The Politics of Population in Brazil: Elite Ambivalence and Public Demand 9781477301388

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THE POLITICS OF POPULATION IN BRAZIL

The Texas Pan American Series

THE POLITICS OF POPULATION IN BRAZIL Elite Ambivalence and Public Demand by Peter McDonough and Amaury DeSouza

University of Texas Press • Austin and London

Copyright © 1981 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box 7819, Austin, Texas 78712.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data McDonough, Peter, 1939The politics of population in Brazil. (The Texas Pan American series) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Brazil—Population policy—Public opinion. 2. Birth control—Brazil— Public opinion. 3. Public opinion—Brazil. 4. Elite (Social sciences)—Brazil—Attitudes. I. Sousa, Amaury de, joint author. II. Title. HB3563.M33 304.6'6'0981 80-20490 ISBN 0-292-76466-9

The Texas Pan American Series is published with the assistance of a revolving publication fund established by the Pan American Sulphur Company. This book was written under the auspices of the Institute for Social Research, The University of Michigan, and the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

Contents Acknowledgments

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1 • Overview 3 The Political Context of Population Policy in Brazil Principal Themes 15 The Nature of the Evidence 22 Organization of the Analysis 25

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2 • Elite Opinion 26 Recognition of and Priorities on Population Problems Preferences on Birth Control 33 Mechanisms of Population Policy 46 Conclusion 53 3 • Public Opinion 57 Some Basic Concepts 58 The Salience of the Family Planning Issue 60 Contours of Opinion 66 The Determinants of Preferences on Family Planning and Divorce 73 Protoconstituencies for Family Planning 93 Conclusion 96 4 • Elite Perceptions 98 Interlite Perceptions 99 Elite Perceptions of Public Opinion Conclusion 115 5 • Summing Up

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Appendices I. The Elite Sample 125 II. The Sample of Southeast Brazil Notes 139 Bibliography Index 175

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Figures 2.1. 2.2. 2.3. 3.1. 3.2.

Average Importance Attributed to Birth Control as a Policy Issue by Elite Groups 32 Average Importance Attributed to the Birth Control Issue According to Elite Preferences on the Issue 37 Smallest-Space Diagram of Nine Policy Preferences 39 The Incidence of Nonopinion on the Issues of Subversion and Birth Control by Educational Level 65 Summary Diagram of the Determinants of Attitudes toward the Role of Government Regarding Birth Control 92

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Tables 2.1.

Average Importance Attributed by the Elites to Fifteen Issues 30 2.2. Average Preferences of Elite Groups Regarding Birth Control, Divorce, and Abortion 34 2.3. Average Elite Preference on the Birth Control Issue by Rationale of Preference 45 2.4. Percentage of Elites Stating Specific Population Policy Measures to Be Very Important 47 2.5. Correlations between Birth Control Preference and Importance Given to Seven Population Measures by Elite Groups 52 3.1. The Salience of Seven Issues in Public Opinion 64 3.2. Average Popular Preference on the Birth Control Issue by Rationale of Preference 69 3.3. Social Bases of Support for Birth Control and Divorce: Bivariate Associations 76 3.4. Differences between Ideal and Actual Family Size by Number of Living Children 81 3.5. Some Correlates of Congruence in Family Size 82 3.6. Ideal and Actual Family Size by Educational Level and Religiosity 84 3.7. Attitudes about Government's Role in Birth Control as a Function of Education, Controlling for Religiosity 86 3.8. Attitudes toward the Legalization of Divorce as a Function of Education, Controlling for Religiosity 86 3.9. Multiple Regression on Four Predictors of Attitudes toward Birth Control and Divorce 90 3.10. Multiple Regression on Four Predictors of Birth Control Preferences and Ideal Family Size 90

3.11. Percentage in Favor of Government Action Regarding Birth Control by Sex and Ideal Family Size 94 3.12. Principal Protoconstituencies Regarding the Issue of Birth Control 95 4.1. Average Differences between Avowed and Attributed Opinions on Birth Control by Elite Sector 103 4.2. Birth Control and Income Redistribution: Elite Importance Ratings and Elite Perceptions of Popular Importance Ratings 108 4.3. Birth Control and Income Redistribution: Elite Perceptions of Popular Preferences 111 4.4. Elites' Proximity to Protoconstituencies' Opinions on Birth Control 114 I.I. The Elite Sample in Detail 128 II.1. The Sample of the Population of Southeast Brazil: States and Primary Sampling Units 134 H.2. Interviewer Evaluations of Responses to the Issues of Birth Control and Internal Subversion 137

x • TABLES

Acknowledgments Our study was conducted jointly with the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ) under a Ford Foundation grant to the Center for Political Studies, Institute for Social Research (ISR), the University of Michigan. The late Kalman Silvert was the major inspiration for this undertaking. Data analysis and writing time were facilitated by grants from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHHD). We are grateful to Sidney Newman and V. Jeffery Evans of the Center for Population Research within NICHHD for their interest in our work. The Tinker Foundation also supplied funding for analysis of parts of the data which, even though the results do not appear in this publication, have contributed to setting this phase of our study in broader perspective. We owe a special debt of gratitude to Candido Mendes de Almeida and Warren E. Miller, whose encouragement and backing made this study possible. Philip E. Converse and Youssef Cohen, our collaborators in research, offered continued support and crucial suggestions. Almir de Castro at IUPERJ and Raburn Howland at ISR made essential contributions to the organization of our efforts. Luiz Alberto Bahia contributed generous advice and pivotal contacts. Our colleagues at IUPERJ—Wanderley G. Dos Santos, Simon Schwartzman, Cesar Guimarães, to mention only a few—helped us through some of the lean years of our research. Barbara Crane, Jason Finkle, and A. F. K. Organski provided thoughtful comments on our initial attempts to understand the politics of population in Brazil. Thomas Bruneau, Vilmar Faria, Bolivar Lamounier, Harley L. Browning, Nelson do Valle Silva, and Mitchell Seligson read the manuscript version in its entirety and prompted us to rethink some of our more doubtful ideas. We are grateful to all of them. Joyce Meyer typed numerous drafts of the text with efficiency and good humor. Deborah Eddy, William Domke, Kevin Kramer, and Alden Mullins gave invaluable assistance in processing the final version of the text.

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Finally, we would like to thank Charles Arthur, of the University of Texas Press, and Barbara Burnham, now of Cornell University Press, for seeing our various drafts through to print and Mary Jo Powell for her skillful copy editing.

xii • ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THE POLITICS OF POPULATION IN BRAZIL

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1 • Overview In 1872 the population of Brazil stood at 10 million. The population of Brazil is now over 120 million. Most observers agree that by the end of this century the population will reach 200 million. The exponential nature of the growth so far is reflected in the fact that nearly half of it has occurred since World War II. The population of Brazil makes up one-third of that of all Latin America, including the Caribbean. However striking these data may be, they do not demonstrate that Brazil suffers from overpopulation. The territory of the country is larger than that of the contiguous United States. Moreover, there is little evidence that the size of the Brazilian population or its rate of increase has jeopardized economic growth in the aggregate. Since 1945 the economy of Brazil has grown on the average more than twice as fast as the population. A dominant assumption among many sectors in Brazil has been that if a population problem exists, it is one of underpopulation rather than overpopulation. With continued economic expansion, made possible in part by an abundant labor supply and stimulated by a potentially vast domestic market, population is expected eventually to come into equilibrium with material resources. If economic development can be sustained at a sufficiently rapid rate, then urbanization, education, and the attendant incentives to planning by married couples are expected to keep population growth within bounds. This is the benign view. It implies a strategic gamble that does not enjoy universal assent in or outside of Brazil. Nor has the optimistic perspective itself remained static. At least two problems may give even strenuous pronatalists pause. One scenario estimates the final stable population of Brazil at 450 million.1 This figure raises doubts about whether economic development on a large scale, to which Brazil aspires, is reachable. Second, whatever the association between demographic and economic growth at the macrolevel, certain costs become apparent at the regional and individual levels. In Brazil as in many other countries, familial poverty is exacerbated by the proliferation of offspring. Children from large,

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poor families are unlikely to benefit from as many opportunities as those provided in smaller families even if the poverty of the family unit is alleviated to some degree, and for some time, by the participation of its members in the work force. Upper-class and middle-class Brazilians have greater resources, and greater access to contraceptives, than do the poor.2 It was not until the mid-1970s, under the government of Gen. Ernesto Geisel, that the pronatalist policies of the Brazilian regime were reconsidered in light of widespread and increasing marginalization in both rural and urban areas. Skepticism about the capacity of the economy to maintain high rates of growth in the face of global recession provided further impetus to revisions of population policy.3 Modifications in the pronatalism of earlier times were gradual, and it is worth reviewing the main features of the process.4 The first step was taken at the World Population Conference in Bucharest in 1974. While rejecting the claim that Brazil might be afflicted by a population explosion or that population growth by itself might jeopardize economic development, the Brazilian government explicitly recognized the right of couples to make free decisions about the number of children they wanted. It also suggested that the public authorities might provide informational assistance to families who would otherwise not be able to obtain such help.5 The statement delivered at Bucharest by the Brazilian delegation can hardly be called antinatalist. It maintained the essentially laissez-faire position of previous governments in Brazil, hinting only that the government might intervene to democratize (a word that was soon to enjoy considerable vogue) the access to information related to family planning. No public funds were committed for this purpose, and it was plain that the goal of limiting population was not to be given priority. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the Bucharest statement was what it did not do. It did not envision anything like an official ban on the sale of contraceptives, a policy that Argentina adopted under the presidency of the widow of Juan Perón. Three years later, in 1977, the Ministry of Health announced a program of maternal and child care directed, in its first stages, at the prevention of high-risk pregnancies.6 The program was designed to reach some fifty thousand women in four years, a rather modest goal. The ministry emphasized that the program had nothing to do with birth control, even though the prevention of high-risk pregnancies might necessitate the use of contraceptives. Family planning, which should not be confused with demographic control, is a valid instrument for promoting maternal and infant

4 • OVERVIEW

health. Its objective is not to reduce natality but rather to guarantee healthy offspring by taking care of the mother's physical condition. . . . Only couples are competent to plan the growth of their families, and any actions that attempt directly or indirectly to impose certain behaviors would imply a violation of the freedom of choice—a freedom which the Brazilian government has already recognized, at the Bucharest conference, as belonging to individual couples.7 By 1980, as the economy deteriorated further, the government had drawn up a family planning program of larger dimensions. "No one is against population growth and the occupation of our national territory," declared the minister of social welfare. "What we do not want is that the price for this should be 700 children dead out of every 1,000 born, as happens in the region of Gameleira in Pernambuco." 8 In partial deference to the Church, the plan stressed the use of "natural" (for example, the Billings method) and "mechanical" devices, such as the diaphragm. The dissemination of birth control pills ("chemical" means) was not ruled out, but it was to be conducted only "in certain cases, under medical supervision." The government also envisioned the possibility of underwriting voluntary sterilizations. The entire project, to be initiated in 1981, would cost an estimated 1.8 billion dollars over a fiveyear period.9 Consultations about the plan continued as Brazil prepared for the visit of Pope John Paul II in July 1980. In retrospect, the factors contributing to these policy changes are not difficult to make out. Certainly by the mid-1970s, many of the costs of the full-speed-ahead developmentalism of the late sixties and early seventies had become unmistakable. Infant mortality, the most dramatic sign of the neglect of basic public services, actually increased in São Paulo, the most industrially advanced region of the country.10 Illegal abortions, many of them performed unprofessionally and under dangerous conditions, were also common.11 The number of abandoned children was apparently on the increase in the large cities. The publicity given to these facts, together with growing alarm at the number of assaults and other violent crimes evident in the middle-class, as well as poorer, sections of Rio and São Paulo,12 created a prima facie case for the commitment of public funds to health care and at least raised the question of whether the system could absorb unlimited population growth (specifically, substantial cityward migration) without serious disruption. Analyses of the 1970 census, however, as well as of subsequent surveys, supported what many observers had suspected for some time: the rate of increase of the Brazilian population was beginning to slow down.13

