Brazilian Political Science Review

8-30

Authors: Cristina Buarque de Hollanda

This article is dedicated to recounting the main initiative of Nelson Mandela’s government to manage the social resentment inherited from the segregationist regime. I conducted interviews with South African intellectuals committed to the theme of transitional justice and with key personalities who played a critical role in this process. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is presented as the primary institutional mechanism envisioned for the delicate exercise of redefining social relations inherited from the apartheid regime in South Africa. Its founders declared grandiose political intentions to the detriment of localized more palpable objectives. Thus, there was a marked disparity between the ambitious mandate and the political discourse about the commission, and its actual achievements.

56-73

Authors: Paolo Spada & Feliciano de Sá Guimarães

This paper explores recent advances in experimental methodology to analyze elite behavior. Using an email experiment conducted in the context of the Brazilian 2008 municipal elections, we studied whether candidates target “swing” or “core” voters during campaigns. Candidates from all parties – 1,000 candidates in all – were contacted by randomly generated citizens who identified themselves as either core or swing voters. Additionally, we randomized senders’ past voting behavior and their gender. To identify the baseline answer rate, we employed a placebo treatment with no reference to the elections. Our results show that Brazilian candidates target any sender as long as she identifies herself as a potential voter. Within this general finding, models with city-specific fixed effects indicate that Brazilian politicians tend to target core voters. The paper contributes to the general experimental literature by providing an easily replicable design that can test the behavior of elite interaction with the public. At the same time, the paper extends the literature on core versus swing voters by providing an empirical test that can shed light on the effects of a specific political environment (type of election, voting rule, and party structure), and how it affects the relationship between candidates and voters during elections.

94-117

Authors: Augusto Veloso Leão

The main goal of this article is to provide a good basis to assess the way media frames are embedded in a wider social scenario, and how public and political preferences can be researched through media debate. The methodology adopted allows for an analysis of newspaper articles that can show broader trends of the debate and serve as a thermometer to measure public debate. It can further highlight details and enable in-depth analyses of media discourse. The article explores the interconnectedness of media debate and policy-making process by means of the analysis of articles published in a Brazilian newspaper between 2009 and 2010. Quantitative and qualitative methodologies are employed to identify the frames used in media and to offer insights of their relationship with the political debate. The ongoing political debate has raised attention to the issue of migration, with a great numbers of actors expressing very diverse points of view. A broader public debate has been initiated and some portions of it find voice in different means of communication. The paper argues that changes in the public and in the media debate are a response to changes in the political debate, while at the same time the first two also help to outline the latter.