"Democracies" and "legitimacies": the effect of democratic institutions on political attitudes from a comparative perspective in Latin America

• Grant number: 17/01913-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: October 01, 2017
• End date: February 28, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - Political Behavior
• Principal Investigator: Maria Do Socorro Sousa Braga
• Grantee: Gabriel Avila Casalecchi
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

In general, research on democratic legitimacy in Latin America considers the countries of the region as part of the so-called "new democracies," sharing the problems and challenges inherent in that condition. While it is true that the countries of the region have many features in common, this project aims to relativize this assumption, showing that the different democratic trajectories in each country result in a "legacy" that affects the formation of attitudes of its citizens. In other words, the overall objective of the project is to investigate how the context provided by different democratic legacy influence the formation of political attitudes of its citizens, particularly the support for democracy and its underlying principles. More specifically, the project aims to move in four directions: 1) in the complexity of the concept and measures of democracy and how they form different legacies in Latin America; 2) the complexification of the concept and measures to support democracy; 3) analysis of the effect that each of the democratic legacy has in supporting democracy (in its multiple dimensions) and; 4) in the case study of some countries, both those who follow the prediction of quantitative models as the outliers, aiming qualitatively deepen the results. For the realization of the project, we will use the measures of democracy from the Varieties project of Democracy (V-Dem) recently conducted by the Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg and the Kellogg Institute of the University of Notre Dame and the public opinion data AmericasBarometer, raised regularly by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP) of Vanderbilt University.