5

Even more remarkable, while the decline was concentrated in the comparatively industrialized regions, it was found to be taking place at a faster rate among the deprived than among the better-off sectors of the populace, for reasons traceable to the abject poverty in which the urban masses found themselves.14 Although this development did not by itself argue for the adoption of antinatalist measures, neither did it square with the expectation that the spread or trickling down of development would reduce the birth rate, and it reinforced the conviction among many within and outside the government that more than token gestures had to be made with respect to the impoverishment of the Brazilian people. In any event, the estimated net annual growth rate of the population (2.4 percent) is still considerable, given the absolute size of the population. These mixed signals, together with doubts about the capacity of the economy as it enters the 1980s, are largely responsible for the dual concern in Brazil with health care (in particular, with reducing the rate of infant mortality) and with offering a modicum of family planning assistance to those who cannot obtain it. While the use to which it may be put remains uncertain, the scope of the government's maternal-child health program is potentially enormous, reaching a clientele that makes up over 70 percent of the entire population.15 A similar uncertainty, compounded by the vagaries of the period of political opening, marks the ambitious family planning program of the government. Our study does not focus on the structural tradeoffs between economic and demographic growth in Brazil, in part because these questions have been treated, though hardly settled, elsewhere.16 Instead, we concentrate on the politics of population policy in Brazil. Our materials are drawn from a dual survey, based on personal interviews conducted in 1972-73, of leaders in the economic, social, and political spheres of Brazilian society and of those in the population 18 years and older who were resident in southeast Brazil, where over half of the national population lives. Before we outline the plan of the study and its major themes, however, we should describe the institutional and social setting within which the debate on population policy has taken place in Brazil. Four aspects of this setting are especially important. One concerns the position of the Catholic Church, in particular the shifts in its position that have occurred during the sixties and seventies. Another has to do with the nature of the population debate as it is conducted by elites of various ideological persuasions. Third, and perhaps most obvious for all its implications with regard to economic change in the aggregate, it is women who bear the most im-

6 • OVERVIEW

mediate and tangible effects of population policy in Brazil and who, at the same time, are almost wholly without a voice at the elite level. The extent to which they favor family planning and governmental promotion of such activities, in light of the traditionally close link between sex roles and religious devotion in Latin societies, is another question. It is one that we shall pursue in detail. The fourth aspect involves recognition of the fact that the Brazilian political system is authoritarian. The cruder forms of censorship and repression have been abandoned, but autonomous interests still have enormous difficulty in making themselves heard in consequential policy matters. This fact raises the issue of the feasibility of translating reformist impulses, on the part of elites as well as the mass public, into effective political influence. The problem is not so stark as would be the pitting of elite reluctance against a popular antinatalist consensus. The elites themselves are divided on the issue, public opinion is also mixed, and Brazilian authoritarianism, at least as far back as its populist incarnation during the thirties and forties, has typically exhibited a paternalistic, social welfare strain; rarely has it been based on force alone. The difficulty involves understanding the obstacles to change in population policy under conditions in which public input is minimal and in which the meliorative urges of the elites, even if these urges are genuine and even if the power at their disposal is great, are constricted by the imperative of capital accumulation to which many of them are committed.

THE POLITICAL CONTEXT OF POPULATION POLICY IN BRAZIL The Role of the Catholic Church The Church's position on population policy in Brazil has been neither monolithic nor unchanging. Officially, the episcopate adheres to the teachings set forth by Pope Paul VI in Humanae Vitae—that is, to the condemnation of "artificial" methods of contraception and of the intervention of the state in the regulation of birth. Recent declarations by Pope John Paul II have reiterated the sexual moralism of the Church. In fact, however, there has been widespread disagreement with papal teaching among both the clergy and the laity. Brazilian theologians have questioned the paradoxical emphasis, found in Humanae Vitae, on conjugal love and responsible parenthood, on the one hand, and the simultaneous proscription of effective contraceptive methods on the other. Rather than dwell on this side of Church doctrine, a number of bishops and priests have chosen to stress another, potentially more liberal pro-

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clamation, also issued at Vatican II, which affirms the right to the free exercise of conscience in matters of religious belief and practice that affect family planning decisions among married couples.17 Catholic dogma concerning the regulation of birth remains essentially pronatalist. Behavior conducive to greater natality may be encouraged by the Church in a variety of ways: first, through the prohibition of most methods of contraception except cyclical abstinence; second, through instruction about the virtues of reproduction and of large families; and, third, through the reinforcement of a traditional moral code regarding sex roles and sexuality.18 Theology, in the strict doctrinal sense, is probably not the primary source of whatever religious influence the Church enjoys at the nonelite level. Instead, the Church's teaching more likely interacts with, and reinforces, the existing attitudes of social groups for whom high fertility is advantageous or acceptable, in the sense that it legitimizes social norms about the range of desirable family size.19 This teaching, in schematic form, is the pastoral approach of the Church to family planning. The problem for the Church in Brazil is that such a doctrine is extremely difficult to implement and enforce. Consequently, the direct impact of Catholic doctrine on fertility tends to be marginal. Although observance of the Church's teaching varies widely among Catholics according to their degree of religiosity, a very high proportion of Catholics in Brazil and in other Latin American countries routinely resort to forbidden methods of contraception, including sterilization and abortion.20 In Brazil, there are about twelve thousand priests to minister to a population of over 100 million, and half of these priests are foreigners.21 Furthermore, many Catholics-in-name adhere to a popular religiosity that bears little resemblance to Roman Catholicism, at least in its theological purity.22 Politically, however, the Catholic Church in Brazil wields power in excess of its religious influence on the populace. Brazilian governments have historically granted the Church a wide range of privileges, as if Catholicism were de facto the official religion of the country. Lacking resources to increase its influence through evangelization, the Church has relied on elite connections to combat the relaxation of restrictions on divorce and abortion and to delay public action regarding family planning.23 In situations where the Church cannot impose the more pronatalist aspects of its doctrine, even if it wanted to, resistance to the possible intervention into family life of any other agency—in particular, of the public authorities—provides an alternative means of warding off antinatalist programs. In this case, the grounds of opposition shift from the positive avowal of procreation as a means toward the good life, in either material or spiritual terms, and from the outright prohibition of antinatalist information and

8 • OVERVIEW

measures toward the defense of the integrity of the family and especially of its autonomy from the state. Even Catholics who disregard the harsher aspects of the Church's pronatalism may not be sympathetic to the intervention of the state in the regulation of fertility. To be sure, the Church does not enjoy veto power on any of these matters, as the successful midseventies movement to legalize divorce, against the strong objections of the Church, indicates. Nevertheless, the Church is an important element in coalition formation on a variety of issues that concern powerful actors in Brazil. The government is usually reluctant to offend the Church or to lose it as a potentially important ally. Perhaps the best indicator of the latent power of the bishops is the fact that, among the corporate bodies that count in authoritarian Brazil, the Church is one of the few that has been able to criticize openly and indeed confront the public authorities.24 Thus, the relations between the government and the bishops move from hostility to détente, depending on the issues. While the bishops condemned the government-backed legalization of divorce and are opposed to the current movement on the part of the opposition forces to legalize abortion, they also condoned the anticommunism of the 1964 military takeover, at least in its early stages. The bishops themselves are also divided internally on social and political, if not moral, issues. Some members of the National Conference of Brazilian Bishops (CNBB) are fearful of what they consider the fellow travelling of their colleagues who support liberation theology and who sympathize with the demands of urban and agricultural laborers. Although the internal factionalism of the CNBB is difficult to document, the onset of the 1980s has witnessed a tenuous bargain between conservative and progressive strains within the Church. In exchange for the silence of the conservatives regarding the involvement of certain bishops in workingclass politics, the progressives have apparently acquiesced in a campaign against not only initiatives favoring abortion, but also the government's own inclination to underwrite a national program of family planning.25 The Nature of the Population Debate It is not our objective here to rehearse the entire debate over population policy in Brazil. Summaries of the main lines of the debate at the elite level have been published elsewhere, and Chapter 2 of this book covers variation in opinion across a greater range of prominent Brazilians than has been presented previously.26 Nevertheless, two broad features of the population debate in Brazil merit special attention. First, the controversy over population planning is peculiar in Brazil because it is virtually impossible to characterize opposing views on the is-

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sue as being distinctively of the political left or right. On the average, political conservatives are just as likely to take pronatalist or antinatalist positions as their more progressive colleagues, so that it is tenuous to identify a presumed neo-Malthusianism with social and economic reaction.27 The fact that opinions about population policy have at most a weak connection with preferences on other issues does not imply that policy options in this area are conflict free. At least outside of Brazil, cleavages based on regional, ethnic, religious, and linguistic differences are known to be extraordinarily volatile, even if they bear no direct relation to class antagonisms.28 Among Brazilian elites, opinions have hardened on the issues involved in population planning to the extent that the question is defined from a long-run or aggregate perspective, particularly when population planning is viewed as an imposition from the outside—that is, as a problem that evokes the presumably self-serving interests of the population establishment in advanced industrial societies to the exclusion of a concern with questions of structural change, social reform, and national power.29 Just as the Brazilian government has until recently favored a generally laissez-faire policy that is supposed to leave family planning decisions to the discretion of individuals, so too do almost all sectors of the elite draw a line against any perceived attempt on the part of foreign interests to force the issue.30 As the problem is disaggregated—that is, as it is viewed as a series of different measures with a social service component that may be relevant to the concrete problems of specific regions and individual families—the issue tends to become less polarized, and debate takes on a more conciliatory tone. Even when the polemic is cast at the collective or national level, arguments on principle often give way to reasoning by way of accounting. The proposition that governmental investment in family planning is simply inefficient, given the presumed tendency for economic development to drive down the birthrate, typifies this sort of argument. A similar position, with a leftist cast, holds that most population policy measures are cosmetic diversions from the more profound structural problems that characterize the increasingly capital-intensive Brazilian economic model. In this view, antinatalist programs are not axiomatically wrong; rather, they tend to be seen as largely irrelevant to the presumably more fundamental obstacles to equitable growth. A second characteristic of the population debate in Brazil is that the topic is not important for most elites to begin with. It is very much a side issue even for the antinatalists.31 A great part of the analytical chapters in this book will be devoted to understanding the implications of the low priority accorded population planning by the elites. For now, the central point is that the lack of impor-

10 • OVERVIEW

tance attributed to the issue adds to its ambiguity. On the one hand, the generally low ranking of population planning on the policy agenda of the elites may not be encouraging to convinced antinatalists. On the other hand, with a few exceptions, it is difficult to find among the Brazilian elite persons who might be called doctrinaire, fully committed pronatalists.32 The typical pronatalist position can be termed pronatalism by default, or laissez-faire. It does not involve a wholesale condemnation of family planning or even of certain government measures that might facilitate birth control. We stress the low priority of population planning among Brazilian elites mainly to highlight the relativity of the presumed explosive nature of the issue. Inferential myopia may set in if the issue is viewed in isolation. It is essential to remember that the elites are much more concerned about other problems—about foreign investment, income redistribution, and so forth—and that some of these problems are quite divisive indeed. Thus, in order to gain perspective on the nature of the population debate in Brazil, we shall have to situate opinions on the issue within the broader context of elite policy differences on several developmental issues. Family Planning as a Women's Issue We have suggested that a striking feature of elite opposition to government-sponsored family planning is that it tends to become less intransigent the more the issue is viewed from a microperspective. Many elites who object to population planning on a wide scale are willing to entertain the possibility of government involvement at the local level, for example. The shift in perspective to the less than global is carried even further by the nonelite respondents. There is a definite tendency for ordinary Brazilians to view birth control as a pressing concern insofar as it bears directly on their family situations. While it would be erroneous to conclude that most Brazilians define the issue in entirely personalistic, immediate terms, on the whole they are not inclined to consider it as an abstract problem of national policy.33 Among Brazilian women, however, family planning is particularly central as a concrete, pressing issue. The risks of conception fall disproportionately on women and the demand for access to contraceptive methods thus expresses women's need to gain control over their sexual and reproductive behavior.34 Women do not necessarily constitute a uniformly antinatalist bloc in Brazil. As we shall see, the large majority of female respondents support government-sponsored antinatalist measures, but certain properties associated with the female condition in Brazil may militate against a desire to control fertility and family size. For example, women tend to be somewhat more religious and somewhat less educated

