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"Democracy Social aspects Brazil."
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Flooded
In the middle of the twentieth century, governments ignored the
negative effects of large-scale infrastructure projects. In recent
decades, many democratic countries have continued to use dams to
promote growth, but have also introduced accompanying programs to
alleviate these harmful consequences of dams for local people, to
reduce poverty, and to promote participatory governance. This type
of dam building undoubtedly represents a step forward in
responsible governing. But have these policies really worked?
Flooded provides insights into the little-known effects of
these approaches through a close examination of Brazil's Belo Monte
hydroelectric facility. After three decades of controversy over
damming the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon, the dam was
completed in 2019 under the left-of-center Workers' Party, becoming
the world's fourth largest. Billions of dollars for social welfare
programs accompanied construction. Nonetheless, the dam brought
extensive social, political, and environmental upheaval to the
region. The population soared, cost of living skyrocketed, violence
spiked, pollution increased, and already overextended education and
healthcare systems were strained. Nearly 40,000 people were
displaced and ecosystems were significantly disrupted. Klein tells
the stories of dam-affected communities, including activists,
social movements, non-governmental organizations, and public
defenders and public prosecutors. He details how these groups, as
well as government officials and representatives from private
companies, negotiated the upheaval through protests, participating
in public forums for deliberation, using legal mechanisms to push
for protections for the most vulnerable, and engaging in myriad
other civic spaces. Flooded provides a rich ethnographic
account of democracy and development in the making. In the midst of
today's climate crisis, this book showcases the challenges and
opportunities of meeting increasing demands for energy in equitable
ways.
eBook
Religion and Brazilian democracy : mobilizing the people of God
\"On November 7, 2017, conservative opponents of \"gender ideology\" burned the American feminist theorist Judith Butler in effigy on the street in front of the art institute Sesc Pompeia in the city of Sao Paulo, while Butler herself was inside giving a lecture. As protesters hoisted a life-sized doll in a pink brassiere and witch's hat over their heads and lit it on fire, they chanted, \"Burn the witch!\" The protest apparently included both conservative Catholics and evangelicals. Though Catholic crucifixes were on prominent display during the protest, evangelical groups built much of the momentum behind the protests. In the days leading up to the talk, a Facebook group and website led by Assembly of God clergy from the city of Ilha Solteira (Sao Paulo state) drove traffic to an online petition that gathered 366,000 signatures opposing Butler's visit (J. Goncalves 2017). While the protest was cast in the media as an attempt to shut down the conference, a survey conducted with protesters at the event itself found that most did not aim to stop Butler's talk (Calegari 2017). Rather, they hoped to stimulate a debate over gender, sexuality, and the role of public schools in sexual education\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Long March: Deep Democracy in Cross-National Perspective
Abstract
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.
Journal Article
Drugs and Democracy in Rio de Janeiro
Taking an ethnographic approach to understanding urban violence, Enrique Desmond Arias examines the ongoing problems of crime and police corruption that have led to widespread misery and human rights violations in many of Latin America's new democracies. Employing participant observation and interview research in three favelas (shantytowns) in Rio de Janeiro over a nine-year period, Arias closely considers the social interactions and criminal networks that are at the heart of the challenges to democratic governance in urban Brazil.Much of the violence is the result of highly organized, politically connected drug dealers feeding off of the global cocaine market. Rising crime prompts repressive police tactics, and corruption runs deep in state structures. The rich move to walled communities, and the poor are caught between the criminals and often corrupt officials. Arias argues that public policy change is not enough to stop the vicious cycle of crime and corruption. The challenge, he suggests, is to build new social networks committed to controlling violence locally. Arias also offers comparative insights that apply this analysis to other cities in Brazil and throughout Latin America.
eBook
Bubble reachers and uncivil discourse in polarized online public sphere
Early optimism saw possibilities for social media to renew democratic discourse, marked by hopes for individuals from diverse backgrounds to find opportunities to learn from and interact with others different from themselves. This optimism quickly waned as social media seemed to breed ideological homophily marked by “filter bubbles” or “echo chambers.” A typical response to the sense of fragmentation has been to encourage exposure to more cross-partisan sources of information. But do outlets that reach across partisan lines in fact generate more civil discourse? And does the civility of discourse hosted by such outlets vary depending on the political context in which they operate? To answer these questions, we identified bubble reachers, users who distribute content that reaches other users with diverse political opinions in recent presidential elections in Brazil, where populism has deep roots in the political culture, and Canada, where the political culture is comparatively moderate. Given that background, this research studies unexplored properties of content shared by bubble reachers, specifically the quality of conversations and comments it generates. We examine how ideologically neutral bubble reachers differ from ideologically partisan accounts in the level of uncivil discourse they provoke, and explore how this varies in the context of the two countries considered. Our results suggest that while ideologically neutral bubble reachers support less uncivil discourse in Canada, the opposite relationship holds in Brazil. Even non-political content by ideologically neutral bubble reachers elicits a considerable amount of uncivil discourse in Brazil. This indicates that bubble reaching and incivility are moderated by the national political context. Our results complicate the simple hypothesis of a universal impact of neutral bubble reachers across contexts.
