Cesar Zucco
Speaker
Lemann Family Foundation Professor of Brazilian Studies and Professor of International and Public Affairs, Princeton University
Escolas de Samba and Electoral Behavior under Brazil's Military Dictatorship
Date and Time
October 20, 2026
12:00PM - 01:30PM EDT
Location
CGIS South, Room S216
No registration required to attend in person.
Participation in Rio de Janeiro's escolas de samba was a powerful form of collective action that Brazil's military dictatorship (1964–1985) paradoxically tolerated and even promoted. While these organizations operated as vital civil society organizations, their yearly Carnival parade themes ranged from overtly regime-apologetic to subversively critical. This paper revisits a classic debate at the intersection of culture and politics: was Carnaval a tool for authoritarian co-optation or a vibrant space for resistance? To address this, we leverage a newly built dataset of thousands of samba-enredos (parade lyrics) to establish broad historical trends, and then zoom in on the critical decade of the 1970s by pairing local lyrics with newly uncovered, geocoded fine-grained electoral data. We find that escolas de samba significantly increased anti-regime opposition. Crucially, this effect was strongest among schools with a rich tradition of politically critical and racially conscious themes, demonstrating how cultural resistance directly translated into electoral pushback.
This event is presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Steven Levitsky
Moderator
Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies; Professor of Government, Harvard
Bios
Cesar Zucco is the Lemann Family Foundation Professor of Brazilian Studies and Professor of International and Public Affairs. He previously served for twelve years as Professor of Politics and Public Policy at FGV/EBAPE in Rio de Janeiro and as Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, and has held visiting or temporary appointments at Nuffield College, Princeton University, Yale University, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and IUPERJ (now IESP-UERJ). His research focuses on Latin American politics, with particular emphasis on voting behavior, the measurement and meaning of ideology, and the political economy of public policy in Brazil and in comparative perspective. His work combines observational and experimental methods and has been published in leading political science journals, including American Journal of Political Science, The Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, and Comparative Political Studies, as well as in leading area studies journals.
Zucco is the author of two books published by Cambridge University Press. The Volatility Curse (2020), coauthored with Daniela Campello, examines how economic volatility-particularly in commodity-and capital-flow-dependent economies-leads voters to misattribute responsibility for economic outcomes, thereby undermining democratic accountability. His first book, Partisans, Antipartisans, and Nonpartisans (2018, with David Samuels), analyzes the development and political consequences of partisanship and antipartisanship in Brazil. In addition to ongoing extensions of this work and new research on culture and politics, Zucco co-coordinates, with Timothy Power, the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, a three-decade initiative tracking the attitudes and behavior of Brazilian legislators.
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world.
Professor Levitsky has written for New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and he has been a columnist for La Republica (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil).