Chapter 4 shows how the emergence of novel policy beliefs led to the adoption of globalized state-led development. It documents the policy beliefs of policy-makers from the Brazilian Workers’ Party regarding the benefits of state support for nationally controlled MNCs for the country’s long-term development. It traces the emergence of these novel policy ideas to the epistemic and policy learning of policy-makers and shows how these ideas guided industrial policy and BNDES reform. To further validate the argument, the chapter addresses competing explanations for policy adoption centered on political coalitions, macroeconomic conditions, and business pressures.

In 2021, the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, there was an exponential increase in the number of deaths in the country. These deaths can be explained, among other factors, by the easing of restrictions on social isolation and the delay in purchasing vaccines. In that context, family members and friends had to deal with abbreviated funeral rituals experienced in a context of necropolitics. In this chapter, based on the analysis of the death of Vítor, a forty-six-year-old Pentecostal pastor, we see how new protocols aimed at containing the spread of the virus affected the traditional rites, shortening their sequences and phases – thus reducing community participation to a minimum – and, in turn, how they drove the creation of new possible rituals. If, on the one hand, the new possible rites point to a process of creating funerals that combines in-person tributes and the use of new technologies, on the other, they highlight the consequences of mourning experienced in a context of political tension mainly due to the actions of a conservative and denialist government.

The introduction presents the book's core puzzle of why states promote the outward investments of national firms despite the political and distributional costs of doing so. It previews a theory of globalized state-led development whereby policy-makers promote the internationalization of domestic business to pursue the structural transformation of their home economies. The chapter also describes the book's research strategy of within-country and cross-national comparisons of globalized state-led development in Brazil and China.

This chapter of Persistent Citizens investigates the role of partisanship as an alternative or complementary explanation for variation in state-centric persistence and the "2ei" attitudes (i.e., entitlement, indignation, and self-efficacy). The authors analyze whether support for major political movements in each country – the Workers’ Party in Brazil and the Peronist movement in Argentina – affects citizens’ attitudes and behaviors toward the state. The findings reveal a significant contrast between the two cases. In Brazil, partisan identity has little to no explanatory power. In Argentina, in contrast, Peronist supporters show systematically different attitudes and a greater willingness to persist than non-supporters. Analysis of additional survey questions suggests that differences in attitudes among Peronist supporters are not the result of greater reliance on clientelism but instead reflect greater optimism about the state’s capacity to provide services. Despite this partisan effect in Argentina, the chapter concludes that the book’s core findings regarding the importance of 2ei remain robust in both countries.

The 2018 presidential election marked a watershed moment in Brazilian politics with the ascension of Jair Bolsonaro, who secured over 55% of the vote and became the primary catalyst for a novel far-right political alignment. This movement, termed Bolsonarismo, is characterized by a multidimensional political rhetoric that synthesizes reactionary stances on crime, corruption, and sociocultural issues—specifically regarding gender and LGBTQ+ rights—with militarist, economically liberal, and authoritarian inclinations. Bolsonaro’s ideological positioning oscillates between a radical, illiberal far-right and a more extreme, authoritarian posture, consistently commanding a resilient support base of approximately 20% of the electorate. This consolidation of the right-wing spectrum has effectively marginalized “third-way” alternatives, establishing him as the movement’s uncontested figurehead. Chapter 3 investigates the roots of Bolsonaro’s oratory, demonstrating that the core tenets of Bolsonarismo were embedded in his discourse before his presidency. Through a systematic analysis of his public statements and legislative rhetoric, the chapter shows how he championed positions aligned with the global far-right. Furthermore, the analysis examines his executive actions, focusing on his response to the COVID-19 pandemic and his disruption of conditional cash transfer programs as a form of policy rebranding.

Building on the findings of Chapter 5 of Persistent Citizens, this chapter shifts focus to the origins of the three "2ei" attitudes (i.e., entitlement, indignation, and self-efficacy). The authors explore various factors that might explain why some individuals feel more entitled, indignant, and efficacious than others. Their analysis finds that domain-specific knowledge – knowledge of social rights – is a particularly strong predictor of these attitudes. The chapter provides evidence that knowledge of social rights is a more significant factor than socioeconomic status, prior experiences with the state, or general civic engagement. Path models show how knowledge of social rights plausibly affects 2ei, driving state-centric persistence.

Drawing on a series of sixteen focus groups with Brazilian and Argentine citizens from low-income groups in four cities, this chapter documents the challenges individuals face when trying to access public health and early childhood education benefits. The chapter provides a conceptual framework for classifying citizen responses to these challenges. It argues that while some citizens exit from seeking access to public services, an important response is what the authors call "state-centric persistence": the act of repeatedly and directly engaging with government offices or officials after an initial failed attempt. The focus group narratives illustrate that this form of persistence is often necessary for successful access and that it is distinct from other options like giving up or turning to private alternatives. The chapter also uses survey data to show widespread belief in the usefulness of state-centric persistence.