11

than men. Religiosity in particular may act as a brake against receptivity to the use of contraceptive methods. Thus, a crucial stage in our analysis will involve the determination of how gender roles influence attitudes towards family planning, over and above the presumably countervailing effects of religiosity, lack of education, and so on.35 The fact that birth control is very much a women's issue in Brazil by itself creates a latent conflict between elite and public opinion. There are at least two routes through which the preferences of the public might find their way into the elite policy debate. One, elites may consciously try to gauge the prevailing sentiment of the population on salient issues and to take into account the expressed wishes of the public, regardless of whether they have received an electoral mandate to do so. Alternatively, elites may be so "typical" of the public that in following their own inclinations they actually advance the public's wishes, even when they take no cognizance of public opinion. Women's views are likely to go unheeded on both counts. Being an unorganized majority, women are not in an advantageous position to promote their demands. Furthermore, the elites are all males; in addition, they are comparatively elderly. This demographic difference does not, of course, guarantee that the elites will be thoroughly unrepresentative in their policy views. The virtual absence of women at the peak of the Brazilian establishment, however, is hardly likely to be conducive to the promotion of women's specific interests. For now, the message is a simple one. The debate over population policy in Brazil has been conducted almost entirely without popular input. This fact is bound to limit elite perspectives on the issue. More important, it excludes from a fair hearing those who are most affected by pronatalist or antinatalist policies—namely, Brazilian women. The Authoritarian Policy Framework The lack of influence by women on an issue, like family planning, that touches them directly is a special instance of the exclusionary nature of Brazilian authoritarianism. Latin American polities have not generally been noted for their receptivity to mass initiatives and involvement in public affairs.36 For our purposes, the question becomes: how does this bias affect population policy in Brazil? We have indicated that a substantial discrepancy exists between elite and nonelite opinion on the issue, with the latter assigning it on the average more priority than the former. A natural inference would therefore appear to be that antinatalist measures do not stand much chance of serious consideration in Brazil. Several factors, however, suggest that such an interpretation needs to

12 • OVERVIEW

be qualified. The most obvious is that, regardless of whether or not it has responded directly to public demand, the government has moved much closer to an antinatalist position than it was during the early seventies; "prevailing conditions have changed." 37 Even though a strong correlation may be expected between the two, the question of the government's actual performance in facilitating access to family planning services, and to social services in general, is logically separate from the question of its responsiveness to mass opinion.38 While it is plain that government policies have served to aggravate already deplorable conditions in several areas—most notably, with respect to the size distribution of income, at least through the early seventies—in other areas the record cannot be interpreted simply as an invidious tradeoff between the imperative of accumulation and postponed distribution. Until quite recently, programs of preventive health care have fared poorly. At the same time, investment in remedial health services has grown. "Social security agencies," the World Bank reports, "have been established to provide curative health care, first in urban areas and more recently in rural areas. By 1975 almost 80 percent of the urban population and 40 to 60 percent of the rural population were so covered."39 Furthermore, since the midseventies, there has been movement in the direction of prevention-oriented, and perhaps more cost-effective, health care service. The most spectacular instance was the vaccination of over 80 million Brazilians against spinal meningitis during 1974-75, in less than ten months. The shift in official policy toward the provision of funds for family planning corresponds to a recognition of the perils of relying almost exclusively on the remedial approach.40 It also reflects a change in elite perceptions of the developmental environment and of the pressures made evident by rapid population increase in times of reduced economic growth. Somewhat ironically, the sizable sums spent on remedial health care have crystallized the tension between the harsh accumulation policies of the government and its sense that the social effects of a nearly exclusive focus on accumulation might be both economically inefficient, in the long run, and politically unwise. On the one hand, the direct effects of authoritarian taxation have been regressive. On the other hand, in spite, and to some extent because, of these measures, the bureaucracy charged with curative health care has swollen under military rule. This contradictory compromise between accumulation and distribution may have been feasible under conditions of double-digit aggregate growth, but it leads to bankruptcy when the economy falters, as it has since the midseventies. The cautious movement of the Brazilian government toward greater priority for preventive health care can be understood,

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in part, as a function of the potential diminishing returns of the virtual monopoly accorded to curative treatment.41 Even if a straightforward zero-sum relation cannot be posited between the accumulative and the distributive policies of the government, measures of both kinds have been promulgated from the top down. Consultation may be broader during the current period of political opening than it was from 1964 to 1974. Nevertheless, severe restrictions, or the threat of them, have continued to dampen the expression of organized, autonomous interests. One reason why the government can look with favor on the milder forms of publicly sponsored family planning, and why elements of the Church can look the other way, is that the policies under serious consideration do not challenge their institutional or moral authority. The impetus behind wider access to family planning facilities has, at least implicitly, democratic features. Yet, even if the fulfillment of such programs commits the government to substantial expenditures, this does not constitute a rupture of the political order, since the measures involved can be construed as falling within the boundaries of paternalistic authoritarianism. The extension of social rights may proceed for some time as political liberties remain in abeyance.42 The advocacy of more radical measures of birth control—specifically, induced abortion—poses a more serious threat, however. No member of the government in an official capacity, much less any bishop, has even flirted with this policy option; its elite proponents belong to the political opposition and are outside the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Of course, the line demarcating reformist and confrontational alternatives in matters of population policy in Brazil is not entirely clear-cut. Still, support for the legalization of induced abortion is more politically charged than the promulgation of the "natural," "mechanical," and "chemical" methods discussed earlier in this chapter.43 In addition, if the frequency of premeditated abortion by Brazilian women approaches anything like available estimates, the abortion controversy cannot be dismissed as an intraelite debate without deeper political consequences. More generally, we are interested in the potential for conflict of population issues, relative to the polarization of other issues.44 One of our principal arguments is that population issues in Brazil tend to be less divisive than those which customarily separate the left and the right, even though the polemic surrounding abortion is more heated than the debate over most other birth control alternatives. This focus serves to emphasize the obvious but important fact that considerable bargaining and shifts of policy are possible and even common in an authoritarian situation.45 Substantial movement toward public investment in family planning may occur

14 • OVERVIEW

even if the wording of policy decisions repeats the pronatalist and laissezfaire nostrums of the past. What the elites rule out are programs involving blatant coercion—for example, enforced or semicoerced sterilization after the fashion of the Indian government under Indira Gandhi. This decision leaves quite a bit of room for change.46 On the other hand, while our approach is comparative in the sense that we compare elite and mass opinions on a variety of issues so as to set opinions on population policy in context, we give less attention to the comparative implications of population policy in the cross-national sense. One reason is that the sheer size of Brazil adds to the substantive significance of what is, in effect, a case study. Another is that the data needed for systematic cross-national comparisons of elite and mass opinion on population issues are extremely hard to come by.47 Hence, our study is not comparative in a rigorous, point-for-point way. Nevertheless, after presenting the analysis of the Brazilian materials, we will be able to make some informed guesses about their broader implications.

PRINCIPAL THEMES Our study deals with five aspects of elite and public opinion: 1. Differences between elite and public preferences regarding population policy, with emphasis on variable definitions of the issues as well as on quantitative discrepancies between the two levels; 2. Differences both within and between elite and nonelite strata regarding the sheer priority given to population planning; 3. Perceived links between attitudes about population planning and other developmental issues—for example, income redistribution, foreign investment, and the like; 4. Attitudes about alternative and complementary mechanisms of population planning among elites; and 5. Perceptions of various elite groups regarding the policy preferences of other elites and the preferences of the public. The analytical themes have intuitive importance. Population policy, like agrarian reform and foreign investment, is a composite issue, a bundle of controversies. As such, it is susceptible to multiple definitions, ranging from the collective (the consequences of population growth for national power) to the individual ("I have too many children and I cannot support them"). 48 Policy positions may also differ across a scale of options: for example, from favorable views on the use of contraceptives to negative attitudes regarding abortion. Similarly, opinions with respect to population planning may vary not

15

only from one subissue to another but also among social strata—in particular, between elites and nonelites. It is conceivable, for example, that those who take a fairly liberal position on the issue may perceive others, elites or nonelites, as retrograde in the matter. To the extent that such perceptions are common among elites, who by definition wield power, they may have policy consequences. Let us examine these themes in greater detail, and suggest how they are interconnected. Elite versus Mass Opinion Population questions have been customarily nonissues in Brazil. Certainly, during the presidency of General Emílio Garrastazú Médici (1969-74), when our field work was carried out, the antinatahst exhortations of the World Bank were not front page news. While the government did not actively discourage the use of contraceptives and did not prohibit the provision of family planning information to those in need of it and while some influential public figures advocated antinatahst measures, the official laissez-faire policy that was carried to the 1974 World Population Conference at Bucharest relegated publicly sponsored intervention in matters associated with family size to a secondary position. Opinions about birth control and allied issues among the public at large are another question, however. Until quite recently, little information has been available about the thinking of ordinary Brazilians on this controversy. The absence of knowledge about public opinion in Brazil is not, of course, unique to population issues. Under the post-1964 authoritarian regime, policy makers have been reluctant to accede to popular demands, especially if they bear directly on the underpinnings of the system—for example, on wage policies. Still, even if the rulers of Brazil feel under no special obligation to represent the public in classical democratic fashion, the few surveys that have been conducted in Brazil during the recent period indicate a growing receptivity to family planning practices among the population.49 The Brazilian economic model has tended to augment social inequities, so that vast portions of the population remain ignorant of family planning mechanisms. Nevertheless, a popular shift in favor of family planning does appear to have taken place in Brazil at the mass level, and it shows no sign of abating. That some gap should emerge between elite and mass opinion in Brazil is not surprising. Nevertheless, it is useful to spell out the nonobvious implications of this tendency. First, as we have suggested, there is no guarantee that elites and nonelites view population questions from the same or even similar perspec-

16 • OVERVIEW

tives. Many of the differences in opinion between them can probably be understood as a function of discrepant frames of reference. In general, elites tend to approach population questions in aggregate, although not completely abstract, terms. Not that they ignore individual, familial, and moral considerations, rather, in addition to these factors, they often make explicit connections between such elements and collective results—for example, between growth rates in urban areas and increased demands for housing. In the public, links of this sort tend to be weaker. For the man, and especially the woman, in the street, the population may not have tremendous urgency in principle but it does tend to assume significance if one's children cannot be raised properly or if they are thought to act as a drag on a couple's life chances. It is not the case that ordinary Brazilians fail to see the broader repercussions of their individual decisions and predicaments. Indeed, compared to the prevailing lack of information about issues of a more purely political nature, such as subversion or the right of habeas corpus, familiarity with population-related issues is fairly widespread among the public, precisely because these issues can be translated into the concerns of everyday life. Still, there is an overall tendency for elites to see more of the ramifications of population-related decisions. This tendency is one of the factors that, in turn, may work to make them more ambivalent and cautious with regard to population planning. Second, the broad distinction between the frames of reference common among elites and nonelites should not obscure the fact that at both levels multiple definitions of the population problem are present. Elites tend to accentuate the public, nonelites the private side of the issues; but this tendency is hardly an ironclad law. Perhaps more than any other major issue, population planning evokes public and private norms that are extremely difficult to reconcile. Its strongly moral and clearly collective implications make the bundle of issues peculiar, relative to controversies that fall more plainly on the left or the right. Let us set aside for the moment the question of how this tension operates at the elite level and consider how it may be expressed among the public. We have mentioned that there is a tendency among ordinary Brazilians to perceive the issue as a personal problem or at least as more immediate than presumably remote debates over foreign investment, partisan politics, and the like. To the extent that this is so, attitudes on the issue may be difficult to predict as a simple function of socioeconomic indicators. This statement does not mean that the major determinants of fertility-related attitudes operate randomly; rather, it suggests that such attitudes are affected by norms and values that are difficult to assess by such crude proxies as socioeconomic status.

