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The article reports on the impact of political changes in Brazil, particularly the shift from Bolsa Família to Auxílio Brasil, on Afro-Brazilian women beneficiaries. Topics include the influence of race, class, and gender on voting preferences, the debate between petismo (support based on political ideology) and lulismo (support based on charismatic leadership), and the exploration of whether low-income Afro-Brazilian women demonstrate characteristics of both concepts.

The Brazilian elections of 2022 were characterized by strong political polarization at the national level. The presidential race was structured around two candidacies: on the right, the then-president running for reelection, Jair Bolsonaro from the Liberal Party (PL), and on the left, the former president in office from 2003 and 2010, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva from the Workers’ Party (PT). This article aims to analyze the 2022 Brazilian elections in light of Bolsonaro’s and Lula’s strategies during the presidential campaign. Contrary to the influential claim of the economic voting account, voters’ short-term retrospective assessment did not determine the 2022 election results. We argue that the candidacy of Lula, the most popular former president in Brazil’s history, introduced a distinct dynamic into the electoral race, challenging the incumbent with the legacy of his governments (2003-2010). In this case, Lula’s win was related to his ability to reactivate voters’ memories of his government, particularly evoking the significant improvements in social welfare achieved during that period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Jair Bolsonaro's handling of Covid-19 in Brazil was consistent with his 'different kind of branding.' Contrary to the expectations of marketing experts and place branding scholars, Bolsonaro's branding tactics were predicated not on portraying Brazil positively to commoditize it to (trans)national audiences but on producing the image of Brazil as a white conservative Christian country through maintaining epistemic and informational crises, delegitimizing expert systems, and engaging in necropolitical calculation. Methodologically, to describe the 'brand-new' Brazil projected in Bolsonaro's presidency (2019-2022), I build three case studies centering on the boycott of Covid-19 vaccines, his strategy of letting the virus spread freely in favor of a supposed herd immunity, and the 'shadow board' that helped him build a necropolitical strategy. I suggest that Bolsonaro's 'chaotic' branding project harnessed features of currently existing neoliberalism, including informational entropy, the digital production of 'alternative facts', entrepreneurial ethos, the delegitimization of expert systems, and the association between free market and political conservatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decade, academic interest in evangelical groups in Latin America has reappeared in light of their growing participation in the political-electoral processes taking place in various countries in the region, generally accompanying political formations that have intensified a shift to the right. In this interest, in their achievements and in their blind spots, it becomes clear to what extent evangelicals pose an intellectual and political challenge for the critical currents in the academic world. In this paper, we propose to investigate the ways in which the relationships between evangelical groups and the political process in Latin America occur. More specifically, what are the relationships between these groups and the authoritarian and conservative shift that occurring in many countries in the region. Starting with a theoretical discussion about evangelism in Latin America, we will attempt to answer this question by considering the case of two different countries. On the one hand, Brazil, in which the participation of evangelicals in politics seems to be inextricably linked with conservative radicalization. On the other Argentina, which appears to be a slightly more open in its historical possibilities, although it is in a process of transformation. Through them we will attempt to demonstrate a single thesis: that within the framework of the political and social processes under way in both countries, the socio-political insertion of evangelicals goes from a relative malleability and contingency in terms of their political destiny to the sedimentation of a series of conditions that transform them either into companions or into catalysts of this authoritarian shift in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the outcome of Brazil's contestation of the responsibility to protect, adding to existing literature through an analysis that makes use of recent norms research on possible alternate endings of contestation. As revealed, differentiating between the natures of contestation allows for greater nuance and broader reflections on the possibility of contestation, serving as an avenue for future cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Dados - Revista de Ciências Sociais is the property of DADOS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Dados - Revista de Ciências Sociais is the property of DADOS and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The second year of Jair Bolsonaro's presidency in Brazil has been marked by multiple sources of pressure on the government. The COVID-19 pandemic has taken its toll on Brazilian lives, on the national health system and on the country's already sluggish economy. Hitting close to home, Bolsonaro has witnessed the beginning of several investigations against his also politician sons and increasing pledges for moderation from Centrão, the informal and yet powerful centrist coalition that has historically shaped Brazilian politics. Moreover, criticism from external