State and mass in Brazil

Weffort, Francisco C.

doi:10.1007/bf02800609

Cited by 9 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…The reviewer is correct to observe that populism is a recurrent feature of Latin American politics, but I am not sure we have read the same genealogy or take away the same lessons. It was scholars from Latin America-like Gino Germani (1978), Di Tella (1965, and Francisco Weffort (1966)-who pioneered research on populism. This first wave of research explicitly approached the phenomenon from the ground up in a way that provincialized charismatic leaders and resisted conflating populism with authoritarianism.…”

Section: ***mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Response to Carla Moscoso’s “Populism, the Press and the Politics of Crime in Venezuela: a Review of Robert Samet’s Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)”

Samet

2020

Int J Polit Cult Soc

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It is a pleasure to receive this review of Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela and to have the opportunity to engage with Carla Moscoso's insightful analysis. I'm grateful for many of the reviewer's key points, which are organized in a helpful chapter-by-chapter summary. I will return to many them later in my reply, but I want to begin by explaining what I take to be the book's broader significance. Two decades of the tumultuous twenty-first century have undone easy assumptions about the democratizing influence of media technology. Rather than spreading liberal democracy across the globe, the political, economic, and technological openings of the late twentieth century sowed the seeds of populist revolutions. The political grounds beneath our feet are shifting; what happens next is anyone's guess. If we are to make predictions, much less act upon them, we need a conceptual framework suited to the times. That is especially true when it comes to thinking about the role of news media in political processes. So many of our normative pronouncements about what media outlets should or should not do are still playing catch up to what media outlets are actually doing. There was no better laboratory for observing the transformation of news media in times of populist upheaval than Venezuela during the Hugo Chávez era (1999-2013). When I arrived in 2006, Venezuela was the acclaimed epicenter of the "left turn" in Latin American politics. The capital, Caracas, was home to an old and powerful private press, a robust alternative media movement, and a burgeoning state media. Digital technology and social media platforms were booming. So too were broadcast and print news outlets. Today, Caracas's incredibly diverse media ecosystem is a thing of the past, destroyed in part by the extreme political polarization that pitted supporters and opponents of the late president Hugo Chávez against one another. Much of what we are witnessing now in the USA and Europe was already on full display in Venezuela: openly partisan news outlets, selective reporting, accusations that the government was censoring the press,

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Section: ***mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Response to Carla Moscoso’s “Populism, the Press and the Politics of Crime in Venezuela: a Review of Robert Samet’s Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)”

Samet

2020

Int J Polit Cult Soc

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“…A Brazilian school also emerged during the middle years of dictatorship, drawing on earlier studies. Stalwarts Jaguaribe (1974), Ianni (1975), and Weffort (1978, 1966) published compilations of their earlier works, with enhancements. They were joined by new voices like Brito (1978), Andrade (1979), Debert (1979), and Camargo (1979).…”

Section: Smentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Skidmore (1967) identified many other comparable leaders in Brazil's 1930–1964 era and developed a general definition that highlighted populists' prowess at winning elections, recruiting ever‐larger followings, overcoming difficult challenges to their leadership, and creating auras of charismatic authority. He also associated these leaders with promoting “developmental nationalism.” Political scientists Francisco Weffort (1965, 1966) and Octavio Ianni (1968) added their Marxist‐leaning interpretations in following years.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A historiography of populism and neopopulism in Latin America

Conniff

2020

History Compass

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For over a half-century, Latin American and other scholars have written reams and held innumerable conferences about the populist style of politics in the region. Historians quickly joined in with their theories, methods, and perspectives. Most literature focused on the classic period from the 1930s to 1970s, when populism dominated many nations' governments. In the 1980s and 1990s, as the region rebounded from military dictatorship, new leaders using populist methods won office and instituted economic policies in line with neoliberalism. This reappearance, called neopopulism, sparked new interest in the subject. Finally, after 2000, numerous left-leaning politicians gave rise to a radical phase of neopopulism that lasted over a decade. This essay follows historians' and social scientists' work documenting and analyzing these phenomena. 1 | INTRODUCTION The term populism first arose with reference to Latin America in the 1940s and soon became broadly applied to many leaders, parties, movements, policies, and episodes, before and after. The phenomenon seemed to disappear during the military regimes of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, only to reappear in the 1990s in the guise of neopopulism. Over the decades the concept found frequent usage in Brazil,

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“…As an analytical framework, populism presents two related challenges. First, it is a notoriously slippery concept, and there have been numerous attempts to formulate a single, broadly accepted definition (Canovan ; Di Tella ; Germani ; Ionescu and Gellner ; Jansen ; Knight ; Laclau ; Roberts ; Weffort ; Weyland ). Among scholars, it has become a rite of passage to point out the failures of previous generations en route to a new and improved definition of populism.…”

Section: Populism As Object Of Ethnographic Inquirymentioning

confidence: 99%

The photographer's body: Populism, polarization, and the uses of victimhood in Venezuela

Samet

2013

American Ethnologist

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Political antagonism between supporters and opponents of former president Hugo Chávez has been a defining feature of daily life in Caracas for more than a decade. Despite their different political orientations, the antagonistic poles of “chavismo” and “the opposition” share striking similarities, starting at the level of political practice. I argue that Venezuela's political polarization reflects the shared logic of populism. Through the story of Jorge Tortoza—a photojournalist killed during the failed 2002 coup d’état against President Chávez—I describe how the chavista–opposition divide is produced and policed through performances of victimhood, performances that are essential to populist mobilization in Venezuela.

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State and mass in Brazil

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

A Response to Carla Moscoso’s “Populism, the Press and the Politics of Crime in Venezuela: a Review of Robert Samet’s Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)”

A Response to Carla Moscoso’s “Populism, the Press and the Politics of Crime in Venezuela: a Review of Robert Samet’s Deadline: Populism and the Press in Venezuela (Chicago: University of Chicago Press)”

A historiography of populism and neopopulism in Latin America

The photographer's body: Populism, polarization, and the uses of victimhood in Venezuela

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