Brazilian Political Science Review

Number 3, Vol. 15, 2021

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The Political Uses of the Past During the Cold War: Conservative Intellectuals and the Military Dictatorship in Brazil

Authors: Diogo Cunha

Abstract

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The aim of this paper is to examine how, in the context of the Cold War and Latin America’s National Security dictatorships, conservative Brazilian intellectuals turned to history to demonstrate the country’s ‘incompatibility’ with progressive values and left-wing government. It analyzes a selection of lectures given by acclaimed conservative intellectuals at the National War College during the 1960s and 70s. An examination of these lectures demonstrates that many of the elements chosen to define ‘national identity’ under the ‘Estado Novo’ dictatorship of 1937-45 – such as the valorization of miscegenation, a belief in the docile nature of the Brazilian people, the exaltation of work and the idea of a nation founded on cohesion and cooperation – were revived after 1964. Thus, conservative intellectuals made an important contribution to legitimizing the military dictatorship of 1964-85 by inscribing it within what they believed the Brazilian tradition to be, presenting it as the only regime capable of preserving national unity and culture against the threats posed by Marxism and communism.

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The Gendered Division of Labor in Brazilian Political Science Journals

Authors: Marcia Rangel Candido, Luiz Augusto Campos, João Feres

Abstract

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This article analyzes the gendered division of labor in Brazilian political science. We seek to answer two questions: what are the predominant topics in political science that are being published in the discipline’s journals? How are women and men’s authorship distributed in these journals? The methodology involved three stages. First, we built a corpus with 2,363 articles that were classified as ‘political science and international relations’ by the Coordination for the Improvement for Higher Education Personnel ( Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – CAPES) and published in the most prominent Brazilian journals between 2005 and 2018. Next, we scraped abstracts and other bibliographic information from publications in the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) platform and used a topic modeling technique to identify the most recurrent topics. Finally, we associated the identified topics with the authors’ gender. The data was examined based on two specific types of the gendered division of labor: the ‘horizontal’ and the ‘vertical’. Our results show that women and men as first authors tend to cluster around specific topics (horizontal division), but we did not find a tendency in journals to reject works on the topics in which women are better represented. In other words, differently from what was found by the international literature, the Brazilian journals in our sample do not seem to grant a lower status to these topics (vertical division). It is noteworthy, however, that men are the majority of first authors in all topics, including feminism.

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Political Communication, Television Advertising and Elections in Brazil: A Longitudinal Analysis of Two Major Parties’ Use of Free Electoral Advertising Time

Authors: Michele Massuchin, Fernanda Cavassana, Emerson Cervi

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A longitudinal analysis of the use of televised electoral advertising by the two political parties that have been the central actors in presidential elections in post-democratization Brazil: the Workers’ Party (hereinafter referred to using the Portuguese acronym the ‘PT’) and the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (hereinafter referred to using the Portuguese acronym the ‘PSDB’). Our objective is to identify patterns and changes in Brazilian electoral advertising between 2002 and 2018 with reference to Brazil’s system of free electoral advertising time (hereinafter referred to using the Portuguese acronym ‘HGPE’), more of which has been allocated to these two parties than to any other. Despite the increasing use of other forms of electoral campaigning, HGPE is central to presidential contests and demarcates political time and parties’ agendas. It is therefore relevant to understand how use of this campaign component has been developed over time, taking into account two factors: messages and strategies. Our quantitative content analysis considers 90 days of PT and PSDB block format advertising during the first rounds of five election contests. Our results reveal that changes in messaging tend to be decided on by the parties (with the PT emphasizing public policies and the PSDB emphasizing image building) whereas the strategies employed depend on the context of each election and are less specific to either party.

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Jair Bolsonaro and the Dominant Counterpublicity

Authors: Camila Rocha, Jonas Medeiros

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Number of views: 16

This article focuses on the controversial and infamous behavior of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in the public sphere. Based on an understanding that there exists something specific in relation to his strategy of rhetorical mobilization and the discursive domination related to broader dynamics in the Brazilian public sphere, we seek to analyze here the use of what we consider to be a ‘dominant counterpublicity’.

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The Brazilian Conservative Wave, the Bolsonaro Administration, and Religious Actors

Authors: Joanildo Burity

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Despite the obvious connection between conservative Christian leaders and Bolsonaro, from his electoral campaign to the formation of his administration, religious agency in Brazilian politics goes beyond a mere conservative register. This article seeks to trace various dimensions of the trajectory made by evangelicals in Brazilian politics as a tipping factor in the emergence of a new protagonism of religious actors in politics. It discusses how the emergence of evangelicals as public actors has included different ideological and practical expressions, as well as internal disputes and ventures some remarks on whither current trends point to as Bolsonaro’s government makes room for the evangelical right but sparks reactions and rearticulations from various forms of evangelical progressives.

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Climate Security, the Amazon, and the Responsibility to Protect

Authors: Gustavo Macedo

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In this article, I briefly present the multilateral discussion on ‘climate security’ and its relation to the protection of the Amazon. First, the text points out the importance of the Amazon for keeping global climate balance, the drastic change to the environmental agenda of Brazilian diplomacy, and the growing call in international public opinion for an internationally coordinated action to reverse deforestation in the region. Next, it introduces the concept of ‘climate security’, its development within the United Nations Security Council, and its relation to the principle of responsibility to protect (R2P). Finally, based on contextual evidence, I carry out a prospective analysis of the narratives that might be constructed to justify applying this principle to the Brazilian Amazon.