17

A third property of fertility-related issues deserves mention insofar as it may affect differences between elite and public opinions. We are less interested in developing models of fertility preferences and practices than in understanding the determinants of opinion about the role of the government in family planning. Although the two sets of concerns are connected, attitudes about family planning as a matter between couples and attitudes about what the government should do about it are, at least in principle, separable. For example, it is not really paradoxical that elites and upper-class Brazilians who are sympathetic to birth control as family planning may oppose population planning in the aggregate, if such a policy is looked upon as an unwarranted intrusion on the part of the state or if it implies a commitment of resources to the mass of the population that otherwise enlightened strata are unwilling to make. Conversely, lower-class Brazilians may have fewer scruples about "government meddling" in family planning, especially insofar as they perceive such a policy as an addition to badly needed welfare services, at the same time that they may recoil from family planning for traditional religious reasons that do not trouble the generally more secularized upper classes. In summary, population and family planning policy has both public and private ramifications and is therefore fraught with ambiguity. To the extent that elites and the public tend to emphasize one or another dimension of this set of issues, their preferences are liable to differ. Raising the possibility that the government may take an active role in family planning adds to the complexity of the issue. It is the politics of the issue—the government's role in family planning—that is the focus of our study. The Priority of Population Issues We have suggested that for large portions of the Brazilian public family planning is a bread-and-butter issue, at the same time that it has been something of a nonissue in elite circles and in the media. This difference in salience bears stressing, for, to a degree, it is distinct from the question of preferences for and against the issue. The distribution of opinion on a controversy like family planning is of interest in itself, especially as this distribution varies among social strata. Such variation, however, should not lead us to ignore what can be considered a prior question: namely, how important the issue is thought to be in the first place. Neither the Brazilian elite nor the Brazilian public forms a homogeneous bloc regarding population policy, and there exist some intricate variations within the two broad collectivities. Yet what is probably more dramatic is the wide discrepancy between them regarding the sheer importance of population-related issues.

18 • OVERVIEW

The fact is that family planning ranks low on the elite agenda, even on the agenda of elites who take a generally antinatalist stance. On the mass side, by contrast, a latent demand for family planning and allied services clearly exists in Brazil. Certainly such issues tend to have greater salience in the popular mind than more explicitly political concerns. This combination of factors suggests that population issues may be less volatile, and more susceptible to negotiation, than the polemical literature indicates. Family planning is seen by many Brazilians as a matter of welfare policy rather than as a confrontational issue involving the political nature of the regime. The low priority of population issues among the elites is something of a mixed blessing. While the back-burner position of these issues means that they are far from consuming the attention of the elites, it also implies that they are neither very conflict ridden nor conducive to the cultivation of intransigent, immobile opinions on either side. The Relation of Population Policy to Other Issues Our stress on determining the importance attributed to population policy relative to other issues is designed to establish the political context of the issue, particularly its ranking on the elite agenda. Another feature of population policy, the perceived relations between preferences on population policy and positions on other issues of national importance, is equally crucial to understanding its political context. The question of perceived links is more important at the elite than at the mass level. Among the general populace in countries with low rates of literacy and politicization and without extensive flows of information, conceptual sophistication about the relations between various policy issues is rare. This is not to suggest that the views of most Brazilians on population policy are totally unrelated to their positions on other issues, but only that these links are unlikely to be very elaborate or tight.50 The question then becomes: how and to what extent are elite views on population policy integrated into their developmental models? What are the perceived links between preferences on this issue and other issues of national policy? At least two different answers to this question can be imagined. One is that elite opinions on population policy are rather simply tied in with preferences on other developmental controversies so that a straightforward, progressive-conservative continuum can be discerned. This answer would mean that the pronatalist or antinatalist positions of the elites are closely associated with their preferences on other issues, such as income redistribution and agrarian reform. The second answer is the one we think more realistic. Preferences regarding population policy cannot usually be located along the classic leftto-right spectrum. In Latin America, conservatives and Marxists may take

19

opposite positions and assign quite different priorities to wage policy, for example, yet at the same time converge in their opposition to antinatalist policies. Thus, elite attitudes with respect to population policy may be linked to options on other economic, social, and political issues without there being a characteristic or uniform connection across the elites as a whole. One reason why attitudes about population planning do not fit snugly on a left-right continuum is that the issue is actually a package of controversies, admitting a variety of options. The fact that population policy is also loaded with public and private considerations that may work at crosspurposes tends to separate it further from the vocabulary in which alternative positions can be defined sharply as progressive or conservative. Mechanisms of Population Planning We have stressed that the population question is not a unitary problem but rather a set of issues with a variety of policy alternatives. Thus, while many Brazilian elites are willing to admit to the existence of a population problem, they do not agree about desirable solutions. For example, some may approve of a program of sex education in schools; others may favor government-funded distribution of contraceptives; still others may promote government provision of elective abortion services. Once the adamant pronatalists are set aside, a rather broad spectrum of policy options can be imagined, ranging from the merely permissive to the quasicoercive. The fact that these options are fairly specific does not render the investigation of opinions about them a merely technical exercise. On the contrary, since we take into account the preferences of multiple elite sectors, from bishops to businessmen, a primary question is whether any workable consensus can be detected at all. The distribution of opinion regarding specific policy instruments helps us define with some precision what Brazilian elites tend to consider a minimally acceptable program of population planning. Elite Perceptions So far we have outlined four major facets of attitudes toward family planning: variable definitions of the issue, the relative salience of the issue, the connection (or lack of connection) between preferences on the issue and opinions on other controversies related to the development of Brazil, and the variety of opinions about specific policies falling under the general rubric of population planning. One final step remains to be taken in our analysis of mass and elite attitudes: an investigation not of attitudes but rather of attitudes about at-

20 • OVERVIEW

titudes—that is, of the attributions made by the various elite groups about the orientations of others regarding population planning. Two considerations prompt our investigation of these second-order attitudes. First, there is a real question about the extent of pluralistic ignorance surrounding population policy, as well as other issues, in Brazil. Except in the most simplistic and small-scale of polities, the assumption that elites accurately perceive opinions outside their own spheres of competence is more convenient than realistic. Although we can compare the distribution of elite and public opinion, this operation by itself tells us nothing directly about the degree to which groups whose opinions happen to coincide are in fact aware of their agreement. Nor does it enable us to uncover the converse phenomenon of false consensus—that is, the tendency for groups who think themselves in accord to hold discrepant views. The analysis of perceptual distortion thus captures an important feature of the politics of policy formation in any society with a fair degree of differentiation among multiple actors. It is particularly useful in getting us beyond conventional treatments of public (and elite) opinion as the sum of individual preferences. Second, because the elites are powerful, their perceptions, accurate and otherwise, may have political consequences. The attributions that the elites make about the opinions of others constitute an important element of the policy environment. Thus, the possibility that elites under conditions of imperfect information may fall prey to stereotyping, projection, and other sorts of misunderstanding is not merely a psychological oddity: their perceptions constitute a construction of reality that is, in part, of their own making and that may affect what they actually do or fail to do. The attempts by the elites to impose meaning on a fragmentary political environment are likely, as we shall see, to lead to a biased but comprehensible vision of "what is out there." More specifically, the elites are engaged in a two-way process of perception and interpretation with regard to a policy issue like family planning. On the one hand, it is reasonable to suppose that they have some idea, however dim, of public opinion on the issue, even if they do not feel bound to reflect the demands that such opinions represent. Furthermore, the elites try to keep themselves informed of the policy positions of one another. While such cross-checking need not entail a systematic process of consultation, it would be politically inept for elites to ignore the preferences of groups who might be in a position to block their own policy initiatives. One elite estate that must somehow be dealt with in the formulation of population policy in Brazil is, of course, the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

21

In brief, the analysis of elite perceptions enables us to fill a significant gap in studies that use interview materials to understand the context of policy formulation. Our major supposition is that, even if the elites do not consider themselves bound to represent anything except their own interests in matters of political controversy, they are also involved in a process of anticipating the reactions to their policy positions from those who also have a stake in the issues under debate.

THE NATURE OF THE EVIDENCE The Samples Two cross-sectional surveys provide the evidence on which our analysis is based. Detailed documentation of both surveys may be found in the appendices. For now, it is useful to sketch in the basic features of the surveys, both of which were launched in July 1972 and concluded in June 1973. The design of the mass survey is straightforward. It includes 1,314 individuals 18 years of age and older selected by multistage probability sampling methods from six states of Southeast Brazil: Guanabara, Rio de Janeiro (at that time separate entities), Minas Gerais, Espírito Santo, Rio Grande do Sul, and São Paulo. The overall response rate was 86 percent and the results were weighted to compensate for nonresponse. The sample, then, is not national in scope, even though it represents over 50 percent of the national adult population. Strictly speaking, inferences cannot be made about "Brazilians" in general. An obvious question is whether the concentration of the survey in the Southeast, which is more industrialized and urbanized than the rest of the country, biases our findings against the rural and presumably more traditional areas. This possible distortion turns out to be minor. With the exception of Guanabara, all of the states included in the sample have urban and rural localities defined by the Brazilian census. We searched for differences between these areas with respect to opinions on family planning. No significant difference emerged. We then obtained breakdowns of the proportions in urban and rural areas in the remaining states and territories and derived simulated results to estimate possible variations in opinion in these areas.51 Again, differences turned out to be trivial.52 The elite sample is more complex. The 269 respondents are drawn from six different groups: (a) top civil servants, including directors of major state-owned enterprises (total respondents, 56); (b) senators and national deputies of the government (ARENA) and opposition (MDB) parties (47); (c) executive officers of the largest 500 nonfinancial companies

22 • OVERVIEW

and of the largest 200 banks, together with the heads of the largest business associations in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (84); (d) presidents of the industrial and commercial labor confederations, including the heads of the largest labor syndicates (locals)53 in metropolitan Rio and São Paulo (53); (e) bishops (11); (f) professionals—a category that includes editorial writers for the leading metropolitan dailies as well as officers of organizations in the liberal professions (18). The principal characteristics and limitations of the sample can be summarized as follows: First, although some retired military officers appear among the top civil servants, there is no sample of the active military command as such.54 Second, sampling procedures varied with the internal structure of the elite groups. For some groups, such as the industrial and financial, hierarchies by size can be discerned fairly clearly; size was measured by liquid assets for the largest 500 individual firms and by deposits for the largest 200 banks. Cutoff points defining the universe to be sampled in the civil service are more problematic. They are obscured by the marked power differences between ministries (the Ministry of Finance, for example, being closer to the center of the action than the Ministry of Health) and by the occasional incomparability of similar-sounding job classifications, among other factors. We settled on the rank of "national institute director" as the threshold level in order to restrict the government sample to the higher reaches of the executives and the judiciary (ministers and secretariesgeneral of the ministries, supreme court judges, and executive officers of public companies). The overall response rate was 41 percent, with considerable variation among the elite groups. The sample of the labor leaders is the most complete. Primarily because of their geographical dispersion, the bishops turned out to be the least accessible of the elites. Yet, on balance, the 269 interviews constitute the closest approximation to date of a representative sample of influential public figures from various sectors at the national level in Brazil. Validity of the Data While we collected a large quantity of interview materials, the sheer amount of evidence is less important than its quality, and it is appropriate to inquire whether responses gathered under authoritarian conditions are believable. The problems encountered in conducting interviews at the elite and nonelite levels are documented at length in the appendices. Here it suffices to summarize the ways in which the political environment may have affected the validity of the responses we obtained. Among elites, access is always difficult, even in nonauthoritarian cir-

