials have been able to activate these participatory institutions. This opens questions about how and why such variation exists. To understand this puzzle, Brian Wampler has decided to focus on the participatory

IDS Working Paper 210 Who participates? Civil society and the new democratic politics in São Paulo, Brazil

2003

This paper explores the participation of collective civil society actors in institutional spaces for direct citizen participation in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. The data was produced by a unique survey of civil society actors who work for, or with, sectors of the lower-middle class, the working class, and the urban poor. The paper identifies factors that influence the propensity of civil society actors to participate in three types of institutions: the participatory budget, the constitutionally mandated policy councils, and other local participatory councils and programmes. Many political leaders, policy-makers and researchers believe that such forms of direct citizen participation can help democratise and rationalise the state, as well as provide politically marginalised populations with a say in policy. Whether these hopes materialise depends in part on the answer(s) to a question the literatures on civil society, citizen participation and empowered participation have not addressed-Who Participates? Contrary to the focus on autonomy in much of the work on civil society, the statistical findings support the claim that collective actors with relations to institutional actors, and the Workers' Party and State actors in particular, have the highest propensity to participate. The findings also support the idea that the institutional design of participatory policy-making spaces has a significant impact on who participates, and that this impact varies by type of civil society actor. Unlike what has been found in research on individual citizen participation, there is no evidence that the "wealth" of collective actors influences participation.

Critical Review: Alonso, Mische (2017) “Changing Repertoires and Partisan Ambivalence in the New Brazilian Protests"

Critical Review: Alonso, Mische (2017) “Changing Repertoires and Partisan Ambivalence in the New Brazilian Protests’, published in the Bulletin of Latin American Research., 2018

Angela Alonso, University of São Paulo, Brazil and Ann Mische, University of Notre Dame, USA, investigated the June 2013 Brazil protests in their article “Changing Repertoires and Partisan Ambivalence in the New Brazilian Protests’, published in the Bulletin of Latin American Research. This critical review aims at introducing and contextualizing the events in addition to indicating the effectiveness of the thesis, arguments and structure of the piece of work. In early June 2013, several Brazilians marched on city streets following general public disaffection regarding state inefficiency. Following global (autonomist and socialist) and local (patriotic) repertoires of contention, the June protests combined hybrid political performances from two distinct action fields displacing the earlier prevalence of socialist repertoires. Alonso and Mische set that the diversity of actors, and claims consist on a cycle of protest and that it deviates from a single student movement. The authors drew up the rejection of political parties as a trigger for protest and raised broader questions regarding the correlation between political parties, institutional politics and social movements in the waves of protest.

Partisan Protesters and Non-Partisan Protests in Brazil

Journal of Politics in Latin America, 2014

In young democracies with weak parties, there is some evidence that partisan identification may shift in response to short-term government performance. The massive protests that erupted in Brazil in June 2013 sharply increased the salience of, and public attention to, poor government performance and took most observers by surprise. They were also widely depicted as nonpartisan or even anti-partisan. We use two well-timed surveys to examine the effects of the protests on mass partisanship. We find that the protests led to increased non-partisanship and decreased attachment to the governing Workers’ Party (PT) among the public as a whole. We also show that small, leftist parties were more broadly represented among protesters than previously has been recognized.

Are politically engaged citizens more democratic? A glimpse from Brazil

A significant part of the Western literature on democracy assumes that political participation leads to citizens being more committed to democratic values. However, we do not know to what extent this is true in young democracies with an authoritarian tradition. Hence, this article aims to examine whether politically engaged Brazilians are more democratic. To do so, we analyzed whether there is any association between political participation, support for democracy, and democracy relativization through multivariate regression models. Our database comprises a representative sample of 2417 interviews with the electorate of São Paulo in 2019. The results show a statistically significant association between unconventional political participation and support for democracy. General political participation is associated with non-relativization of democracy only, showing a limited relationship between support for democracy and participation. Other variables, such as political interest, political knowledge, and interpersonal trust, are also associated with higher support for democracy.

Civic Participation Faces Resentment: Right-wing Movements in Brazil and the Crisis of Dem

2020

Since 2015, Brazil has been experiencing the explosion of right-wing protests. These pro-tests were assembled by groups organised in digital media, which claimed forms of demo-cratic participation to propagate antidemocratic ideas, such as the shutdown of public poli-cies based on social redistribution of resources to the poorest; the criminalization of the so-cial movements linked to social minorities; and the extinction of councils of popular parti-cipation. In this article, we develop a discourse analysis on the Facebook pages of the three major right-wing groups in Brazil, namely, Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL), Vem Pra Rua, and Movimento Contra a Corrupção(MCC). Our sample is composed of 468 posts made by these three groups when they established profiles on Facebook and at the moment of the major right-wing civil protests in Brazil between 2015 and 2018. We aim to understand the discursive strategies adopted by these groups to undermine democratic citizenship purpor-tedly laying ...

Between “Us” and “Them”: Political Subjectivities in the Shadows of the 2018 Brazilian Election

Revista de Antropologia USP, v.63 n.2, 2020

This article examines political subjectivities, community engagements and voting practices among residents of São Paulo's Zona Sul peripheries in the three years preceding Brazil's 2018 presidential election. Building on a 398-person household survey, 46 in-depth interviews, and extensive participation observation over the course of a four-year study, we argue that although most residents of our study communities across the political spectrum are disenchanted with institutional politics, many maintain political engagement through their everyday lives, including activism centered on intersection-al identities and state-sponsored violence/genocide. Our discussion combines statistical analysis and auto-ethnographic inflected vignettes and is in dialogue with two common themes present in recent analyses of the Brazilian political landscape: the role of urban periphery voters in the election of Bolsonaro, and the complex connections between moralities and political subjectivities. In conclusion, we reflect on opportunities and challenges for progressive political engagement in the (post)Bolsonaro era. Between "Us" and "Them": Political Subjectivities in the Shadows of the 2018 Brazilian Election.

Vote and Protest in Argentina and Brazil: contemporary research based reflections on political participation

SOCIOLOGIES IN DIALOGUE, 2017

The article presents a comparative analysis of recent citizen's reflections on political participation in Argentina and Brazil. Throughout the recollection of data from focus groups carried out in 2015 and 2016, we aim to discuss the ways the participants conceived and related the compulsory act of voting with the participation in the recent wave of demonstration in both countries. In the cases presented, there was a prevalent understanding of voting and protesting as complementary forms of political engagement and the participation in protests was conceived as a form to compensate the limitations of formal electoral politics.