From commercial marketing to electoral marketing: candidates’ attributes in the perception of Brazilian and American voters

This study investigates attributes that influence the vote in different socioeconomic contexts (Brazil/USA). Our results show an asymmetric effect of candidates’ attributes on voters’ decision. In less developed socioeconomic contexts, voters analyze candidates’ image by satisfying their unconscious will than by making strictly rational choices, which shows a shift of a democratic discourse to an eminently advertising clash. On the other hand, American voters tend to be more judicious regarding the image of their representatives, giving value to elements of the political debate. Such findings can be used to explain election results in both countries under a political marketing perspective.Este estudio investiga la influencia de los atributos en los votos en diferentes contextos socioeconómicos (Brasil / USA). Nuestros resultados muestran un efecto asimétrico de los atributos de los candidatos en los votantes decisión. En contextos socioeconómicos menos desarrollados, los votantes de analizar la imagen de los candidatos por la satisfacción de sus voluntad inconsciente que al tomar decisiones estrictamente racional, que muestra el desplazamiento del discurso democrático a un choque de publicidad eminentemente. Por otro lado, los votantes estadounidenses tendencia a ser más juiciosa En cuanto a la imagen de sus representantes, dando valor a los elementos del debate político. Tales hallazgos pueden ser utilizados para explicar los resultados de las elecciones en ambos países bajo una perspectiva política de marketing

Bots, Elections, and Controversies: Twitter Insights from Brazil's Polarised Elections

From 2018 to 2023, Brazil experienced its most fiercely contested elections in history, resulting in the election of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro followed by the left-wing, Lula da Silva. This period was marked by a murder attempt, a coup attempt, the pandemic, and a plethora of conspiracy theories and controversies. This paper analyses 437 million tweets originating from 13 million accounts associated with Brazilian politics during these two presidential election cycles. We focus on accounts' behavioural patterns. We noted a quasi-monotonic escalation in bot engagement, marked by notable surges both during COVID-19 and in the aftermath of the 2022 election. The data revealed a strong correlation between bot engagement and the number of replies during a single day ($r=0.66$, $p<0.01$). Furthermore, we identified a range of suspicious activities, including an unusually high number of accounts being created on the same day, with some days witnessing over 20,000 new accounts and super-prolific accounts generating close to 100,000 tweets. Lastly, we uncovered a sprawling network of accounts sharing Twitter handles, with a select few managing to utilise more than 100 distinct handles. This work can be instrumental in dismantling coordinated campaigns and offer valuable insights for the enhancement of bot detection algorithms

Essays on Political Institutions and Institutional Design

This dissertation attempts to understand the factors that determine the performance and choice of political institutions. We start with the recognition that these two aspects of the problem are fundamentally connected given that political institutions are themselves endogenous, i.e. the way in which they perform and function depends importantly on the reasons behind their adoption. Each chapter of this dissertation analyzes a different class of institutions, identifying specific features of the political and social environment that impact their performance and deriving, whenever possible, implications for institutional design. The first chapter studies the main factors that determine the constitutional preferences of citizens over the form of government. We focus on the case of Brazil, where a referendum in 1993 allowed the population to choose between a presidential and a parliamentary system of government. A model is proposed to explain the main facts emerging from the data. It is shown that the parliamentary regime requires a strong system of protection against expropriation, particularly at the local level, and a class of politicians that can be trusted to represent well the interests of voters. We also show that the poor groups of the population are more likely to vote for the presidential regime since the low quality of their local accountability institutions makes them more vulnerable to the expropriation by legislators. The second chapter studies the question of why checks and balances work well in some cases, but not in others. We investigate the conditions under which a system of checks and balances is beneficial to the society. The analysis emphasizes the important role played by political transparency, which is defined as the ability of voters to observe the proposals submitted to congress during the legislative process. We show that transparency is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for an effective system of checks and balances. The model yields the surprising result that political transparency may be harmful to voters depending on the characteristics of the social and political environment. The third chapter studies a committee decision-making problem with career oriented agents who may be biased towards one of the alternatives. We investigate how the interaction between career concerns and bias affects the behavior of members and how this effect depends on transparency. The main result is that public voting leads to better decisions when the magnitude of the bias is large relative to the common value, while secret voting performs better otherwise. We also show that the interaction between transparency and reputation concerns may exacerbate the biases of incompetent members, leading them to vote more in accordance with their individual interests

Inequality, Uncertainty, and Redistribution

For centuries it has been believed that the extension of the franchise in unequal societies would lead to relatively high levels of redistribution. According to international rankings, how- ever, among the fourteen most unequal countries in the world, nine have been democratic for at least the past fourteen years. A prerequisite for the adoption of redistributive policies is that there be elected representatives who are either committed to or who have an incentive to advocate for such policies. The prospects of such an outcome depend not only on candidates personal policy preferences and motivations, but also how they are perceived by voters. One important feature shared by highly unequal democracies is that they tend to be relatively young, with many new parties and candidates in the political scene. This means elections occur under a high degree of uncertainty about critical information voters need to chose their delegates. Thus, in this paper I develop a model of elections as a game of incomplete information to explore how uncertainty, candidates’ motivation (policy vs. office), and beliefs about their ideological inclinations affect what policy interests are likely to be represented in the political process. I explore the model’s assumptions and outcomes empirically using individual level data for each presidential election in Brazil since democratization.Elections, Redistribution, Inequality, Uncertainty

