Junho de 2013 continuado por outros meios: os movimentos de renovação política e a institucionalização do engajamento cívico no Brasil contemporâneo

Abstract

This doctoral thesis examines the social and political conditions underlying the processes of legitimation and institutionalization of civic engagement in contemporary Brazil. It focuses on the case of RenovaBR, the most prominent among the organizations known as “Political Renewal Movements” (PRM). These initiatives emerged largely in response to the critical juncture that followed the June 2013 contention cycle . In this context, the research analyzes the social backgrounds and associative ties of the 118 candidates supported by RenovaBR in the 2018 elections, seeking to understand how, in the wake of post-2013 political opportunities, the organization worked to redirect its members’ civic engagement toward representative institutions through electoral participation. The analysis unfolds across three complementary axes. The first reconstructs the historical conditions that enabled the emergence of the PRM – especially RenovaBR – highlighting how they were shaped through the discursive appropriation of the legitimacy crisis affecting Brazil’s political system. The second investigates the social trajectories and political agenda of the 2018 Renova candidates’, linking them to ideas and actors that surfaced during the 2013 cycle of mobilizations. The third maps the ties between these candidacies and civil society organizations, revealing how political renewal is structured through specific associative circuits. Drawing from this analytical framework, the thesis argues that political renewal groups reframed diffuse and contentious criticisms of the political system and the state – articulated between 2013 and 2016 – into a project of institutional occupation. In doing so, the so-called “renewers” mobilized technical competencies, connections to organized civil society, and the discourse of political professionalization as strategies for public legitimation. The study further shows that, on the one hand, such initiatives can be interpreted as responses to the crisis of representation and the closure of the Brazilian party system, as recognized in existing literature. On the other hand, it demonstrates that, despite their rhetoric of inclusion of the “ordinary citizen” in politics, these organizations are grounded in a selective ecology of civil society actors, primarily linking middle- and upper-class participation and associative networks to non-hegemonic center and right-wing political parties. Finally, the dissertation contributes to the scholarly agenda on the outcomes of collective action by proposing that the PRM be understood as institutional legacies of the 2013 protest cycle – translating social demands into non-contentious repertoires of institutional engagement. In this sense, the emergence of these groups is interpreted as an attempt by specific sectors of civil society to continue the political impulse of June 2013 by other means.