Category: Brazil

How WhatsApp helped Bolsonaro win Brazilian election

     

Brazil’s digital environment is a fertile ground for innovative strategies to spread polarizing content with the intent of manipulating public debate, notes Caio C. V. Machado, a Brazilian lawyer and… Read more »

Latin America’s democratic resilience: institutional innovation beats populism

     

The resilience of democracy in Latin America is impressive, notes Javier Corrales, a professor of political science at Amherst College, and author of “Fixing Democracy: Why Constitutional Change Often Fails… Read more »

Conservative civil society pushing back against Western liberal norms

     

The rapid rise of Brazil’s new far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro may have surprised some observers but it did not come out of thin air. His success follows years of support… Read more »

Liberal democracy’s weaknesses pulling it apart?

     

Brazil’s election, along with the rest of the populist trend, represents something more disruptive than a single wave with a single point of origin. Research suggests it exemplifies weaknesses and… Read more »

Latin America braced for ‘Bolsonaro effect.’ How did the unthinkable happen?

     

Following the crushing victory of right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro in Sunday’s runoff presidential election, Brazil’s Latin American neighbors are bracing for a regional “Bolsonaro effect,” AFP reports: The knock-on effect… Read more »

Human rights abuses: mavericks needed to counter rogues & enablers

     

  The survival of the rules-based global order is at greater risk than at any previous point in the 21st century, with ominous implications for democracy and human rights in… Read more »

Corroding Latin America’s largest democracy ‘from the inside out’

     

An authoritarian-seeming partial outsider who praised the country’s military dictatorship, rejects some rules of the democratic game and threatens to undermine citizen’s rights has won the first round of the Brazilian… Read more »

Brazil: the next democracy to fall in populist wave?

     

This October, Brazilians will go to the polls to elect a new president, and the country could become the next democracy to fall in the populist wave that has been… Read more »

Does populism really threaten democracy?

     

Marine Le Pen’s far-right political party is looking to deepen its ties to a nascent pan-European populist movement in the run-up to next year’s European Parliament elections, The Financial Times… Read more »