markets and foreign powers regarding Brazil's mishandling of environmental policies has been constant, while Bolsonaro's campaign promises of economic liberalization remained largely unfulfilled. Quite puzzling though, domestic businessmen approval of the president increased over the year, as I show through the analyses of survey data. What explains this group's persistent support for Bolsonaro? This article reviews some of the main political events in Brazil in 2020 and it uses insights from International Political Economy and Brazilian politics scholarships to advance hypotheses that can explain why those who self-identify as businessmen remain steadfast supporters of the president, even amidst the economic, social, and sanitary turmoil in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we explore how the discourses around gender are evolving at the core of Brazilian politics. Our focus lies on the discourses at the public hearing on the bill 3.492/19, which aimed at including "gender ideology" on the list of heinous crimes. We aim to identify the deputies' linguistic representation of social actors as pertaining to in- and outgroups. In addition, the article analyzes through Critical Discourse Analysis how the terminology gender is represented in this particular hearing. The analysis shows how some of the conservative parliamentarians give a clearly negative meaning to the term gender, by labeling it "gender ideology" and additionally connecting it with heinous crimes. We propose that the re-signification of "gender ideology," from rhetorical invention to heinous crime, is not only an attempt to undermine scientific gender studies but also a way for conservative deputies to gain more political power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Social Anthropology / Anthropologie Sociale is the property of Berghahn Books and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article describes the Brazilian civil–military dictatorship's anti-inflation advertising campaigns in 1973 and 1977. It shows how Finance Ministers Antônio Delfim Netto and Mário Henrique Simonsen used advertising as a substitute for economic policy. It argues that they turned to advertising to divert attention from their own policy failures by blaming urban women, small shopkeepers and consumers for the growing inflation problem. This article details the background of the campaigns and examines the advertisements, especially their use of normative gender ideologies. By reference to newspapers and political speeches, it also documents the social and political reaction to the campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory budgeting (PB) has been one of the most popular local democratic reforms in Latin America in recent decades. This article examines what happened to PB when it was scaled up to the state level and integrated in a participatory system in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil (2011–14). Using theories of deliberative systems, multichannel participation, 'venue shopping' (the practice of seeking the most favourable policy venue) and countervailing power, as well as a multimethod research design, we explain how the systems approach allowed for both deliberation and direct democracy and mobilised new sectors to participate online. However, on the negative side, the different participation channels undermined each other. Social movements migrated to other spaces, leaving the budgeting process open to control by well-established, powerful public-sector groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a dearth of criminological scholarship on how the political persuasions of governments affect Indigenous people as it relates to human rights and environmental consequences, whether positive or negative, for Indigenous peoples. To address this gap, we develop a comparative instrumental case study of the policies concerning Indigenous peoples implemented during two political periods in Brazil: the administrations of presidents Silva (2003–2010) and Rousseff (2011–2016) and the administrations of Temer (2016–2018) and Bolsonaro (2019–). We explore the consequences for Indigenous peoples of these leftist and the right-wing governments. We argue that governments of both political leanings victimize Indigenous populations, with leftist governments using structural violence and right-wing governments engaging additionally in symbolic and direct violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazil's Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem Teto (MTST, Homeless Workers' Movement) has grown dramatically in recent years. This growth was partly provided for by the use of a large government housing programme, Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV, My House My Life), which allowed the MTST to construct housing for its members and swell its ranks with thousands of new members. Yet some have argued that the MCMV programme used by the MTST may compromise the autonomy of civil society organisations. This article, by contrast, argues that while the MCMV programme encouraged bureaucratic practices, it also helped to promote the cultural politics of the MTST. