Between left and right: the political dimension of the 2015 and 2016 protests in Brazil

Abstract

Abstract  This article investigates the relationship between ideology and protest in Brazil, analyzing the demonstrations of 2015 and 2016 related to the impeachment process of former President Dilma Rousseff. We start from the hypothesis that right-wing and left-wing protests differed mainly in terms of political themes, regardless of the socioeconomic status of the participants. To test this hypothesis, we used data from the DataFolha institute and applied logistic regression models to assess the effect of sociodemographic and political variables on participation in the protests. The results indicate that mobilization was predominantly guided by attitudes toward the government, with support for impeachment and negative evaluation of Dilma Rousseff as predictors of participation on the right, while sociodemographic variables had a limited impact. These findings reinforce the importance of contextual factors, such as the polarization of electoral preferences in the dynamics of social mobilization, and offer new insights into the role of ideology in political participation.

Keywords:
political ideology; street protests; electoral polarization; social mobilization; impeachment of the former president Dilma Rousseff