The everyday life of politics: Class, democracy and popular discourse in urban Brazil.

This dissertation uses popular discourses of daily life, social relationships and politics to examine class and democracy in contemporary Brazil. I argue that the "popular classes"--working and poorer people who compose the majority of the country's population--have a positive role in shaping their own political participation in ways neither predicted nor examined in research on Latin American democracy. Beginning at the individual level of analysis, I provide a basis on which to understand cultural and contextual factors that both constrain and are affected by political change in developing democracies. My research supports four propositions about the ways that "ordinary people"--those who are neither elites nor activists--translate commonplace values into political practices. First, most people expect that the values animating everyday social relationships continue to hold in political relationships. Second, commonplace values are a discursive repertoire that citizens have at their grasp to frame their political agency. Third, democracy provides a variety of opportunities for ordinary citizens to negotiate their agency in encounters with local leaders, politicians and other actors. Fourth, the variety of political encounters and their repetition in electoral and non-electoral cycles is an internal dynamic of democracy that can strengthen the agency of even the poorest and least powerful citizens. The research is based on a set of 70 open-ended interviews with people of all classes in Belem, Brazil. The interviews average 1.5 to 2.5 hours in length and were taped and conducted in Portuguese by the author. They are organized around eight subjects: an important event in the respondent's life, work, family, neighborhood, crime, religion, local politics and national politics. This data is triangulated with two other sources that provide independent bases for interpreting the open-ended interviews. First, I conducted 60 informant interviews (hand-noted) with priests, social workers, politicians, office holders, bureaucrats, and community leaders. Second, I developed participant-observer studies of three popular neighborhoods with varying degrees of community organization; one half of the respondents were residents of these neighborhoods.PhDPolitical ScienceUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/105097/1/9635526.pdfDescription of 9635526.pdf : Restricted to UM users only