Brazil is undergoing a paradigm shift in its approach to racial inequality. Once eschewing race, legislators and other policy makers are now vigorously implementing racial quotas in public institutions of higher education. In this paper, we explore public opinion on racial quotas using the 2010 and 2012 AmericasBarometer. In 2010, a surprising majority of Brazilians strongly supported these policies. Afro-Brazilians and individuals with lower levels of education were more likely to express strong support compared to whites and those with higher levels of education. In 2012, a question format change that set up a zero-sum game scenario between afro-Brazilians and others resulted in a dramatic fall in that support. Interestingly, those 2012 results show that education, and not race, contours support. We discuss possible explanations for these particular patterns of public opinion on racial quotas in Brazil.

The Brazilian state recently adopted unprecedented race-targeted affirmative action in government hiring and university admissions. Scholarship would predict the state's institutionalization of racial categories has "race-making" effects. In this article, we ask whether the Brazilian state's policy turnabout has affected racial subjectivities on the ground, specifically toward mirroring the categories used by the state. To answer, we conceptualize race as multidimensional and leverage two of its dimensions-lay identification and government classification (via open-ended and closedended questions, respectively)-to introduce a new metric of state race-making: a comparison of the extent of alignment between lay and government dimensions across time. Logistic regression on large-sample survey data from before the policy turn (1995) and well after its diffusion ( 2008) reveals an increased use of state categories as respondents' lay identification in the direction of matching respondents' government classification. We conclude that the Brazilian state is making race but not from scratch nor in ways that are fully intended.

O artigo analisa o impacto das estratégias de comunicação realizadas pela Assembleia Legislativa de Minas Gerais (ALMG) durante a década de 1990 sobre a opinião pública da sociedade do estado de Minas Gerais. Pretende-se avaliar se a opinião pública em relação ao legislativo estadual se mostrou "resistente" às inovações institucionais ou se ocorreram mudanças ao longo dos treze anos cobertos pelos dados disponíveis. A análise comparativa no tempo e com outras instituições políticas não nos autoriza a falar sobre uma excepcionalidade da ALMG no que se refere a sua imagem pública. Em grande medida, a imagem da ALMG, em termos de confiança e avaliação, não foge do padrão brasileiro em relação às instituições políticas. O impacto do processo de inovação institucional é perceptível apenas sobre um público restrito: aqueles que consumiram as mensagens e comunicações produzidas pela ALMG e veiculadas no radio e na televisão.
This article analyzes the impact on public opinion of the strategies of communication carried out by the Legislative Chamber of Minas Gerais (ALMG) during the 1990's. We evaluate whether the public opinion on the state legislature has changed along of this thirteen years, following a steady process of institutional innovation. Comparing results for different points of time between 1993 and 2006, we reject the idea that ALMG's public image is substantially different from standard public evaluation of Brazilian political institutions. We find that the institutional change process is noticeable and has a positive response only for the small public attentive to ALMG's messages transmitted by radio and television

Census ethnoracial categories often reflect national ideologies and attendant subjectivities. Nonetheless, Brazilians frequently prefer the non-census terms moreno (brown) and negro (black), and both are core to antithetical ideologies: racial ambiguity versus racial affirmation. Their use may be in flux as Brazil recently adopted unprecedented race-targeted public policy. We examine propensities to self-classify as moreno and negro before and after the policy shift. Using regression modeling on national survey data from 1995 and 2008 that captured self-classification in open and closed formats, we find moreno is highly salient but increasingly constricted, while negro is restricted in use, though increasingly popular. Negro’s growth is mostly confined to the darker pole of Brazil’s color continuum. Education correlates in opposing directions: negative with moreno and positive with negro. Our findings proxy broad ideological shift from racial ambiguity to negro racial affirmation. They suggest race-targeted policy is transforming racial subjectivities and ideologies in Brazil.

This paper examines the context-dependent role of race as a predictor of non-electoral political participation. Prior country-level studies have documented group-level differences in a variety of forms of participation in South Africa and the United States, but have found few to no differences in Brazil. Why are members of one group more engaged in certain political activities than members of other groups only in specific contexts? Why do members of socioeconomically deprived groups, such as non-Whites, participate more than better-off groups in acts that require group mobilization in South Africa and the United States but not in Brazil? Results from the World Values Survey and the International Social Survey Programme show that Blacks and Coloureds in South Africa and Blacks in the United States participate more than Whites in activities that demand prior organization and mobilization, whereas group differences are negligible in Brazil. I argue that (1) race as a driver of political mobilization is conditional on the existence of politicized racial identities; (2) members of groups that share a strong collective identity participate in direct political action more than predicted by their socioeconomic background; (3) politicization of identities is the product of racial projects that deploy the state apparatus to enforce group boundaries for the implementation of segregationist policies as well as the reactions against them; and (4) by enforcing group boundaries, those systems unintentionally create the conditions for the formation of politicized group identities. In the absence of such requisites, political mobilization along racial lines would be weak or nonexistent.