Citation:
Date Presented:
February 5Abstract:
In June 2013, what began as a protest of a few thousand people against a twenty-cent hike in bus fares in São Paulo, transformed into a nationwide wave of demonstrations across Brazil. Hundreds of thousands of protesters—more than 1.4 million on June 20—presented a wide variety of demands, from investments in health and education to political reform and an end to corruption. Politicians, witnessing the unrest and the size of the demonstrations, responded with a range of policy changes.
My thesis seeks to explain the logic and mechanisms behind these political responses to protest, and in doing so I hope to add to our understanding of what makes some movements achieve their demands while others fail in this regard. The current literature has little to say about these topics. Most social movement literature focuses on movements’ formation, growth, and membership rather than their policy results, and those authors who do examine protest outcomes underplay the role of politicians. One of my central theoretical claims is that in order to understand what makes protests successful, we must investigate how politicians interpret information about problems in society expressed by protests, as well as the processes by which they decide on solutions.
I develop a theoretical model that links protests and political outcomes by focusing on the way that demonstrators can either narrow politicians’ policy outcomes by affecting their access to information or shift politicians’ prioritization of preferences in order to achieve a final policy in line with the movements’ demands. I then demonstrate the usefulness of this model through three case studies in the June 2013 protests: the demand to lower public transit fares in São Paulo; the call for broad political reform; and the campaign to reject a proposed constitutional amendment that would limit the investigatory power of Brazil’s public prosecution ministry.