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Brazilian Political Science Review, Volume: 13, Número: 3, Publicado: 2019
  • The World Cup and Presidential Popularity in Brazil Article

    Mundim, Pedro Santos; Silva, Gleice Meire Almeida da

    Resumo em Inglês:

    From the political point of view, major sporting events are seen as a way of strengthening a country's institutional image and, as a result, the popularity of its leaders. Events in Brazil in response to the 2014 World Cup, however, point towards other conclusions. The objective of this article is to analyze the relationship between public opinion and the World Cup in Brazil with reference to data from quantitative and qualitative opinion polls conducted by the Office of the Secretary of Communication of the Presidency of the Republic. These analyses suggest that an increasingly critical view on the part of citizens as well as frustration with expectations vis-à-vis essential public services such as health and education had a direct impact on Brazilians' views of the event and their (dis)approval of the Federal Government. Amid a series of demonstrations in 2013 and 2014, the World Cup was transformed from a classic case of bread and circuses into a catalyst for popular dissatisfaction. Instead of a popularity boost and a smooth path to re-election in 2014, Brazilian political leaders found themselves scrambling to deal with the legacy of a World Cup own goal.
  • Clientelism and Local Politics: Interactions Between Municipal Councilors and Voters in the State of Minas Gerais Article

    Rocha, Marta Mendes; Souza, Augusto Carvalho; Araújo, Paulo Magalhães

    Resumo em Inglês:

    This article addresses the subject of clientelism with reference to an unprecedented set of data resulting from a survey of 422 municipal councilors in 44 Brazilian municipalities. Our aim was to verify whether a propensity for clientelist behavior was uniformly distributed among the councilors surveyed and, in the event that it was not, to identify factors that could explain any variations. Our analysis revealed that clientelism – understood as the degree of exposure on the part of councilors to voter demands for individual benefits, and the councilors' willingness to attend to such demands by means of informal strategies – varies among councilors. Through a multivariate analysis of data, we concluded that these variations are related, as we expected, to such characteristics of the municipalities as population, poverty levels and political competition, and to such individual attributes of councilors as ideology and position in relation to the executive branch. We also conclude that there is an interaction between poverty and competition: competition seems to be more relevant than poverty to explain the observed variations, and its effect is intensified; the explanatory power of poverty is higher in the context of low political competition.
  • Parliamentary Supervision of Brazilian Foreign Policy: An analysis of Approval of Authorities Article

    Spohr, Alexandre Piffero

    Resumo em Inglês:

    This article seeks to address the question of how the Federal Senate acts in approving the appointment of authorities to lead diplomatic missions and to determine if the decision-making process on foreign policy is similar to the handling of other matters. It therefore aims to contribute to the debate about the action of lawmakers in the foreign policy decision-making process in Brazil and in the understanding of the elements that influence the approval process of authorities by the Federal Senate. To do so, it gathers statistics on the elements that influence the results of voting on authorities, measured in terms of the time taken for approval and the rate of favorable votes, and specifically the appointment of chiefs of permanent diplomatic missions. The article’s results point to a similar pattern of legislative supervision for foreign policy and other public policies. These corroborate the article’s filiation with legislative trends, according to which party rivalries set the tone for the relationships between Executive and Legislative Powers in Brazilian presidentialism. Although approval of diplomatic authorities displays specific characteristics, such as the presence of lengthy approval cases, they remained aligned with the pattern observed in other cases of senatorial deliberation.
  • Race and Competitiveness in Brazilian Elections: Evaluating the Chances of Black and Brown Candidates through Quantile Regression Analysis of Brazil's 2014 Congressional Elections Article

    Machado, Carlos Augusto; Campos, Luiz Augusto; Recch, Filipe

    Resumo em Inglês:

    Although the proportion of black, brown and indigenous electoral candidates in Brazil is close to the proportion of blacks, browns and indigenous in the general population, the proportion elected to the country’s Federal Congress is significantly lower. Statistical techniques such as linear or logistic regression are typically used to estimate the effect of a particular variable such as color/race or gender on a candidate’s electoral performance. However, in Brazilian elections, characterized by substantive, asymmetrical differences such as extreme variations in campaign finance distribution, the efficacy of these types of regression models is limited. Such being the case in Brazil's open list proportional representation system, we propose quantile regression as the most suitable means for estimating the relationship between voting and other variables such as race/color, because it enables us to estimate relationships between the variables of interest across several distribution quantiles. Quantile regression models show that black and brown candidates get as many as 40% fewer votes than white candidates in higher vote distribution quantiles. Furthermore, analysis of access to campaign financing finds that black and brown candidates on average garner only 75% of the funds available to white candidates at quantile 80 of campaign finance distribution. This drops to 65% at quantile 90.
  • What do State Institutions Say? Twitter as a Public Communication Tool During the Impeachment of Dilma Rousseff Article

    Marques, Francisco Paulo Jamil; Herman, Fellipe; Kniess, Andressa Butture; Teixeira, Jackeline Saori

    Resumo em Inglês:

    The objective of this article is to analyze the content of public communications in situations of political crisis. We aim to establish whether and to what extent there was partisan instrumentalization of the digital social media channels administered by State institutions during the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff. We analyzed all posts published between 2015 and 2016 on the official Twitter profiles of Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, Federal Senate, Presidential Palace and Federal Supreme Court. We considered all posts with the words ‘impeachment’, ‘impedimento’, (‘impeachment’) ‘afastamento’, (‘impeachment’) and ‘golpe’ (‘coup’) (n=795). Our methodology comprised a combination of quantitative (descriptive statistics) and qualitative (content analysis) strategies. We found that the Federal Senate’s twitter profile most frequently posted the word ‘impeachment’, while the term ‘golpe’ was most frequently posted by the Presidential Palace profile. Over half of the publications fit into the category of ‘dissemination of news’. The Presidential Palace’s Twitter profile exhibited a distinct pattern of behavior, predominantly posting tweets associated with the ‘promotion of ideas and expression of positions’. Therefore, the Presidential Palace favored a communications strategy with a partisan bias. This research is relevant as it uses empirical data to discuss phenomena tied to studies on public and political communication.
  • Controles Democráticos No-Electorales y Regímenes de Rendición de Cuentas en el Sur Global: México, Colombia, Brasil, China y Sudáfrica Book Review

    Fontaine, Guillaume
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