EDITORIAL.

The article reports that the effects of lawmaking on public opinion are not as frequently studied as the restrictions that public opinion puts on legislative initiatives. The latter is the subject of Rachel Meneguello's study of "Government Popularity and Public Attitudes to Social Security Reform in Brazil." She looks at reform measures initiated by President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, and finds that a government supported by the political left can implement reforms in the neo-liberal vein without embarrassing itself or estranging its supporters. The condition is, of course, that the government is a popular one, and that it acts largely in a manner that corresponds to people's expectations. Meneguello's analysis mostly draws on a June 2003 survey of the Brazilian population, but she also looks at the development of Brazilian politics over the last 20 years, and especially at the ups and downs of presidential popularity since 1995. Public opinion research, if it considers the media at all, is accustomed to understand media content as an independent variable in the process of opinion formation.