Routledge Handbook of Brazilian Politics

Barry Ames

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134848287
• Subtopic: Economic Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With contributions from leading international scholars, this Handbook offers the most rigorous and up-to-date analyses of virtually every aspect of Brazilian politics, including inequality, environmental politics, foreign policy, economic policy making, social policy, and human rights. The Handbook is divided into three major sections: Part 1 focuses on mass behavior, while Part 2 moves to representation, and Part 3 treats political economy and policy. The Handbook proffers five chapters on mass politics, focusing on corruption, participation, gender, race, and religion; three chapters on civil society, assessing social movements, grass-roots participation, and lobbying; seven chapters focusing on money and campaigns, federalism, retrospective voting, partisanship, ideology, the political right, and negative partisanship; five chapters on coalitional presidentialism, participatory institutions, judicial politics, and the political character of the bureaucracy, and eight chapters on inequality, the environment, foreign policy, economic and industrial policy, social programs, and human rights.

This Handbook is an essential resource for students, researchers, and all those looking to understand contemporary Brazilian politics.

PART 1

The Input Side

Political Culture, Behavior, and Participation

1

CONTINUITY AND CHANGE IN PUBLIC ATTITUDES TOWARD CORRUPTION

Kelly Senters, Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro, and Matthew S. Winters

High-profile corruption scandals have been a remarkable constant in Brazilian politics since the country’s 1985 transition to democracy. Each of the six presidents preceding current President Michel Temer had at least one major corruption scandal erupt under their watch (Power & Taylor 2011). Large numbers of federal legislators have been implicated in the myriad, colorfully named scandals of the past three decades, including the Anões do Orçamento (“budget dwarves”) scandal of 1993–1994, the Sanguessuga (“bloodsucker”) scandal of the mid-2000s, the Mensalão (“big monthly payment”) scandal of 2005, and the Operação Lava Jato (“car wash”) scandal that emerged in 2014 and is ongoing at the time of writing (Power & Taylor 2011; Carson & Prado 2014).¹ At the subnational level, too, corruption seems rife—municipal audits from the mid-2000s reveal evidence of corruption in 80 percent of the municipalities audited by the federal Comptroller General’s Office (CGU; Ferraz & Finan 2011). As of 2008, one in three state legislators faced corruption charges (Melo 2014).

Although corruption scandals have been a regular feature of Brazilian politics in the current democratic era, we know little about the evolution of popular attitudes toward corruption during this period.² At times popular discontent has erupted into mass protests against corruption. In August and September of 1992, for example, allegations of corruption and self-enrichment against President Fernando Collor de Melo prompted a series of large-scale protests calling for his impeachment.³ In 2013, protests that were initially sparked by public transport price increases grew into large, countrywide demonstrations aimed at a broad range of perceived failings of the political elite, with corruption foremost among the public’s grievances (Saad-Filho 2013; Winters & Weitz-Shapiro 2014). At other times, however, there has been no obvious link between corruption and popular discontent. The 2005 Mensalão scandal under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, for example, did not engender mass public protests. Furthermore, although widespread street protests calling for the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff in 2016 mentioned corruption (among other grievances), Dilma herself was not accused of self-enrichment, and many observers point to other factors as more central to public disaffection with her presidency (e.g., Melo 2016; Petherick 2016).⁴ Although protests and popular support for impeachment may give us some insight into public attitudes toward corruption, the breadth of these protests is also the result of many factors beyond attitudes toward corruption, including the media environment, partisan dynamics, and economic fundamentals (Pérez-Liñán 2007; Arce & Mangonnet 2013; Carlin, Love, & Martínez-Gallardo 2015).

In this chapter we describe and seek to explain the Brazilian public’s attitudes toward corruption in the current democratic period. To do so, we compile over-time data on citizens’ perceptions of and views about corruption. Recent years have seen a spate of single-shot polls and academic research on corruption in Brazil (this growth is perhaps itself a sign of changing public attention focused on the issue), and these generally find limited tolerance for corruption among the Brazilian public (e.g., Ferraz & Finan 2008, 2011; Rennó 2008; Pereira, Melo, & Figueiredo 2009; Winters & Weitz-Shapiro 2013; Manzetti & Rosas 2015). However, in most cases, the surveys or policy experiments used in these studies are not available for an earlier period, making it difficult to examine the evolution of attitudes toward corruption over time. Here we combine data from a large number of public opinion surveys from 1987 to the present, focusing on questions asked over at least a ten-year period, to undertake a series of analyses of how Brazilians view corruption. How serious is the problem of corruption for Brazilians, how do they evaluate the government’s progress in combatting corruption, and how, if at all, have these views changed from the late 1980s to today? Further, we explore the extent to which demographic characteristics, direct experiences with corruption, and partisan preferences explain differences in individual attitudes toward corruption.

To preview our findings, we established that the Brazilian public’s concern about corruption was relatively low in the two decades following democratization. Until the Mensalão scandal in 2005, an average of 5 percent of respondents listed corruption as the most important problem facing the country; since 2005, however, this average has been closer to 10 percent.⁵ In addition, this proportion spiked during periods of acute public attention focused on corruption, such as during the Mensalão scandal, although it quickly returned to medium-term average levels. The latest spike occurred in the midst of the Lava Jato scandal in 2015, making it too early to assess whether this corruption scandal—on track to be the largest ever documented anywhere (Taylor 2016)—will mark a permanent change in public attitudes toward corruption, or whether concern for corruption will return to previous levels once the scandal has subsided.⁶