Journal Article
The price of poverty: Inequality and the strategic use of clientelism in divided democracies
This article investigates the political cost of poverty in democracies marked by deep social divisions. We develop a probabilistic voting model that incorporates clientelism as a strategic tool employed by elite political parties to secure electoral support from non-elite voters. Unlike models based on ideological proximity, our framework conceptualizes party competition as structured by the socioeconomic composition of their constituencies. We demonstrate that in contexts of high inequality and widespread poverty, elite parties face structural incentives to deploy clientelistic strategies rather than universalistic policy agendas. Our model predicts that clientelistic expenditures by elite parties increase proportionally with both inequality (GINI index) and poverty levels, rendering clientelism a rational and cost-effective mechanism of political control. Empirical evidence from a cross-national panel (2013-2019) confirms the theoretical predictions: an increase of the 1 percent in the GINI index increase a 1.3 percent in the clientelism, even after accounting for endogeneity and dynamic effects. These findings suggest that in divided democracies, poverty is not merely a condition to be alleviated, but a political resource that elites strategically exploit. Consequently, clientelism persists not as a cultural residue or institutional failure, but as a rational response to inequality-driven constraints within democratic competition.
Journal Article
Social Movements, Social Change, and International Cooperation: Strategic Insights from Latin America and the Caribbean
In the wake of the advancements made in civil and human rights in the twentieth century, social movements have come to be regarded as a driving force behind social change. Nevertheless, evidence demonstrates that social transformations driven by certain citizen mobilisations do not always prove beneficial to the most marginalised groups. In January 2023, acts of vandalism were perpetrated against the buildings of public institutions in Brasilia. Similarly, anti-democratic mobilisations have been observed in Colombia against the peace agreement with the FARC and in Chile against the proposed more inclusive constitution. Globally, anti-democracy and other movements that are in opposition to human rights are gaining ground, and their effects are having a detrimental impact on the environment in which organisations that are advocating for excluded sectors are operating. However, Latin American perspectives of social and behaviour change (SBC) emphasise engagement with social movements to contribute to social justice, creating alliances to amplify the voices of those most affected without interfering with the organic nature of citizen-led movements. This prompts the following inquiries: Can we categorize as social movements those with popular roots but espousing hegemonic interests? How can the Latin American tradition of social movement action and reflection inform strategies for social change? How can SBC strategies counteract anti-human rights movements and empower social movements prone to inclusion? This essay addresses these questions.
Journal Article
Political struggles for a universal health system in Brazil: successes and limits in the reduction of inequalities
Background
Brazil is a populous high/middle-income country, characterized by deep economic and social inequalities. Like most other Latin American nations, Brazil constructed a health system that included, on the one hand, public health programs and, on the other, social insurance healthcare for those working in the formal sector. This study analyzes the political struggles surrounding the implementation of a universal health system from the mid-1980s to the present, and their effects on selected health indicators, focusing on the relevant international and national contexts, political agendas, government orientations and actors.
Main text
In the 1980s, against the backdrop of economic crisis and democratization, Brazil’s health reform movement proposed a Unified Health System (SUS), which was incorporated into the 1988 Constitution. The combination of a democratic system with opportunities for interaction between various developmental and social agendas and actors has played a key role in shaping health policy since then. However, the expansion of public services has been hampered by insufficient public funding and by the strengthening of the private sector, subsidized by the state. Private enterprises have expanded their markets and political influence, in a process that has accelerated in recent years. Despite these obstacles, SUS has produced significant health-status improvements and some (although incomplete) reductions in Brazil’s vast health inequalities.
Conclusions
We find that a combination of long-term structural and contingent factors, international agendas and interests, as well as domestic political struggles, explains the advances and obstacles to building a universal system in an economically important yet unequal peripheral country. Further consolidation of SUS and reduction of health inequalities hinge on the uncertain prospects for democracy and national development, on enlarging the political coalition to support a public and universal health system, and on strengthening the state’s ability to regulate the private sector.
Journal Article
Movement-driven development : the politics of health and democracy in Brazil
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Brazil improved the health and well-being of its populace more than any other large democracy in the world. Long infamous for its severe inequality, rampant infant mortality, and clientelist politics, the country ushered in an unprecedented twenty-five-year transformation in its public health institutions and social development outcomes, declaring a striking seventy percent reduction in infant mortality rates.
Thus far, the underlying causes for this dramatic shift have been poorly understood. In Movement-Driven Development, Christopher L. Gibson combines rigorous statistical methodology with rich case studies to argue that this transformation is the result of a subnationally-rooted process driven by civil society actors, namely the Sanitarist Movement. He argues that their ability to leverage state-level political positions to launch a gradual but persistent attack on health policy implementation enabled them to infuse their social welfare ideology into the practice of Brazil's democracy. In so doing, Gibson illustrates how local activists can advance progressive social change more than predicted, and how in large democracies like Brazil, activists can both deepen the quality of local democracy and improve human development outcomes previously thought beyond their control.
eBook