23

cumstances. Across the elite sectors within which we did construct samples, however, there is no evidence that response rates differ because of variable sensitivity to political considerations. What causes the relative frequency of interviews obtained to vary from sector to sector is primarily the fact that certain elite sectors, like the businessmen and the civil servants, are far busier than others or that some, like the bishops, are geographically removed from the three urban centers (Rio, São Paulo, and Brasilia) where the field work for the elite study was conducted. One other potential difficulty has to be faced. It is conceivable that for reasons of discretion, the elites we did succeed in interviewing may have shaded their responses toward the safe side—that is, in a conservative direction. It turns out that this distortion is not a problem with regard to the policy areas examined in the present study. Birth control, divorce, and the like are somewhat controversial but not forbidden topics. Where we did pick up a slight tendency toward cautious responses was with questions tapping attitudes about truly sensitive issues, such as the participation of the military in politics. In short, we have no reason to believe that elite responses regarding the issues we are concerned with here are biased in any significant way. Eliciting meaningful responses from the general populace presents difficulties of another kind. At first glance, it is reasonable to suppose that many persons would have been extremely reluctant to answer questions about public issues in Brazil during the early seventies. As shown in Appendix II, however, the main factor accounting for nonresponse among ordinary Brazilians is far and away ignorance of the issues rather than fear. Authoritarian controls over the flow of information reinforce the effects of existing low levels of education and politicization in such a way that large proportions of the populace tend to be unaware of and uninterested in the controversies that form the basis for much interelite squabbling. One example of such an issue is internal subversion. The primary characteristic of nonelite opinion on this issue is less the distribution of preferences by itself than the huge incidence of "don't knows." These declarations of ignorance are not linked to estimates, made by the interviewers themselves, of political reticence among the respondents. Instead, the chief factor behind nonresponse in the mass sample is a lack of information about public affairs that is especially prominent among the less educated. In summary, there is no substantial distortion of nonelite opinion about fertility-related issues in Brazil. Unlike relatively distant controversies over political and macroeconomic policy, birth control is a meaningful topic to the vast majority of Brazilians, and they exhibit little hesitation in stating their opinions about the issue.55

24 • OVERVIEW

ORGANIZATION OF THE ANALYSIS In Chapter 2, the priorities and preferences of the major elite estates are examined. Our interest focuses on how the elites define the question of population policy; how important they feel it is, relative to other issues; the extent to which the elites integrate their views on family planning with their positions on other issues; and the selective emphases they place on specific policy mechanisms related to family planning. Throughout this chapter, the primary analytical factor is simply the division of opinion among the elite groups. Our objective is to determine the degree of interelite consensus and discord on population policy. Chapter 3 is devoted to the sample of southeast Brazil. Here, as in the previous chapter, we examine the priority attributed to governmentsponsored family planning activities, as well as the multiple definitions of the issue. We then turn to an analysis of the determinants of popular preferences regarding family planning. The influence of sex, age, education, and, in particular, religiosity and ideal family size are evaluated. This evaluation leads to a specification of possible interactions—for example, between age and gender—as they bear on opposition to and support for family planning. The purpose is to identify the specific demographic clusters—say, younger females—who exhibit distinctive opinion profiles on the issue. Also, in order to estimate the specificity of the determinants of attitudes toward family planning we compared the correlates of opinion regarding the legalization of divorce.56 Chapter 4 takes up elite perceptions. The objective is to compare the opinions that the elites impute to various sectors, including one another, with the independent measures of opinion examined in the previous chapters. Our special interest is in understanding the possible distortions that may afflict elite perceptions on the issue of family planning and in determining which elite groups may be particularly susceptible to stereotyping, projection, and the like. In turn, analysis of these patterns of misperception helps us understand the political environment of the decision-making process.

25

2 • Elite Opinion . . . about two million fertile women in Brazil use the pill or the loop, and statistics show that they belong almost exclusively to the upper and middle classes. There's the danger. The upper and middle classes are the source of the elite in any country. If they continue to limit the size of their families, and if the lower class keeps on multiplying at a rapid rate, we will have an imbalance, and the disappearance of the elite will become a reality.1 Population policy measures will have their greatest impact in the long run but, because of the dynamics built into demographic growth, they should be adopted as soon as possible. The choice that Brazil makes now will determine if, within a century, our population reaches 600 million or 300 million.2 I am not at all interested in knowing if Brazil in the year 2500 is going to have a per capita income of eight thousand dollars, because none of us is going to be around to find out. What matters is that the country has already demonstrated its capacity to develop at the rate of nine percent a year. If we keep the population mobilized to maintain this rate of economic growth, the increase in population will be irrelevant, because we will grow rich.3 While all three of the Brazilians quoted—one a physician, another the head of a public bank, and the third a leading civil servant—diverge in their opinions about population policy, they also communicate a divergent sense of urgency about the issue. For one, it is a matter of great importance; for another, it is quite irrelevant. At first glance, the link between policy preferences on population planning and the importance attributed to the issue may seem transparent. In general, the elites who favor population planning measures can be expected to feel that Brazil faces serious problems of population growth that

26

will not simply take care of themselves. Yet this connection cannot lead to the inference that the antinatalists place supreme importance on population planning, unless it can be shown that the issue outranks most others on the schedule of policy concerns. Population policy must compete for a place on the elite agenda. Before examining the distribution of elite preferences, then, let us determine the ranking of the population question on the policy agendas of the elites, relative to the priority given other economic, social and political problems.

RECOGNITION OF AND PRIORITIES ON POPULATION PROBLEMS Is There a Population Problem? More than one-fifth of the elites do not believe that overpopulation is a problem at all in Brazil, or at least a problem on which the government should take action.4 Not surprisingly, this attitude is most frequent among the bishops (36 percent). It reaches a low (17 percent) among the professionals, a social category that has been reported to be antinatalist elsewhere in Latin America.5 The reasons the elites give for not considering overpopulation to be a matter of public concern provide complementary perspectives on the issue of population growth. The following response to our questions typifies what might be called the "reliance-on-economic-development" rationale: "Brazil still has unlimited resources and will reach demographic equilibrium through economic growth, which will extend gradually to the lower classes. In my opinion, there is no need to worry about a demographic problem as such, because it will be resolved in time with the growth of the middle class in Brazil." In other words, a slowing of population growth is seen as a result rather than a cause of economic development. The model assumes a more-or-less automatic replication of the demographic transition in Brazil. A somewhat different perspective involves the idea that economic growth or national power actually depends on an expanding population: "Population growth expresses the vitality of the nation. Even though we don't know exactly why, experience shows that as population grows, the country develops." In this view, population growth is accorded a causal, if somewhat vague, role in promoting economic development, presumably through the expansion of the labor supply and the cultivation of an internal market. By far the most common pronatalist response, accounting for over half of the sixty-one individual reasons for believing overpopulation is not a current problem or future threat in Brazil, centers on the continental

27

proportions of the country and the national destiny of populating this territory. An MDB senator expresses it as follows: "Brazil has a population of 90 million and an area of eight million square kilometers. Between the west and the Amazon there lies an empty region that takes up 50 percent of our total area. This region is the object of foreign interests, because it is the world's largest area of practically untouched forest. Only by populating [this area] can we prevent foreigners from invading us as they have in the past." The same note is struck by a labor leader: "In Brazil birth control would be a crime. We require a minimum of 50 inhabitants per square kilometer. If we don't populate our land, others might want to 'take care' of it for us." Thus, the arguments that population problems do not exist in Brazil involve variations on three themes: (a) that economic growth will produce a more-or-less spontaneous equilibrium between resources and people, (b) that economic growth is, in fact, stimulated by a large and growing population, and (c) that it is underpopulation that poses a threat to the political security of Brazil and to the fulfillment of its national destiny. Since these rationales are not mutually exclusive, some elites cite more than one of them. Mixed in with the three major rationales is an occasional reference, most common among the bishops, to the ethical impropriety of state interference in family life. Furthermore, the reasons for believing that overpopulation is not a problem in Brazil tend to vary in expected ways across the elite groups. Pronatalists in the business community are the most inclined to perceive the demographic problem, such as it is, in terms of deficient consumer demand. The more obviously nationalistic imperative of populating the "empty spaces" is more common among the politicians and the labor leaders. Even though we are dealing for the moment only with the elites who deny that there might be a population problem in Brazil, some of these men do not rule out the possibility of implementing certain measures favorable to family planning. The following statement by an industrialist leaves the door open for educational programs, despite the strong pronatalist language in his concluding sentence: "It is not a question of enforcing birth control but rather of educating and orienting the people so that each couple can develop their ability to calculate an ideal number of children. To limit population growth in Brazil is a crime because the country is not fully populated." The statement is revealing because it captures much of the ambivalence surrounding the population debate in Brazil. On the one hand, there is a tendency to interpret population policy as birth control, with the accent on the coercive elements in such a program. On the other hand, there is a reluctance to deprive the Brazilian people of the chance to become aware of the possibility that it might be to their advan-

28 • ELITE OPINION

tage, as couples, to plan their families rationally. Although this industrialist places himself, at least nominally, in the pronatalist camp, he is not far from a centrist position in the Brazilian context. He opposes population planning at the aggregate level, especially insofar as it might smack of coercion, but he is willing to consider programs of an indirect nature that provide couples with family planning information. Nominally pronatalist elites also tend to distinguish between the underpopulation of Brazil as a whole and the overpopulation of certain areas. The distinction is simple yet very important, and it suggests that the issue might not be so emotional and confrontational as is often suspected. These are the words of a Paulista banker: "There should be no control in areas of low population density, such as the Amazon, Mato Grosso, and the federal territories. But there are 37 million people in the Northeast, where economic growth is jeopardized by population growth." The implication of these and similar remarks ("Population growth is a problem in the large urban centers, while there are huge underpopulated areas in the interior," etc.) is that some of the elites who oppose a national population policy that might undercut the economic growth and political power of the country nonetheless recognize the need for remedial action— typically, information programs—directed at individual families, particularly those living in densely populated zones. The resistance to government involvement in population policy that appears when the problem is considered from the point of view of the nation as a whole subsides when it is viewed at the regional level and at the level of the family. This differentiation between the national and the regional, and between the collective and the individual, aspects of population growth is a theme that gained prominence as the rate of economic growth declined after 1973 and as evidence showing the increasing marginalization of masses of the Brazilian populace mounted. Thus, pronatalist sentiment among Brazilian elites—at least, the version that holds that the country does not suffer from overpopulation and that the government need not concern itself in general with population policy—may not be intransigent. Nearly all the elites, antinatalist as well as pronatalist, profess a strong aversion to any intrusion of a coercive element into governmental promotion of family planning. Yet virtually none of them feels that the government should actually prevent couples from learning about methods of birth control. Moreover, there is an awareness that, while Brazil as a whole may be underpopulated, the population density of certain regions is excessive. If the debate is framed solely in aggregate terms, it takes on an abstract quality, and the tendency seems to be for antagonists to dig in—to stake out positions as a matter of principle. Yet this is clearly not the only level at which discussion goes on. As soon as

29

the elites begin to think in terms of specific regions and to visualize childrearing problems as experienced by couples, a certain flexibility appears. We shall have more to say about this latent pragmatism in the course of the chapter. Birth Control on the Elite Agenda So far we have confined our analysis to the elites who give population planning little or no priority. Now we can expand discussion to include the elites as a whole. Among these men, of course, are several who consider themselves strong antinatalists. A question arises, however, as to just how much importance even this group attaches to population planning. Since the priority given to an issue is relative to the importance assigned to other issues and policies, the elites were asked how important they felt each of fifteen different issues were. Their priorities, measured along 100-point scales, are presented in Table 2.1. The most striking finding is that birth control receives the lowest average priority of all the issues. The characteristic feature of the popula-

Table 2.1. Average Importance Attributed by the Elites to Fifteen Issuesa Issue Educational reform Income redistribution Settlement of the Amazon region Student-government relations Agrarian reform Labor-government relations Foreign investment Leadership of Brazil in Latin America Censorship Military in politics Opposition-government relations Divorce Church in politics Subversion Birth controlb

Average Importance 86 81 78 73 73 69 69 66 59 57 56 55 50 50 49

a The question was: "What degree of importance do you attribute to each one of the following issues?" Importance scores vary between 0 (not important) and 100 (extremely important). b The Portuguese is controle de natalidade.