At the individual level, we find that gender, socioeconomic status (SES), and corruption victimization are the most important predictors of respondents’ concern about corruption. Men, higher SES respondents, and those who have been asked for a bribe are consistently more likely to list corruption as the country’s most important problem throughout nearly three decades of public opinion polling. In contrast, concern for corruption does not appear to be constructed through a partisan lens—neither support for the sitting president or his or her party nor support for a party other than the party of the sitting president predicts whether an individual names corruption as the country’s most important problem, although there is some evidence this may be changing in the most recent surveys.⁷

Data limitations mean that we have a shorter series available to document how the public evaluates the government’s progress in combatting corruption; the earliest data come from 2003. Overall, as with responses to questions that reveal the importance respondents attach to corruption, we see both long-term consistency and also some sensitivity to current events in Brazilians’ evaluations of government progress in fighting corruption. On the whole, respondents describe the government’s progress as middling, with a notable drop in evaluations in 2014–2015. At the individual level, in contrast to the relative weakness of partisanship in predicting Brazilian citizens’ overall concern about corruption, incumbent supporters are consistently and significantly more likely to believe that the government is making greater progress in combatting corruption than other respondents. As others in this volume (Kearney & Machado, Abers & von Bülow, Samuels & Zucco, and Hagopian) suggest, the programmatic nature of the PT, which held the presidency from 2003 to 2016, makes it possible for voters to evaluate and sanction the party, as an institution, for its role in malfeasance.⁸ This chapter’s findings substantiate Samuels and Zucco’s claim that partisans, specifically enduring PT partisans, use motivated reasoning to inform their opinions on particular issues, including the extent to which the government is effective in addressing corruption. Individuals who have experienced corruption, conversely, believe the government is making somewhat less progress. Other demographic characteristics have only weak or inconsistent relationships with perceived progress in combatting corruption.

Corruption as the Most Important Problem Facing Brazil

To what extent are Brazilians concerned about corruption? To answer this question, we rely on survey questions that solicit respondents’ opinions about “the most important problem” facing Brazil and include “corruption” as one possible answer. This yields the longest possible series documenting Brazilian attitudes toward corruption, covering almost the entire recent democratic period.⁹ We assembled data on this question from surveys dating from 1987 to 2016, drawing on 69 surveys variously conducted by IBOPE and Datafolha (obtained from the University of Campinas’ Centro de Estudos de Opinião Pública data bank),¹⁰ the Brazil Electoral Study (ESEB), the Latinobarometer, and the AmericasBarometer conducted by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP). We included all nationally representative surveys from each of these sources that asked respondents to indicate the most important problem(s) in Brazil.¹¹

There are some differences in the precise question wording across the surveys. The Latinobarometer, ESEB, LAPOP, and some Datafolha and IBOPE surveys asked respondents to name the most important problem in the country. Other surveys conducted by Datafolha and IBOPE asked respondents to name multiple important problems.¹² In these latter cases, we adjust the survey-level average to account for the option of naming multiple problems.¹³ For 18 of the 27 years in the sample, multiple surveys (across and/or within firms) asked respondents about the most important problem facing Brazil. For these years, we report a simple average from across all surveys of the adjusted proportion of respondents who name corruption as the most important problem. For the remaining years, we present the proportion from the single survey from that year.

Figure 1.1 presents the data. As the figure shows, the proportion of respondents naming corruption as the country’s most important problem is relatively low in the two decades after democratization. Before 2005, the average adjusted proportion of Brazilians naming corruption as the most important problem facing the country is 5 percent, and it is always less than 1 in 10.¹⁴ Our data show a spike in public attention on corruption in 2005, after which the medium-term average adjusted proportion of respondents naming corruption shifts upwards to 10 percent until it spikes again in 2015.

These two spikes in the share of respondents naming corruption as an important problem can be linked to the emergence of two major corruption scandals, the Mensalão and the Lava Jato.¹⁵ The Mensalão scandal began in late 2004 with news reports alleging that the ruling Workers’ Party was making large payments to opposition lawmakers in exchange for their support for the party’s legislative agenda. In June 2005, Federal Deputy Roberto Jefferson provided further details publicly, and the scandal became known as the “Mensalão,” or “large monthly payment,” scandal. The legislature established a number of official investigative committees related to the scandal, and it came to dominate news reports in the months that followed. In the Latinobarometer survey for that year (fielded in August and early September), 22 percent of respondents said that corruption was the most important problem facing Brazil. This response was second only to unemployment, which was mentioned by 29 percent of respondents. Corruption was mentioned more than twice as frequently as crime, health, and the umbrella category of “political problems,” each of which was named by about 10 percent of respondents.¹⁶

Figure 1.1 Corruption as the Most Important Problem Facing Brazil. Note: This figure compiles data from IBOPE, Datafolha, LAPOP, ESEB, and Latinobarometer surveys. For surveys that solicited more than one most important problem from respondents, we divide by the number of problems solicited to get an estimate of the share of respondents who believe corruption is the most important problem. For years that included more than one survey, we take a simple average across the estimates from all surveys conducted in that year.

By the following year, however, the proportion of respondents naming corruption as the most important problem facing Brazil had fallen by half; 9 percent of Latinobarometer respondents gave this response. Unemployment remained the country’s major concern, named by 22 percent of respondents; this was followed by concerns about health, named by 16 percent. Thus, in the wake of the Mensalão scandal, the data suggest that the Brazilian public viewed corruption as a somewhat more central issue than previously, but the high levels of attention paid to the issue during the height of the scandal were not sustained.¹⁷

The next spike in public concern about corruption occurs in 2015, when the highest proportion of respondents in the entire series mentions corruption...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part 1: The Input Side: Political Culture, Behavior, and Participation
• Part 2: Representation: Parties and Elections
• Part 3: Political Economy and Policy
• Index