The 2013 Brazil protests demanded more of the very welfare expansion already underway

Evidence

If you believed—like I did—that the whole thing was fundamentally about better public services, then this was a strange paradox. Given the actual arrangements of Brazilian politics, nobody was pushing harder for an expanded welfare state than the PT (and the closely allied PCdoB). You could view the explosion as an outcry for the government to do more of what it was already doing. This was the basic conclusion that Lula drew in a July New York Times editorial. “In the last decade, Brazil doubled its number of university students, many from poor families. We sharply reduced poverty and inequality. These are significant achievements, yet it is completely natural that young people, especially those who are obtaining things their parents never had, should desire more.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 435

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels the ‘revolution of rising expectations’ pattern seen in disaffected beneficiaries of partial reform across several prior treatment countries. — connects to: Brazil’s 2013 mass protests preceded a radical right-wing turn, not reforms — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 41

Broader Connections

• Brazil’s 2013 mass protests preceded a radical right-wing turn, not reforms #contradicts (0.88) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 41