Citizens’ Distrust in Democratic Institutions

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Notes

1. In modern democracies, children and young people, until a certain age, are excluded from this totality. Elders, after a certain age, may choose whether they want or not to continue benefiting themselves of the right to vote.

2. From the beginning of the 1980s until June of 1994, when the Plano Real was launched, Brazil had an average inflation rate of 1.110% per year; from 1994 to 2002, the average of the annual inflation was around 15%; on the other hand, between 1981 and 1992, the expansion of the Brazilian GDP went from 1.4% per year to 3.5%, between 1993 and 1998; this average fell, in 1999, under the impact of real devaluation and of the international financial crisis, and got back to growth, in 2001 and 2002, though in a very timid fashion (Graeff, 2000). In what concerns the social effects of these changes, they relate to the fall of the illiteracy and of the infantile mortality rates, as well as to the growth of the inclusion rates of the poor in the educational system.

3. On 4 May 2003, the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo presented the results of a CNI pool, according to which around two-thirds of the electors approved the proposals for the social security and tributary reforms of the government, and expected that they would bring more equity and justice as a consequence of the expected corrections that were to be introduced in the functioning of those institutions.

4. According to Novo Aurélio–Dicionário da Língua Portuguesa, the female substantive ‘trust’ refers to the ‘intimate confidence of procedure, credit, faith, and, most importantly, to the “confidence and good concept that inspires people of probity, talent, discretion etc”’ (Rio de Janeiro: Ed. Nova Fronteira, 1999) p. 525.

5. Hetherington (1998) makes a list of the most important items included in the original questionnaires (Michigan) in order to attend to the above-mentioned criteria.