30 • ELITE OPINION

tion debate during the Medici administration was that it was scarcely noticeable at all. In general, the issue ordering corresponds to the climate of the Medici years, with developmental concerns tending to enjoy greater salience than more explicitly political controversies. The salience of birth control policy increased during the presidencies of Ernesto Geisel (1974— 1979) and João Figueiredo (1979- ); it can hardly have been much lower. Nevertheless, it is unlikely to have overtaken many of the other issues on the elite agenda. Thus, population policy does not compete very successfully for a place on the agenda of Brazilian elites. This fact does not mean that the elites are wholly unconcerned about the issue or that it will remain at the bottom of the policy agenda. Plainly, however, population problems have not been at the forefront of political debate in Brazil, and the tendency is to treat them as rather subsidiary to presumably more pressing matters. There is another revealing way to consider elite priorities. Even if population policy stands at the bottom of the elite agenda in general, some elite groups may give it higher priority than others. Table 2.1 is, after all, nothing more than a listing of averages for the elites as a whole, and it obscures intergroup differences. Figure 2.1 corrects this possible distortion. Here we have plotted the average priority that each of the eight major elite sectors assigns to birth control. A significant, though not very marked, degree of variation exists among the elite groups in the importance they attribute to the issue.6 The professionals and the businessmen give somewhat more importance to population planning than do the other elites. While the comparative urgency with which the professional and the business communities treat the issue is scarcely grounds for characterizing them as committed antinatalists, it does belie the accusation that the Brazilian upper classes have a simplistic interest in guaranteeing an unlimited supply of cheap labor. The Brazilian economic model is less primitive than this: in fact, it emphasizes capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive policies, even (with the stress on agrobusiness) in the countryside.7 The tendency for the politicians to rank the issue lower than do the bishops might be thought of as presenting a minor anomaly. Despite their opposition to birth control, the bishops attach moral significance to the issue itself. Their pronatalism does not lead them automatically to slough off the controversy as trivial. Such considerations are not very crucial to the other elites, including the politicians.8 Another pattern is worth stressing: there is no difference between the government and the opposition politicians in the low importance they attribute to population policy. To some extent, this fact reflects a generic, more-or-less pronatalist, orientation that imbues the political culture of

31

Fig. 2.1. Average importance attributed to birth control as a policy issue by elite groups. The proportion of variance (eta2) in importance scores accounted for by elite membership is 6 percent.

parliamentarians in Brazil. In the matter of population policy, they apparently respond more to considerations of patriotism and national power— that is, to nationalism—than to conventional leftist and rightist appeals. As we shall see, the lack of definition of the birth control issue in standard ideological terms is not a peculiarity of the politicians.9 Clearly, among Brazilian decision makers during the early 1970s, birth control was not a burning issue. Even those who, like the businessmen, feel that the issue should receive some attention do not give it overwhelming importance, probably because the consequences of policy seem secondary and distant. The data jibe quite well with the low-key orientation that the Brazilian delegation brought as official policy to the Bucharest conference. The classic developmental controversies—income redis-

32 • ELITE OPINION

tribution, education, agrarian reform, foreign investment, and so on—are viewed as being more pressing than birth control. At the same time, certain sectors of the elite—the professionals and the businessmen and, perhaps, the state managers—recognize that the formulation of population policy may not be wholly lacking in importance. Furthermore, even the elites who give the issue very little importance may not be adamantly opposed to incremental measures favoring something more forceful than a laissez-faire position. While there is no interelite consensus on the issue, neither does population policy seem to generate explosive debate. In order to understand this fact, we turn to the actual preferences of the elites.

PREFERENCES ON BIRTH CONTROL The Distribution of Opinion In Brazil, the issue of "the population problem" or "population policy" centers on government involvement in family planning services. There are several other facets to population policy in Brazil, but it is family planning, and the government's role in it, that form the nub of the controversy. 10 To ascertain the views of the elites on what the government role should be, we presented them with a 100-point scale: the pronatalist extreme of the continuum was characterized as favoring "complete prohibition by the government of birth control"; at the antinatalist end was "considerably greater governmental incentives for birth control"; and the midpoint registered a preference for "the situation nowadays in Brazil." The most significant aspect of this question is that it is directed at government policy with respect to birth control, not at family planning as a private matter. Immediately after the elites located themselves on the scale, we asked them to explain the reasons for their choice. Later, we shall inspect these open-ended responses; for now, let us concentrate on the quantitative results.11 In order to place the division in elite opinion about birth control in perspective, it is useful to compare the breakdown of preferences on the issue with preference distributions in other policy areas. For the sake of simplicity, we confine the comparison to two other closely related controversies: the legalization of divorce and the legalization of abortion.12 Table 2.2 gives the results of this comparison. The variation in preferences is complex but, within the Brazilian context, understandable. Let us focus first on the simplest pattern. By reason of Catholic dogma, the bishops are unequivocally opposed to the legaliza-

33

Table 2.2. Average Preferences of Elite Groups Regarding Birth Control, Divorce, and Abortiona Elite Groups

Birth Control

Legalization of Divorce

Legalization of Abortion

Bishops Labor leaders MDB politicians ARENA politicians Professionals Civil servants Industrialists Bankers

40 52 55 56 56 62 65 65

2 74 74 42 83 67 72 76

0 34 57 21 64 44 45 44

Overall average

58

66

39

5

19

11

2

Variance (eta ) accounted for by elite group

a Figures are average preference scores derived from responses to scales ranging from 0 (strongly against) to 100 (strongly in favor).

tion of divorce and abortion. There is no visible flexibility among the bishops on these issues. On the other hand, even though the bishops are the least favorably disposed of all the elites to birth control and would indeed prefer a slight reversal of the laissez-faire position of the government toward active prohibition, the Church hierarchy was not thoroughly displeased with government policy as of the early 1970s.13 Moreover, beneath the average position of the bishops, there is considerable internal variation. As we suggested earlier in our discussion of the development of the teaching of the Church on family planning, debate within the ecclesiastical ranks has been extensive, and the official position of the Church is sufficiently qualified so as to leave some room for individual variation in interpretation. The prevalence of within-group, individual variation in preferences about birth control is evident across the elite sample. While the elite groups are listed from top to bottom in increasing order of antinatalism, intersectoral differences are comparatively small. Indeed, the most important feature of the preference distribution is that all of the elite groups, with the exception of the bishops, favor some movement away from the prohibitive status quo. The Brazilian position had moved to this point, of course, by the time of the Bucharest conference. Thus, interelite variation in preferences about birth control confirms

34 • ELITE OPINION

what we tentatively suggested in analyzing the priority given to the issue: namely, that although there is no cross-elite consensus on family planning, neither does the general issue seem to tear the Brazilian establishment asunder. Here again, for example, the government-supporting ARENA and the opposition MDB politicians, who are far apart on most other matters, do not differ at all with respect to broad birth control policy. Both groups are mildly in favor of some liberalization. The unanimity of the politicians disappears, however, on divorce and abortion policy. The moral conservatism of the ARENA politicians comes plainly into view. The push to legalize divorce was, in fact, led by the MDB. With regard to the legalization of abortion, the MDB politicians, together with the professionals, are in the vanguard of elite opinion, even though this progressivism is quite relative in light of the overall opposition of the elites to any lifting of sanctions against abortion.14 The progressivism of the MDB in the divorce and abortion controversies may seem at odds with their temperate position regarding birth control. The reasons for this apparent disjuncture will become clearer when we examine the discursive responses of the elites; but even at this point the supposed contradiction is not very mysterious. The legalization of divorce and abortion represents, in the Brazilian setting, a genuine liberalization. Many of the elites must have some inkling that to legalize abortion, for example, would amount only to lifting legal prohibitions against a practice that is widespread, despite attempts to ignore and cover it up, in many parts of Brazil. For the politicians generally—both the ARENA and the MDB— birth control and, indeed, population planning in the aggregate do not necessarily imply liberalization. On the contrary, it may entail the imposition of state controls and, in the view of some elites, an attempt to avoid the more serious structural problems of the country. Thus, in the early seventies, while elite opinion was not on the average hostile to the adoption of some measures that would move population policy beyond the status quo toward a moderate antinatalist position, it was on the question of the legalization of divorce that the establishment, with the exception of the bishops, was ready to liberalize the policy setting. It is indicative of the multifaceted nature of population planning that most of the elites are reluctant to consider relatively strong measures, such as the legalization of abortion, whereas they favor cautious change in the general nonpolicy of the government regarding population.15 Furthermore, it is fairly evident that elite positions on this complex of issues do not fit Marxist-versus-Malthusian stereotypes. The comparatively leftist MDB politicians can scarcely be called enthusiastic antinatalists and yet, within the climate of opinion at the elite level, they are quite pro-

35

gressive with respect to the abortion question. The ARENA politicians are equally hesitant about population policy in general, but they are quite conservative about the legalization of abortion, apparently for moral and traditional reasons. To be sure, the businessmen and the civil servants tend to be the most antinatalist of the elites, and in this respect they resemble the neo-Malthusian stereotype. Yet neither the businessmen nor the civil servants can be labelled strong antinatalists, for their average preferences are not very different from those of the other elites, and the averages themselves must be viewed in the light of the variation in opinion internal to these groups. None of these intricacies in elite opinion can be fully understood from conventional ideological perspectives.16 In part because preferences on population policy do not seem to fall with much regularity along a progressive-conservative continuum, the issue itself may be less susceptible to polarization than is often supposed, even though the elites do not share a consensual position. One sign of the comparatively mild degree of controversy surrounding population policy in Brazil comes from Table 2.2: the differences among the elite groups with regard to birth control barely reach statistical significance. There is still another way to assess the polarizing potential of the issue. The association between preferences on and importance assigned to birth control can be used to gauge the potential for conflict on the issue. If those on one side of the issue give it about as much priority as those on the other side, the controversy is likely to polarize the elites. If, however, priorities are skewed to one side of the preference scale, greater scope for political maneuver and compromise should exist. Not all the pronatalists pay as much attention to the population question as do the bishops, for example, and not even the bishops attribute it as much priority as do the antinatalists. Figure 2.2, which plots the mean importance level assigned to birth control along a simplified version of the pronatalist-antinatalist preferences scale, shows that there is a skewing of priorities. On the average, the antinatalist elites give more importance to the issue than do either the pronatalists or those who are satisfied with the government's laissez-faire position. Thus, the birth control controversy does not appear to be as polarized as it might be. Certain issues on the elite agenda—the questions of government relations with the political opposition and with the labor syndicates, for example—show quite a different relation between preferences and priorities. Conservatives give these issues about the same degree of importance as progressives, probably because the interests of elite groups in these areas are plainly antagonistic. Preferences on such issues have a zero-sum connotation, and positions tend to be correspondingly rigid.17

36 • ELITE OPINION

Fig. 2.2. Average importance attributed to the birth control issue according to elite preferences on the issue. The importance scores are standardized: 5-point preference scale is aggregated from the original 100-point scale.

