Collectivizing political mandates: A discursive approach to the Brazilian Bancada Ativista’s campaign in the 2018 elections
| Author | Sebastián Ronderos,Tathiana Chicarino,Rosemary Segurado |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0263395721990276 |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395721990276
Politics
2022, Vol. 42(3) 309 –324
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0263395721990276
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
Collectivizing political
mandates: A discursive
approach to the Brazilian
Bancada Ativista’s campaign in
the 2018 elections
Sebastián Ronderos
University of Essex, UK
Tathiana Chicarino
Pontificial Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), Brazil
Rosemary Segurado
Pontificial Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP), Brazil
Abstract
This article analyses the political campaign of the rather under-researched Bancada Ativista, a
prefigurative progressive experience comprised of nine co-candidates running for a single seat in the
State Chamber of Sao Paulo during the 2018 Brazilian elections. The political experience brought
about by the Bancada Ativista stands as a prolific effort in its aim to transform legislative action,
responding to the challenges posed by the contemporary crisis of representative democracy. By
taking the Essex School’s discourse theory standpoint, this article critically explores the discursive
composition of the Bancada’s political campaign and the significance of its electoral success in light
of crisis-driven Brazilian politics.
Keywords
Brazil, collective action, discourse, political parties, social movements, square protests
Received: 8th October 2019; Revised version received: 3rd September 2020; Accepted: 19th December 2020
Introduction
Brazilian politics have been subject to much attention lately. Scholars, pundits, and com-
mentators have devoted ample interest to the rise of what they consider to be
a conspicuous menace to democracy. As vividly described by Anderson (2019), ‘[t]he
Corresponding author:
Sebastián Ronderos, Centre of Ideology and Discourse Analysis (cIDA), University of Essex, Colchester
CO4 3SQ, UK.
Email: sr18778@essex.ac.uk
990276POL0010.1177/0263395721990276PoliticsRonderos et al.
research-article2021
Article
310 Politics 42(3)
teratology of the contemporary political imagination – plentiful enough: Trump, Le Pen,
Salvini, Orbán, Kaczyński, ogres galore – has acquired a new monster’. This monster is
none other than Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.
Bolsonaro’s homophobic, misogynist, and racist allegations, his peremptory disa-
vowal of the COVID pandemic and the ongoing ecocide in the Amazon rainforest have
been effusively picked up by the national and international public and media. For its part,
the academic realm has widely depicted Bolsonaro’s electoral success as a conclusive
seizure of power by conservative forces that made use of the social discontent to take over
the presidency.
This article does not disregard the fact that Bolsonaro’s former Social Liberal Party
(PSL)1 expresses a notorious break with Brazil’s electoral trends or that its irruption onto
the political scene is worthy of attention. Instead, it considers that an over-deterministic
image of Brazil’s political and social conjuncture, which focusses solely on its strong
personalistic nature rather than critically engaging with its overarching aspects, neglects
highly significant elements which problematize Brazil’s social and political milieu
beyond Bolsonaro himself.
Indeed, the previous elections in Brazil presented many significant changes, seeing the
proliferation of new and stimulating political phenomena, most of which have been sub-
ject to weak journalistic repercussions and obtained virtually no scholarly attention. We
consider the Bancada Ativista’s irruption in the electoral scene as the most compelling of
these under-researched ventures.
The Bancada Ativista was publicly launched in the 2018 elections as a common plat-
form constituted by nine co-candidates to a single seat in the State Chamber of Sao Paulo.
As members of the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), the Bancada Ativista obtained
a total amount of 149,844 votes, becoming the 10th highest voted position in the Sao
Paulo State Elections – the largest electoral college in Brazil. Never a collective mandate
had reached office in Brazilian politics.
For its novel and intriguing characters, this collective electoral experience compels
researchers to delve deep into processes of social signification, and the discourse theory
approach allows for a more involved analysis of this pioneering initiative.
This article aims to comprehend how the protests of June 2013 in Brazil generated new
forms of political identification, ushering in unique discursive formations and social prac-
tices that can account for the articulation of the Bancada Ativista. As such, we seek to
problematize the objects of enquiry through their genealogical construction, making it
possible to critically engage in an analysis of the predominant discursive logics enclosed
in this collective campaign (Glynos and Howarth, 2007: 41–46).
Furthermore, we believe that the study of this experience can provide productive
insights not only in the Brazilian context but also to the study of politics. Strands of litera-
ture from the fields of political institutions and social movements have signalled a crisis
in current forms of democratic representation. By problematizing the prominent ‘person-
alized hypothesis’ in political science (Garzia, 2019), this case study will approach insti-
tutional crisis and political representation from a perspective of meaning-making.
Institutions, crisis, and personalization
The existing literature on political institutions addresses crucial aspects for understanding
electoral structures in moments of disruption (Dalton and Wattenberg, 2000; Mair et al.,
2004). Through a broad diagnosis of the existence of a worldwide crisis in
To continue reading
Request your trial