Hall of Mirrors: Media, Democratization, and the Public Sphere in Maranhão, Brazil

Abstract

Freedom of expression and access to diverse sources of information are seen as critical elements of democracy, although their concretization on the ground is subject to strong interference. Recent regime change in Maranhão, one of Brazil’s poorest states, has led to the emergence of new media and some expansion of the public sphere. The traditional oligarchy continues to dominate the media, however, and the opposition media replicate its exclusion of nonelite actors. The Maranhão experience confirms that normative approaches to the media either as automatic contributors to democracy or as instruments of elite manipulation have little value for understanding media dynamics. Liberdade de expressão, bem como o acesso a diversas fontes de informação, são considerados elementos críticos da democracia, ainda que a concretização desses fatores esteja sujeita a forte interferência. A recente troca de regime no Maranhão, um dos estados mais pobres do Brasil, tem levado ao surgimento de uma nova mídia e a uma certa expansão da esfera pública. Contudo, a oligarquia continua dominando a mídia tradicional e a mídia alternativa imita a prática de exclusão de atores não pertencentes à elite. A experiência do Maranhão confirma que tratamentos normativos que veem a mídia como contribuinte automática do processo democrático, ou como instrumento de manipulação da elite, teem pouco valor para se entender a dinâmica da mídia.

Attrition as a bottom-up pathway to subnational democratization

“…In the wake of this subnational turn, scholars have identified pockets of democracy in authoritarian countries (Gilley, 2010) and pockets of authoritarianism in democratic countries (Benton, 2017;Durazo Herrmann, 2010;Giraudy, 2015;Sidel, 2014). Moreover, they have analyzed the democratization of subnational authoritarian enclaves (Durazo Herrmann, 2018;Gibson, 2013;Hiskey and Moseley, 2020;Mickey, 2015) and have suggested that pathways to subnational democratization are inherently different from those on the national level (Gibson, 2013).…”