The issue of population planning, however, admits of some gradations, even in the case of the bishops. In summary, while the tendency for the pronatalist elites to give the birth control issue less importance than their antinatalist colleagues is in part simply a reflection of their tendency to ward off positive action by the government, the implication is that this issue is probably not so susceptible to developing into a sharply antagonistic conflict as those issues that evoke the immediate interests of the groups represented by the various elites. Population-Related Preferences and Progressive-Conservative Ideologies Except for our analysis of the priorities of the elites, the issue of population planning has until now been viewed practically in isolation. This leaves a series of questions unanswered. What are the links between the

37

elites' positions on public policy regarding birth control and on other developmental issues? Do elites who favor governmental involvement in the promotion of family planning services also support measures designed to promote income redistribution? Are policy preferences on birth control embedded in a larger system of beliefs—an ideology—about developmental options? It turns out that, when the classic developmental controversies are examined, the elites have rather familiar and coherent ideologies. A leftright, progressive-conservative cleavage is readily detectable within the Brazilian power structure. For example, those who favor a more equitable distribution of income also favor land reform; they also tend to be political liberals, advocating a greater role for the opposition party, autonomy for the labor syndicates, and so on.18 Unless we suppose that authoritarian polities are monolithic—that all the elites hew to a party line—none of this is surprising. The question, however, is whether the preferences of the elites on birth control can be characterized in left-right terms. In order to locate the ideological position of birth control preferences, we computed the correlations between opinions on over twenty policy items, including those related to birth control. For the sake of simplicity, the results for a sample of nine typical issues are summarized in Figure 2.3. 19 Preferences on the standard left-right issues—income redistribution, agrarian reform, and so on—are aligned in the expected manner.20 There is an evident progressive-conservative axis, at the elite level, in Brazilian politics, but it is not the only cleavage. Pronatalist and antinatalist preferences cannot be predicted with any regularity from conservative and progressive positions on other developmental issues. Only two other policy domains show a significant link with opinions on birth control: legalization of abortion and divorce. Attitudes on governmental policies concerning birth control, divorce, and abortion constitute a relatively well-knit cluster, but this cluster does not lie on either side of the left-right cleavage that subtends elite preferences on other issues of economic and social development. Progressives and conservatives alike are as apt to hold pronatalist as antinatalist positions. As Stycos21 and others have argued, the birth control issue does not lend itself to classification according to the standard divisions over accumulation and distribution or repression and more political freedom. Policy on birth control, abortion, and divorce forms a set of problems with moral overtones that, in Brazil, do not fit the conventional boundaries of the public debate on government policy, even though they may on occasion turn out to be politically charged.22 The ambivalence of the elites may be one of the main reasons for the

38 • ELITE OPINION

Fig. 2.3. Smallest-space diagram of nine policy preferences. Preferences on "agrarian reform" and "income redistribution" were scored so that high values represent conservative opinion. Preferences on "political opposition," "labor autonomy," "subversion," and "foreign investment" were scored in the opposite direction. An antinatalist position on "birth control" was given a high score, while antidivorce and antiabortion positions were also scored high. This procedure helps in portraying the cleavages along which preferences are aligned. Dimensions One Two Three Guttman-Lingoes's coefficient of alienation: .28 .04 .00 Kruskal's stress: .35 .06 .00

comparative absence of fierce controversy over population policy. This is not to suggest that the issue is conflict free, much less that the atmosphere of debate surrounding it is entirely rational. Instead, policy decisions related to population questions seem unlikely to evoke strong support or

39

stubborn opposition from elites who are generally more concerned about other priorities and whose preferences on birth control are not deeply intertwined with their positions on apparently more vital issues. By and large, preferences on birth control and related issues, such as abortion and divorce, crosscut rather than overlap with positions on the obviously explosive controversies, such as government-labor relations and income redistribution. The virtual disconnection of the population issue from the broader ideologies of the elites, together with the fact that it offers a great number of compromise solutions and partial opposition, probably works to make it one of the more manageable, if still dramatic, controversies in Brazilian political life.23 Rationales behind Preferences on Birth Control Policy The measures of opinion we have examined so far have face value, for they distinguish among the various elite estates in the expected way. It comes as no surprise that the bishops, for example, maintain the clearest pronatalist position. Yet this sort of analysis is incomplete. It is not as sharply diagnostic as we would like of the variety of reasons that the elites give for their positions. Uncovering these rationales is more than a matter of mere curiosity; it enables us to understand the doses of malleability and intransigence that underlie summary positions regarding population planning. In order to tap the qualitative aspects of elite thinking on the issue, we probed the elites ("Could you tell me more about that?") to explain their views. The discursive responses can be grouped under eleven headings. The major types are listed below in order from pronatalist to antinatalist, with excerpts from representative responses. 1. National Security, Sovereignty: "Population growth is essential to the hegemony of the country. Every sacrifice should be made for this." (São Paulo industrialist) "I am against control, especially in a country with a large territory and a small population compared to this territory. If there were control, the country could not be completely settled, and this would be risking our security." (São Paulo labor leader) 2. National Power, Manpower for Development: "Brazil still possesses innumerable virgin areas with very low population densities. We cannot indulge in the luxury of controlling our own fertility while other countries do not control theirs. If the United States had controlled its birthrate from the time of the Mayflower, it would not have developed." (ARENA politician)

40 • ELITE OPINION

"A big population counts for a lot. It is very important in terms of national power. Brazil is very large and needs many people. It is not any little Western country that can confront China with a population of 500 million." (Rio de Janeiro banker) 3. Empty Spaces, Plenty of Resources: "It is not a fundamental problem. It is an American problem they want to impose on us. The Brazilian problem is the occupation and development of areas like the Amazon, whose population is less than that of the Sahara desert." (MDB politician) "In reality, Brazil has no birth control policy, because there is no need for one. A continental country like Brazil, with enormous uninhabited and unexplored areas, has no problem of population growth. What should be done, and what is being done with some success, up to a point, is the national integration of this marginal area." (ARENA politician) 4. Morally Wrong, Church Opposed, Welfare not Control: "People have the right to have as many children as they want. The problem is not to limit the number of children but to provide living conditions: jobs, education, housing, etc." (São Paulo labor leader) "If God put male and female on this earth, it was for union and reproduction. Man does not have the right to intervene. There should be complete liberty in accord with divine law." (São Paulo labor leader) "The Brazilian government has not yet taken a position because it is afraid of offending the Church. I have the impression that the government favors birth control. But the Church is against it. Anyway, there can't be an aggressive campaign, because the people are not prepared for it." (Rio de Janeiro banker) 5. Automatic Adjustment, Demographic Transition: "The population is still small relative to the size of the country. And control is a natural consequence of the cultural and social development of the country. Families in the cities are already smaller. Only some short-term measures should be taken to prevent the proliferation of large, impoverished families, since they represent a burden on the state and on society." (Director, public company, Brasilia) "In a country like Brazil, the problem of population growth is not serious. Even at a relatively high level, population growth does not present any problems, keeping in mind the technology which humanity disposes of in greater and greater abundance for the production of consumer goods indispensable to the survival of populations. So, in Brazil, what should

41

operate is the natural law according to which, in the measure that we create wealth and improve the level of civilization, through the distribution of this wealth, there will be a spontaneous control of population growth, through rational mechanisms and the free will of couples." (MDB politician) 6. Laissez-faire: "It's all right the way it is. The government doesn't prohibit control and at the same time doesn't discourage it. The present rate of economic growth of 10 percent compared with a rate of population growth of two percent is quite positive." (Ministerial bureaucrat, Rio de Janeiro) "I agree with the policy followed these past ten years, which has given us the number of inhabitants we have today. There are enough people for the supply of opportunities." (São Paulo industrialist) 7. Private Matter, Individual Choice: "The government has kept a balanced position, giving information to the public, but respecting higher laws than the human about who should decide who should and who should not come into the world. The decision is up to the individual." (Rio de Janeiro, industrialist) "I respect individual freedom, and it is up to the family to decide on the matter, not the state." (Bishop) 8. Enlightenment, Gradual Orientation: "The problem of birth control should only be broached by the government in terms of education, clarification, information—never in terms of direct control as a global policy." (Bishop) "Birth control should not be encouraged. We are still a growing country, and we still need people. Large parts of the country are underpopulated. What is necessary is to eliminate the causes of misery. But the country should increase its population only in accord with its possibilities of absorption. At the moment, the government should create educational programs so that the individual naturally limits the number of children. This should be a constant concern." (São Paulo banker) 9. Regional Imbalance: "The highest rates of fertility are found in the economically weak regions, and this aggravates a series of problems. In other regions, where there is a labor market, no. Brazil still needs to grow in population and in these other regions, people understand about such things." (Rio de Janeiro banker) "We are a country with the immense empty spaces, the main one

42 • ELITE OPINION

being the Amazon with six million square kilometers and less than one inhabitant per square kilometer. I accept family planning only in the urban areas, in lhe favelas and mocambos [slums]." (MDB politician) 10. Growing Misery, Inequity: "Birth control is the only way we can attain a reasonable redistribution of wealth. With continued population growth, we would have to maintain an annual rate of economic development of 12 percent in order to redistribute more equitably. If the size of the pie stays the same and the population increases, we will never reach an adequate level of development and income redistribution." (Ministerial bureaucrat, Brasilia) "The middle and upper classes in Brazil have available every means and the necessary information for planning the size of their families. The tendency has been toward small families in this social group. The rural population and the urban populations with low incomes have neither the means nor the information. Therefore, these families will always be large. The consequence of this is that the children of the middle and upper classes can be cared for and educated, and they represent a decreasing proportion of the population of Brazil. The majority of the population has no education, no food, no housing, etc." (Ministerial bureaucrat, Brasilia) "There is a tremendous social imbalance, since the low-income families have the most children. The imbalance consists in that some have much [money], and others have nothing. The minimum wage is calculated per person. A fellow gets a minimum wage, wants to marry, and there you go with greater and greater imbalance." (Labor leader, São Paulo) "If at present levels of development, around 10 percent, the rate of two-and-a-half percent in population growth does not matter, this can change. If the growth rate falls to five percent, two-and-a-half percent already represents half. The rich already control everything, so the burden of misery goes all to the poor. The position of the left therefore unites with that of the conservatives." (Rio de Janeiro banker) 11. Slow Economic Growth: "It is in our interest to have a healthy, educated, and highly productive population. The growth of an unhealthy, illiterate, and unproductive population jeopardizes national development. They become an onerous burden for the productive part of the population." (Ministerial bureaucrat, Brasilia) "This has to be done through educating the population. It is an important element of economic planning. It doesn't work to plan the econ-

