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Article
What Happened to the “New Middle Class”? The 2016 BORP (Brazil’s Once-Rising Poor) Survey
Latin American Research Review
  • Benjamin Junge, SUNY New Paltz
  • Sean T. Mitchell, Rutgers University - Newark
  • Charles H Klein, Portland State University
  • David De Micheli, University of Utah
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
6-8-2022
Subjects
  • Politics and government -- Brazil,
  • Social change -- Brazil
Abstract

This research note provides a detailed account of the development and implementation of a household survey conducted in 2016 as part of a larger investigation into the lifeways and political subjectivities of Brazil’s “once-rising poor,” the demographic sector comprising poor and working-class people who experienced various forms of socioeconomic mobility in the early twenty-first century. After reflecting on the challenges of maintaining a critical perspective on class labels and relations that were intensely contested at the time, the article introduces the survey sample (n = 1,204), highlighting variables captured. It then establishes the demographic profile, mobility experiences, political values, attitudes, and behaviors of the sample. The portrait that emerges for this sector is one of economic precarity, heterogeneous experiences of socioeconomic mobility (and nonmobility) over the past two decades, and significant alienation from formal politics.

Rights

This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Latin American Studies Association

DOI
10.1017/lar.2022.41
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/39246
Citation Information
Junge, Benjamin, Sean T. Mitchell, Charles H. Klein, and David De Micheli (2022). What Happened to the “New Middle Class”? The 2016 BORP (Brazil’s Once-Rising Poor) Survey. Latin American Research Review 57, 573–589. https://doi.org/10.1017/lar.2022.41