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does institutional context condition debates' effects on vote choice during electoral campaigns? The literature on the United States suggests that debates' effects on vote choice are minimal at best, reinforcing voters' prior convictions more often than converting or activating them. There have been very few tests of debates' effects in newer democracies, however, and the strong partisan identification among American voters might mean that this lack of impact is specific to the American context. In this article, the effects of presidential debates are tested in a younger democracy with a multiparty system and runoff presidential elections: Brazil. Data come from the Brazilian Electoral Panel Study, a seven-wave panel study conducted before, during, and after the 2014 Brazilian election. To rigorously measure presidential debates' effect on voters' likelihood to change candidates, a difference-in-differences regression was estimated with a generalized least squares (GLS) random-effects model. In the end, debates had a significant effect on vote choice in the first round of the 2014 Brazilian presidential election, as respondents who watched first-round debates were more likely to switch candidates after the debates had taken place than those who had not watched the debates. In the second round, however, when the field had been reduced to only two candidates, debates no longer affected voters' propensity to change candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 2014 and 2018, a period marked by major political and economic upheaval, Brazilian politics shifted sharply to the Right. Presenting qualitative research conducted over 2016–17, this article examines this process from the perspectives of residents of a peripheral São Paulo neighbourhood. Analysis is presented of three broad groups of respondents, each of which mobilised a distinct narrative framework for interpreting the crisis. Based on this, I argue that the rightward turn in urban peripheries embodies not a significant ideological shift, but rather long-term transformations of place and the largely contingent ways these articulate with electoral politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents questions picked up from several interviews discussing about the Brazilian politics, society, dictatorship , social reforms and the course of civilization Jair Bolsonaro's session; and mentions about the Brazilian Social Democracy Party and d the Workers' Party.

Olympic ceremonies are international arenas from where the hosting nations often display revisited versions of their nationalistic accounts to update their identities. The analysis of such events can thus unveil the progression or regression of a nation towards a given political agenda. By the same token, their study can also expose different ideological stands between successive ruling parties as well as different historical moments of the hosting nation. The theatrical depiction of the 2012 London/Rio handover ceremony can be thus understood as a historical milestone on the nation's soft-power development. What is more, the recent events that took place in the country shortly after the event and during the event's Olympiad (2016-2020) – i.e. civil unrests caused by corruption scandals and a deep economic crisis which culminated with political turmoil and the election of a far-right president in 2018 – have given to the ceremony a further connotation as the symbolic pinnacle of Brazil's New Republic economic growth and its advancements towards a more progressive political agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article situates the far-right backlash in Brazil within the larger Latin American context, including its colonial legacy, leftist governments' failure to deliver promises of inclusion, and the US–China geopolitical dispute over the region's strategic natural resources. By situating Bolsonaro's electoral victory within these dynamics, our analysis presents an alternative to two common perspectives. First, studies of the region's political moment and of Brazilian society in particular do not pay enough attention to institutional and everyday racism, and instead focus mostly on comparative analysis of governmental policies and social class dynamics. Second, critical perspectives that take into account racial inequalities are often not attuned to structural dynamics of gendered antiblackness, and instead present racism as a broad set of practices that negatively affect non-white people in related manners. Our context-specific analysis of the electoral reemergence of the far right in Brazil aims at contributing to an understanding of persistent dynamics of racial inequality within the region as part of a long, enduring and foundational odium of Black people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last several decades, dozens of dictatorships have become democracies. Yet while each has held free and fair elections, they have varied in the extent to which their citizens realize the ideal of self-rule. Why do some democracies distribute power to citizens while other democracies withhold it? Existing research is suggestive, but its implications are ambiguous. Cross-national studies have focused on democracy's formal dimensions, while work on substantive democracy is case-based. We find that one of the most consistent and powerful explanations of substantive democratization is the length of unarmed pro-democratic mobilization prior to a transition. Through a case study of Brazil, we illustrate that these movements matter in three ways: first, because practices of self-organizing model and enable democratic reforms; second, because movement veterans use state office to deepen democracy; and third, because long movements yield civil societies with the capacity to demand the continuous deepening of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This editorial perspective attempts to explain the recent rise of Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency in Brazil and to characterise, at least in a preliminary fashion, the nature of the new regime one year into Bolsonaro's rule. The core argument is that Bolsonaro represents a weak and internally-fragmented far-right regime, with unenthusiastic and declining popular support. Dominant sections of international and domestic capital operating in Brazil lent Bolsonaro electoral backing as a last way out of economic and political crisis, but so far, the new government has failed in sufficiently guaranteeing their most important interests and the