Taking Jair Bolsonaro’s Victory Personally: Historical Events as Bridges between Social Domains.

Sergio Galaz-Garcia, Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE)

How do historical events—emergent, intense, and collectively experienced instances of political contingency—generate sweeping bursts of politicization immediately after they occur? Rationalist outlooks see this capacity as stemming from how events perform as purveyors of information to citizens with exogenous and inflexible political identities. Politico-cultural approaches, on the other hand, contend that events politicize by changing the meanings with which people navigate politics. These outlooks assume that event’s politicizing impact develops strictly within the domain of political experience. But, given that politics is scantly instantiated in everyday life, they have a limited ability to explain how events generate sweeping political activation. I offer an alternative “connective” approach to understand events’ immediate politicizing capacity. I anchor this influence in events’ ability to generate semantic disturbances that allow the infiltration of political narratives into stories and identities driving action from social spheres of more frequent instantiation than politics. I find support for this outlook by conducting qualitative fieldwork in São Paulo in the wake of the unexpectedly strong victory of right-wing extremist Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections. My observations in public spaces and moments of sociability between left-leaning citizens portray this time as one of “politicization without politics”. Bolsonaro’s surprising popular support expanded feelings of vulnerability, leading to political perceptual and behavioral shifts that emerged from changes in personal, rather than properly, political domains of social experience. These connective reaccommodations produced an environment of political “engagement without action” where visible political behavior drastically decreased while political conversations skyrocketed.

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 Presented in Session 111. Contentious Politics