Helder Ferreira do Vale

By Hélder Ferreira do Vale

Brazil is the fourth biggest digital democracy in the world, only after India, Indonesia, and the USA, with over one hundred and thirty million citizens having internet access. In Brazil, the more widespread internet and social media users have been increasingly associated with political polarization and antipartisanship. Also, wider access to digital information technology has meant that Brazilian internet users became more exposed to disinformation. In this context of polarization and antipartisanship, digital media helped to produce critical changes in the Brazilian political dynamics leading Brazil to a democratic crisis. This chapter explores the crisis of democracy in Brazil considering the country’s transition to becoming a digital democracy in 2014 when more than half of the population started having access to internet. To this end, the chapter process traces the critical political events that contributed to the Brazilian crisis of democracy as digital media normalized polarized and antisystem political discourses. This chapter concludes that digital politics poses considerable challenges to Brazilian democracy and proposes adequate institutional responses to digital social activism, suitable regulations of the new digital public spaces, and the elaboration of a new social contract to govern social and political dynamics considering the detrimental impacts of technological innovation on politics.

Part of the book: Democracy - Crises and Changes Across the Globe

By Helder Ferreira do Vale

This chapter provides an interpretation of Spain’s democratic crisis (2008–2023) in which two issues, namely, territorial conflict and democratic decline, conflate. The chapter approaches these two issues as correlated because territorial conflict, as the argument proposes, triggers an initial process of democratic decline; however, in a later period, this very same conflict is used to resist democratic decline. Interpreting democratic decline as a process that in Spain starts with a growth of party fragmentation and electoral volatility that leads to political polarization, the chapter considers party realignment as a critical factor in resisting democratic decline in Spain. This chapter analyzes critical events that punctuated Spain’s democratic crisis—Catalonia’s declaration of independence, difficulties of forming minority governments, emergence of new political parties, and the “amnesty pact” for Catalan separatists, among others. This narrative provides propositions such as the need to theorize on the role of multiple cleavages, namely, territorial conflict and ideological divide, on democratic decline and resistance.

Part of the book: Democracy - Crises and Changes Across the Globe

By Helder Ferreira do Vale

The chapter examines the expansion of social assistance in Brazil as part of the “constitutional catching-up” process. This process is defined as the use of the democratic constitutional framework, which expanded fundamental rights to citizens in the Brazilian democratization, as a springboard for law-making and judicial activism. In the case of Brazil, constitutional rights were used to mobilize the state for the development of social assistance programs. The chapter shows how, in a policy climate characterized by low incentives and commitments to social policies, the incorporation of basic rights into Brazil’s 1988 Constitution generated incentives for state participation in welfare state growth initiatives. By explaining how law-making and judicial activism through “constitutional catching-up” led to the creation of the family allowance program, the Bolsa Família, this chapter broadens our understanding of the conditions under which welfare states in the Global South can be expanded.

Part of the book: Social Welfare