Brazilian Protests: Actors and Demands for Political Changes

Abstract

This chapter analyses the nature of the Brazilian socio-political protests that sparked in 2013 and are still going on today. The focus on determining the main drivers of the movement, protesters’ demands, new forms of collective action and the resulting political changes allows me to trace an important change in the Brazilian democracy as a whole. These protests are neither a one-shot deal, nor an institutionalized social movement. I argue that they rather represent a demand of protesters for participation in the permanent dialogue between the power and the public on every single issue that troubles at least some groups of the society. In this sense, such protests may indicate a completely novel era in the Brazilian democracy that renders representative democracy obsolete and insufficient, while the demands for participatory democracy are being increasingly voiced. Importantly, this mode of protesting proves rather efficient in terms of real changes in politics it brought.