Brazilians punished Dilma for protests whose causes lay outside her power

Evidence

After the dust settled, the Datafolha polling group (the best in the country) did a new survey on Dilma’s popularity. In the first week of June 2013, 57 percent of Brazilians characterized her government as “good” or “great.” At the end of the month, the number was 30 percent. That is a twenty-seven-point drop in three weeks. What is astounding is that not one of the issues that caused the June explosion had anything to do with the federal executive branch. Cities control the bus fares—and Dilma had pressured to delay the price rise. State governments control the police—and in São Paulo, the conservative opposition was in command. The Supreme Court is the final arbiter on corruption cases. President Rousseff had lost half of her support in a three-week period in which her administration didn’t actually do anything except try to respond to the contradictory messages rising up from the streets. For any analysis that assumes voters act rationally based on access to information about their representatives, this presents a serious conundrum. What could explain the drop? No information became available about Dilma or her governance. Perhaps many people realized that there were a lot of things they didn’t like about the country. One common explanation is that citizens believed she had responded poorly to the eruption. But what was the right way? Or, if you bring the media into your understanding of political reality—there is, of course, no national politics without mediation—maybe everyone experienced a few weeks of intense media engagement, weeks in which the government was framed as incompetent, or malevolent, or both. I have never seen a satisfactory answer. Her approval ratings never recovered. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 460

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A full collapse of rational-voter assumptions compressed into one polling result: a president lost half her support because of events her branch of government didn’t even control, in a period of no new information about her governance.
• QUESTION: The unresolved question — why a drop untouched by any rational information — is worth chasing; the author himself has never found a satisfactory answer.
• XREF: connects to: US post-2008 monetary policy deindustrialized Brazil while inflating its currency — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 314; Calls for Dilma’s impeachment began days after her reelection win — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 551; The right experienced Dilma’s 2014 win as a devastating shock and began to organize — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 550

Broader Connections

• The right experienced Dilma’s 2014 win as a devastating shock and began to organize #expands (0.80) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 550
• Calls for Dilma’s impeachment began days after her reelection win #expands (0.75) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 551