Looking back and into the troubled Brazilian political scene: The role of family political transmission

Abstract

This working paper aims to contribute to the important debate on the relationship of individuals — and families — with politics. And it takes as background the current and troubled political and democratic context of Brazil. To this end, I present a brief contextualisation of the Brazilian political scene of the last decade and use data from a long-term research conducted between 2013 and 2017, with families living in a popular neighbourhood in the industrial suburb of ABC Paulista (São Paulo/ Brazil). I demonstrate how politics can be immersed in people’s daily lives, entering the family universe and I present the stories of two families that in 2016 displayed some of the characteristic elements of the political clashes present in current Brazilian society and that mark, not only the 2022 election campaign, but also the three previous presidential elections. I intend, therefore, to demonstrate and defend the relevance of the family and family socialization in the formation of the ways of reacting and perceiving to matters of political order.