Electoral mobilization and the construction of a civic culture in Brazil, 1909-1930

Elections in oligarchical Brazil (1889--1930) have been an understudied topic among scholars given their anti-democratic nature. This dissertation proposes to reevaluate such idea by focusing on the two first competitive presidential campaigns of the period stretching between 1909 and 1929. These were political events which introduced participatory practices among voters. During these campaign activities such as street demonstrations and propaganda rituals, Brazilian voters began to mobilize and to forge a participatory electoral culture. In this dissertation I demonstrated that urban Brazilian voters were less apathetic than historians have supposed. Comparative analysis of both presidential campaigns also indicated that such rituals of electoral participation were not only first experimented in 1909 and 1929 respectively, but also continued to serve as blueprints of popular mobilization in contemporary Brazil