Horizontal social movements and agenda-setting: evidence from Brazil

Resumo

I explore the question of whether horizontal social movements are successful in introducing their preferred policy platforms into the public agenda. Previous scholarship has listed centralization, hierarchy, and leadership as key factors that explain the success of social movements, but has not comprehensively taken into consideration the existence of these horizontal entities. Preliminary empirical evidence mainly focused on media coverage of the MPL-São Paulo, a movement that advocates for free public transportation in Brazil, suggests that these movements are not able to attract media attention on their own merits. Rather, they are only objects of media coverage in the presence of newsworthy events not related to their policy platforms or their own existence – in the case of the MPL-São Paulo, this event was police brutality in protests. The paper calls for more research on the internal functioning of these movements, in particular the issue of how information flows within and is pushed outside of their boundaries.