The introductory chapter of Persistent Citizens lays out the core conceptual, theoretical, and empirical claims of the book. It begins by highlighting that expanded social policy commitments in countries like Brazil and Argentina do not always translate into consistent access to social programs for all eligible citizens. The authors introduce "state-centric persistence" as a key behavior that explains who ultimately receives benefits. The chapter then previews a psychological theory that explains persistence based on three attitudes: entitlement, indignation, and self-efficacy, collectively termed "2ei." The chapter reviews the scope conditions of the argument and outlines the empirical approach of the book, which involves original qualitative and quantitative research in Brazil and Argentina, focusing on health care and early childhood education. The chapter concludes by discussing the book’s contributions to literature on social policy access, claim making, and administrative burden.

This chapter provides a historical overview of social welfare provision in Brazil and Argentina. It details how both countries, in the early twentieth century, established welfare systems that were largely regressive and favored formal workers and privileged groups. The chapter then describes the social policy expansions that have occurred in recent decades, particularly since the countries’ transitions to democracy in the 1980s. While these reforms have expanded access to previously excluded populations, the chapter notes that uneven access persists despite these new commitments. It also summarizes the current state of public provision of health care, especially medication for chronic illness, and early childhood education in each country.

The final chapter of this book considers external challenges – namely, discourses and regulatory moves driven by concerns about state sovereignty and, relatedly, security and development – to the dual-sided framework in the current digital era. It starts by discussing to what extent China provides a counter-model to the liberal conception of information freedom and the dual-sided framework and argues that there is not really a Chinese (counter-)model. It moves to consider other Global South countries, looking at firstly Brazil and India and then the peripheries of the periphery. It argues that placed in a chain of dependence, practices of Global South countries generally do not present fundamental challenges to the dual-sided framework despite their genuine normative contestations. The chapter finally moves to recent sovereignist policies and discourses from the Western liberal world and observes that the main challenge to the dual-sided framework comes from an increasingly fascist United States.

This work examines how organized crime is emergent from the material conditions of life and death. Focusing on Brazil, I develop the idea of “muted martyrdom” to show how longstanding and banal efforts to maintain highly unequal conditions of life and death, both actively through violent policing and passively through the non-provision of life-giving infrastructures, are productive of novel techniques of “life insurance” for populations that, under the global and social relations of capitalism, must not be subject to techniques of life-saving. By returning to the political economy of life and death, which is to say how both life and death are commodified in and via social relations, I push toward a broader understanding of insurable and un-insurable life, which matters because it tells us that death and its material conditions are a powerful force and epistemological means for reading capitalism’s harms and the contestation it instills.

Chapter 2 presents a theory of globalized state-led development that helps us understand the conditions under which this model is adopted and implemented. It begins with the developmentalist dilemma faced by states: how can they help national firms benefit from global markets while managing the domestic political tensions these interventions provoke? This tension has important points of comparison with the challenges faced by the East Asian developmental states, yet has become more acute. Globalization and democracy have deepened the developmentalist dilemma by increasing the relevance of international production and innovation networks, constraining policy space, and heightening political contestation. A theory of globalized state-led development explains the conditions under which governments navigate these competing pressures by supporting national firms at home and abroad.

This chapter provides an empirical test of the psychological theory presented in Chapter 4 of Persistent Citizens. The authors use original survey data from Brazil and Argentina to analyze respondents’ willingness to persist in seeking public health care and early childhood education services. The results of the quantitative analysis demonstrate a statistically significant positive relationship between the three "2ei" attitudes – entitlement, indignation, and self-efficacy – and the likelihood of engaging in state-centric persistence. The chapter provides robust evidence supporting the book’s core theoretical claim that an individual’s attitudes are a crucial determinant of their actions toward the state. It explores and finds limited evidence for alternative explanations for persistence, such as socioeconomic factors. The chapter also shows that 2ei uniquely predicts state-centric persistence versus other types of behavior.

This chapter examines transatlantic news in the first newspaper of seventeenth-century France, the famous Gazette of Théophraste Renaudot, which appeared in Paris every week between 1631 and 1653. Renaudot has often been portrayed in French scholarship as a mere mouthpiece of Cardinal Richelieu, but his coverage of events in the Atlantic world shows that he was in fact a very accomplished news writer who gave a more balanced account of events than contemporaries and historians have given him credit for. Those who wanted to follow events in the South Atlantic were often better off reading Renaudot’s Gazette than the French-language editions of the Amsterdam newspapers, or the embryonic periodicals from Lisbon. As news of the climax in the war in Brazil reached Paris in the late 1640s, the Gazette reported events from as many as four different perspectives – giving equal weight to narratives of the Portuguese and Dutch generals, as well as those of the native American and (formerly enslaved) African commanders who had participated in the final battle.

We present historical background, contemporary status, and potential future development of the psychology of religion (PoR) in Brazil, beginning with its origins: the formative people, places, and various intellectual schools of thought. Writing about the current state of the topic, we reflect on influential factors that are either facilitating or inhibiting the study of PoR, including publication options, topical emphases, practitioners, orientations, methodologies, and professional organizations.

We offer opinions concerning future development topics that are emerging as important in the immediate future and/or are perennially important in order to stimulate creative and useful research including Western theoretical relevance, the extent to which Western PoR theories may or may not contain reasonable expectations and concepts for this region, contextual nuances, Indigenous theoretical concerns, collaborative research opportunities, and common faux pas – reflections on what people unfamiliar with this region commonly and incorrectly assume about conducting PoR work in this context.