markets are withdrawing approval. Themes covered include the political paralysis of the new regime, the social bases of Bolsonarismo, the nature of the current state–capital relation, and the role of evangelical Pentecostalism in far-right Brazilian politics today. A biographical portrait of Bolsonaro is provided, alongside a mapping of the dominant factions of the new administration. Finally, an assessment of the economic outlook in Brazil is developed, together with speculation as to the likely political consequences in the short- to medium-term future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the articulation between Evangelicals and conservatism in the Brazilian scenario since widespread street demonstrations erupted in June 2013; the most significant of these events was the election of Far-Right president Jair Messias Bolsonaro in 2018. A sizable share of this religious segment constitutes, in different ways and in varying degrees, the broader social process that in the national and international public conversation became known as the conservative wave. My argument is that this wave is shaped as the articulation of distinct lines of force at play in the fields of economy, security, morality, and society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2013, Brazil has undergone various moments of political turbulence, ultimately culminating in the seizure of power by the Far Right. The lack of clarity on how this movement has been led and the role played by the military in the political arena allows us to ask if Brazil has been the target of a form of hybrid warfare—similar to the kind experienced by various other countries that have undergone sudden changes in regime (such as Ukraine and Egypt, and more recently Honduras and Paraguay). This article explores the limits and implications of applying the notion of hybrid warfare to the Brazilian case, seeking to understand how politics came to be merged with elements adopted from military strategies and tactics. Based on my own ethnographic experience with military personnel, I aim to show how, with the assistance of other state powers, they produced a high-impact psychological operation that paved the way for the 2018 elections and the seizure of power by the Far Right. Following this line of analysis, I argue that in the Brazilian case, there has been a hybrid warfare as well as an insurgency of state corporations and their networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introduction to Currents, we argue for the potential of ethnography to aid in understanding the present. Extended periods of fieldwork allow anthropologists that are in the field well before the facts —that is, before significant political events occur—to provide unique frameworks for understanding those events, frameworks that can incorporate conjuncture as it is lived by the subjects in the sceneries being researched into analysis that take into account more long-term processes. Focusing on the current political conjuncture in Brazil and placing it in a comparative perspective, we explore the peculiar position that anthropologists of contemporary Brazil occupy, in which their role in the production of knowledge and their participation in public debates makes them a target for the conservative and reactionary wave that is engulfing the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social accountability institutions are at the forefront of democratic reformers' efforts to improve well‐being by harnessing the power of citizen participation. This article builds on recent research identifying a positive relationship between participatory budgeting (PB) and well‐being. The article is the first large‐N study to identify relationships between specific rules of PB programme design and well‐being. A unique dataset of 114 Brazilian municipalities with PB programmes from 2009 to 2016 is constructed to evaluate whether internal mechanisms within PB explain variation in local infant mortality rates – an outcome associated with wellbeing. Hypotheses are tested that correspond to citizen participation, the scope of deliberation and embeddedness within local institutions. It is found that PB programmes are associated with lower infant mortality rates when they broaden participation, expand deliberation and embed the new institutions in ongoing policy‐making venues. The results offer a framework for designing PB programmes and other social accountability institutions to maximise impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that descriptive representation, or demographic similarities between legislators and the public, can provide effective substantive representation of citizens’ concerns. We examine representation through the lens of opinion congruence or alignment in the policy preferences of legislators and citizens sharing various identities. Congruence may result from shared material interests or from self-selection into an identity group on the basis of policy views, but it can also be a product of networks and organizations that socialize masses and elites into a common worldview. Though political parties were historically the most important agents of political socialization, we argue that religious organizations constitute a more powerful socializing force in many new democracies. Examining the case of Brazil, we draw on three legislative surveys and fifteen mass surveys to analyze congruence across seven issue areas. Legislators and voters from underrepresented groups—women, Afro-Brazilians, evangelical Christians, and those of lower social class—are generally closer in their opinions than those sharing a party or electoral district. Evangelicals are often the most congruent. Analyzing original surveys of congregations and clergy, we argue that this finding results from the socializing role of churches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]