Labor unions and the electoral consequences of trade liberalization

We show that the Brazilian trade liberalization in the early 1990s led to a permanent relative decline in the vote share of left-wing presidential candidates in the regions more affected by the tariff cuts. This happened even though the shock, implemented by a right-wing party, induced a contraction in manufacturing and formal employment in the more affected regions, and despite the left's identification with protectionist policies. To rationalize this response, we consider a new institutional channel for the political effects of trade shocks: the weakening of labor unions. We provide support for this mechanism in two steps. First, we show that union presence-proxied by the number of workers directly employed by unions, by union density, and by the number of union establishments-declined in regions that became more exposed to foreign competition. Second, we show that the negative effect of tariff reductions on the votes for the left was driven exclusively by political parties with historical links to unions. Furthermore, the impact of the trade liberalization on the vote share of these parties was significant only in regions that had unions operating before the reform. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that tariff cuts reduced the vote share of the left partly through the weakening of labor unions. This institutional channel is fundamentally different from the individual-level responses, motivated by economic or identity concerns, that have been considered in the literature

OBAMA IN TIME AND LULA IN VEJA: A CASE STUDY OF PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN COVERAGE IN NEWS MAGAZINES OF THE UNITED STATES AND BRAZIL

Journalism and its links with nationhood and the ideologies that have built the nations (race, gender, and class, according to the historians) are the subjects of this study. They are researched through the analysis of the news coverage of two presidential elections which were remarkable in the both countries studied, the United States and Brazil. The elections of the first African-American president of the United States, Barack Obama, and of the first worker president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, are comparable for their symbolism and historical relevance. Textual and historical analyses are combined in this dissertation to investigate, in the narratives of each nation and its ideologies, the meanings that the news magazines analyzed produced during the coverage of those elections. A total of 24 cover stories published in Veja (Brazil) and Time magazine (United States) within a period of approximately eight months in the years of 2008 (Time) and 2002 (Veja) are analyzed. In this close textual reading, visual grammar is also taken in account, since journalism is a language that communicates with its readership by means of layouts (especially in the case of magazines). In this study of interpretive character, the critical discourse analysis approach is used to investigate meaning ranging from the layout of the news magazines (with pictures and so on) to the lexical choices in the written text. This is a study mainly of language and its relationship with the world, in which ideology occupies a special place. It is an international research, a cross-cultural examination of the news coverage of two important elections. In this comparative study, made possible due to the knowledge of the two native languages of the publications (English and Portuguese) by the researcher, the target language is in fact international journalistic language. The study found journalism both working for social change and at same time reproducing racist ideologies in the United States. In Brazil, the examination showed that journalism does not always nurture nationalistic sentiments, but that it can be used to keep the hegemony of one region over the rest of the country

CIBERATIVISM AS A POTENTIAL INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF NEW TACTICS OF POLITIC PARTICIPATION

Given the founding principles of the Democratic Rule of Law, in this research we have the objective to reflect on how the interactions of public power with popular sovereignty were subjugated by the imposition of financial governance over the state autonomy, putting on defeat position the popular trust in political representativeness, with the technological influence on political participation. Nowadays, as the traditional means of protest and participatory instruments have become limited in their effectiveness of popular pressure, the advent of cyberactivism as a political practice has become a potential tool in managing social conflicts. On the other hand, a new profile of internet users (ordinary citizens) comes into play, making our reflection necessary to understand how the Big Data tool was appropriated to direct public opinion around election campaigns. This research used the dialectical method and was carried out through a bibliographic survey, seeking to dialogue with historical and legal concepts to understand the problem and the development of the objectives

Brazil’s online politics: media effects on millennial’s voting intention and political involvement

Dissertação de mestrado em Marketing e EstratégiaMany of the traditional marketing concepts such as branding and stakeholders are now being applied into politics, increasing the usage of trending marketing practices such as social media (Keating & Melis, 2017; Nielsen, 2017; Parsons & Rowling, 2018). For millennials, online marketing is a part of their day to day life and some studies argue that this new communication channel is fundamental for parties, institutions and politicians who wish to target this generation (Parsons & Rowling, 2018; Towner & Munoz, 2016). Therefore, the purpose of this research is to understand to what extent does the usage of mass media or social media as source for political information and social media engagement will affect voting intention and political involvement among Brazilian millennials. A structured questionnaire was applied with a final sample of 51 elements, and data analysis was performed using t test and correlations to test the hypothesis presented. 4 of 5 hypotheses were accepted and suggest that social media has a great influence on Brazilian millennial’s voting intention and political involvement. It is therefore a fundamental tool to increase political participation among this generation.Muitos dos conceitos tradicionais de marketing como branding e stakeholders estão a ser aplicados no âmbito político, gerando um aumento no uso de práticas de marketing de sucesso, como as mídias sociais (Keating & Melis, 2017; Nielsen, 2017; Parsons & Rowling, 2018). Para os millennials, o marketing online é parte da sua vida diária e alguns estudos apresentam que esse novo canal de comunicação é fundamental para partidos, instituições e políticos que desejam atingir essa geração (Parsons & Rowling, 2018; Towner & Munoz, 2016). Portanto, o objetivo da presente investigação é entender em que medida o uso de mídia em massa ou mídias sociais como fonte de informação política e o engagement com essas mídias sociais afetarão a intenção de voto e o envolvimento político dos millennials no Brasil. Um questionário estruturado foi aplicado numa amostra final de 51 elementos, e a análise de dados foi realizada através de teste t e correlações a fim de testar as hipóteses apresentadas. 4 das 5 hipóteses foram aceitas e sugerem que as mídias sociais têm grande influência na intenção de voto e no envolvimento político dos millennials brasileiros. É, desta forma, uma ferramenta fundamental para aumentar a participação política nesta geração