43

omy without taking into account and foreseeing population growth." (Rio de Janeiro industrialist) The differences between some of the rationales are a matter of shading rather than of sharp contrasts. The national security and the national power motifs, for example, are very similar, as are the laissez-faire and private matter rationales. In general, few of the rationales can be characterized as unambiguously of the left or of the right. This point is crucial, for it belies ideological stereotypes of supposedly typical neo-Malthusian and leftist positions. The nationalistic themes, for example, may be adopted with equal fervor by either progressive or conservative elites. Similarly, it is difficult to classify the antinatalist position based on productivity criteria as either uniquely left or right; it reflects a developmentalism that is not the exclusive province of either camp. Even though the birth control controversy cannot be reduced to leftright terms, it is clear that the various rationales are associated with distinctively pronatalist and antinatalist positions. The simplest way to show this is to give the average score on the continuum from pronatalist to antinatalist for each of the rationales, as in Table 2.3. While there is still some variation in the policy positions associated with any particular rationale, the preference scores can be taken as typical of those who argue that "population slows economic growth," that only a laissez-faire nonpolicy is needed, and so on. Thus, the hard-core opposition to population planning comes from the elites who stress the manifest destiny of Brazil as a great power: these are the ufanistas, the traditional nationalists. Not far behind are those who believe that Brazil has a virtually inexhaustible supply of land that needs to be filled and transformed by a practically limitless supply of labor power. Again, neither position is distinctively of the left or of the right. Four types of arguments provide the basis for antinatalist positions, and two of these—redistribution of wealth and economic growth—are especially popular among those who most strongly support birth control as government policy. It is striking that these two arguments that are often counterposed in other areas, the former being presumably more progressive and the latter more conservative, complement each other on the issue of birth control. Both the developmentahsts and the distributionists tend to favor a rather vigorous antinatalist position, even though they are usually at odds in strictly economic matters. Then there are the gradualists, those who advocate mild educational reforms and those who are concerned with regional disparities. They favor a selective antinatalist policy; they do not favor a national program, or at least not one that is overtly so.

44 • ELITE OPINION

Table 2.3. Average Elite Preference on the Birth Control Issue by Rationale of Preference (High score = antinatalist) Average Preference

Percentage of Respondents

Population slows economic growth Growing misery, inequity Regional imbalance Enlightenment, gradual orientation Private matter, individual choice Laissez-faire Automatic adjustment, demographic transition Morally wrong, Church opposed, welfare not control Empty spaces, plenty of resources National power, manpower for development National security, sovereignty

87 83 64 64 50 50

10 16 10 17 7 10

44

5

44 40

8 6

38 21

6 5

Totals

59

Rationale

(N

100 = 242)

It is important to note that the elites at the extremes of the pronatalist-to-antinatalist scale, whatever their differences of opinion, tend to think in collective, national terms. To be sure, those who advocate antinatalist measures as a means to alleviate the maldistribution of income see beneath the GNP and look toward the disaggregation of the fruits of economic growth. They still view the problem of population growth from a national perspective. As we move toward the center of the continuum, toward the elites whose antinatahsm is quite moderate, we begin to pick up rationales that are both indirect (education programs) and microoriented rather than macrooriented (regional inequities are emphasized rather than national growth). This shift supports our argument that the room for maneuver on an issue like population planning increases when it is viewed in a piecemeal manner, instead of being defined as a question of morality or national power. It also helps substantiate the idea that a fundamental polarity in elite debate over population policy involves a differentiation between macroperspectives and microperspectives rather than between left and right. Finally, the most popular argument underpinning antinatalist sympathies is that of "enlightenment," that is, support for government provision

45

of population information and education. In fact, government-sanctioned information programs on family planning are supported even by some elites who place themselves in a conservative position with respect to the prevailing government stance on birth control.24 Not only is the enlightenment rationale the only reason cited for both support of and opposition to birth control, it is also the only one that implies the advocacy of a more-orless specific population policy measure. Thus, although the elites who think in terms of redistribution and economic growth tend to be more antinatalist than those who argue from the basis of enlightenment, it is not clear what particular methods of population planning the former might support. We turn to this question in the following section.

MECHANISMS OF POPULATION POLICY It may be argued that it does not matter why elites support or oppose population planning, even though the overall distribution of opinion among elites is of interest in understanding the main contours of elite opinion. Rather, for those actively engaged in the policy process, the key question probably concerns what specific programs elites are likely to support and oppose. The question is crucial to the degree that population policy can be broken down into a variety of alternative and complementary programs. To help answer this question, the elites were presented with seven different, but not necessarily contradictory, policy measures. We asked them to rate each of the options as "very important," "more or less important," or "without importance." The alternatives include: (a) sex education courses in secondary schools, (ft) information programs about contraceptive methods, (c) dispersion of the population toward the interior (away from metropolitan areas), (d) birth control programs for low-income families, (e) increased supply of contraceptive devices, (/) tax incentives for small families, and (g) legalization of induced abortion.25 The list is not exhaustive, and some of the policy mechanisms are more sharply defined than others. They do represent, however, the major policy measures that appear to have been discussed with any frequency in Brazil during the early 1970s. They stop short of measures with a strong coercive connotation, such as those adopted for a time in India; such tactics seem clearly foreclosed in the Brazilian setting, at least with regard to population planning. Preferences on Policy Options In Table 2.4 the policy alternatives are listed from left to right in descending order of popularity, and the elite groups are arranged from top to bot-

46 • ELITE OPINION

Table 2.4. Percentage of Elites Stating Specific Population Policy Measures to Be Very Important Birth Control Increase for Poor Contraceptive Families Supply

Sex Education

Information Programs

Population Dispersion

Professionals Labor Bankers Industry Civil service MDB Bishops ARENA

61 79 53 44 43 43 46 27

72 32 73 59 50 29 46 36

39 62 40 44 38 50 55 42

28 47 33 33 32 21 18 21

Average across elites

50

49

46

33

Elite Group

Tax Incentives

Legalized Abortion

Average across Issues

50 15 33 33 25 21 9 18

50 34 7 22 14 21 9 9

44 9 27 22 18 29 9 9

49 40 39 37 31 28 26 23

(18) (53) (15) (69) (56) (14) (11) (33)

26

22

18

34

(269)

(N)

tom in decreasing order of their propensity to support the policy alternatives. The professionals, for example, are well disposed to almost all the mechanisms, while the bishops and the politicians tend to attach importance to almost none. The labor leaders present an intriguing deviation from the earlier results. We have seen that they claim to be at most timid antinatalists, in general, and this position is bound up with their patriotic sympathies. Here, however, they rank second only to the professionals in their average enthusiasm for the various policies. Part of the explanation is that their enthusiasm is concentrated almost exclusively on policy mechanisms, such as sex education and population dispersion, that are not intrinsically antinatalist or at best only weakly so. The apparent deviation from the customary pronatalism of the labor leaders cannot be explained completely in this way. Of all the elites, the labor leaders are the most favorable to the government's promoting "birth control programs for low-income families." The receptivity of the labor leaders to such a program is not puzzling once their basic welfare orientation, which is not shared in equal measure by the other elites, is recognized. In principle, the labor elites may be opposed to population planning; in practice, they tend to warm to almost any policy likely to give tangible benefits to their constituents. This instance is perhaps the most dramatic example of the switch that occurs when elites (and, as we shall see, the public) change their frames of reference in dealing with population questions.26 The sex education and the contraceptive information policy options enjoy the broadest support. This result is not surprising, since official policy allows for the introduction of such reforms. The bishops and the politicians, the most pronatalist of the elites, are not markedly enthusiastic even about these measures. Dispersion of the population toward the interior—that is, toward the area of low population density—is the third most popular course of action; past this option, enthusiasm for the remaining alternatives wanes drastically. Two properties of the dispersion alternative should be noted. First, it is not usually thought of as a population control measure. On the contrary, the option is a favorite of the relatively pronatalist elites—the politicians, who are concerned with issues of national power, and the bishops, who oppose antinatalist measures on moral grounds. The policy is also favored by labor leaders to the degree that they too take a strongly nationalistic stance. Second, unlike the other options, population dispersion is not a specific policy mechanism. It is more properly thought of as a goal or as the outcome of a particular policy decision. It would entail controls over migra-

48 • ELITE OPINION

tion through means that are not well understood and not easily susceptible to manipulation. The closest the Brazilian government came to implementing such a policy was during the economic "miracle" of the Medici administration, which promoted not only the Trans-Amazon Highway but also the "march toward the West," an incentive scheme designed to speed up the settlement of states such as Mato Grosso and Goiás. It does not appear to have stemmed the tide of cityward migration. Thus, when the elites select population dispersion as a means of population planning, they are not so much supporting a specific policy as they are stating their preferences about what the result of unspecified developmental policies should be—namely, the reduction of overcrowding in the cities. The professionals, who are generally antinatalist, do not give the dispersion option much importance; neither do the civil servants, who would be responsible for carrying it out. None of the remaining policies gathers wide support. We have seen that birth control programs for low-income families appeal to the labor leaders, who tend to look upon this option as a welfare or family planning measure. The other elites—especially the bishops and the politicians, but also the professionals—are less sympathetic to this course. The connotations of controlling fertility among the poor probably raise ideological flags among these groups, who are generally more attuned to principled debate and, with the possible exception of the bishops and a few of the politicians, are somewhat less involved in bread-and-butter issues and the daily grind of contact with deprived constituents than are the labor leaders. The policy of controlling the fertility of the poor, or of giving the poor the means to plan their families, suggests avoidance of a direct attack on the structural problem of mass poverty itself. Increasing the supply of contraceptives, offering tax incentives for small families, and legalizing abortion are measures that gain support primarily among the professionals. For most of the elites, the low importance attached to the possibility of managing fiscal policy as a mechanism of population planning probably reflects their awareness that a large part of the Brazilian work force does not have taxable income sufficient for such incentives to have an appreciable effect. In view of the decision taken by the government in July 1977 to subsidize the distribution of contraceptives to women in danger of high-risk pregnancies and, in effect, to poor women with health problems, elite preferences on this option are of special interest. Clearly, it is not a consensus policy, and it is least popular among the bishops. The supporters of the policy, however, come close to representing whatever there might be of a population establishment in Brazil: the professionals, the businessmen, and the civil servants. Broadly speaking, they are technocrats rather than

49

political progressives. By contrast, the politicians and the bishops can usually be found in the pronatalist camp, while the labor leaders support the status quo in principle but generally desire antinatalist measures in practice. The overall configuration of interests has a slight left-versus-right flavor, but the groups are not sharply defined in these terms. It seems more accurate to characterize both increasing the supply of contraceptives and birth control programs for low-income families as swing policies. Neither enjoys the strong support accorded sex education, contraceptive information and population dispersion programs. On the other hand, they do not appear to be so blatantly unpopular as the legalization of abortion. A further observation regarding these two policies is in order. The elites probably differ in their interpretations of the measures. For example, the labor leaders favor birth control for low-income families but not increasing the supply of contraceptives; perhaps they view the former as reflecting concern for helping the poor but reject the latter as somehow shameful and unseemly. By contrast, the professionals tend to favor government programs facilitating access to contraceptives, an option about which they feel quite enlightened, while they downgrade birth control for poor families, perhaps because the signals emitted by the words control and poor are ideologically provocative. To some extent, the tendency for elites to project their own interpretations on the alternatives derives from ambiguities in the wording of questions. Yet the uncertainty also reflects an objective lack of definition in public policy, both before and after the Bucharest conference. There is scant support for population control in the coercive sense, nor is there much sign of a willingness to go along with a substantial commitment to noncoercive, welfare-oriented population planning. The distinction between birth control and family planning can be fairly narrow, at least in the minds of some of the elites. Some, like the politicians and the bishops, are inclined to equate the terms and to assign them both a negative connotation. Others, such as the businessmen, seem indifferent to the distinction; they are not hypersensitive to the undertones of control, nor are they as a group so overtly nationalistic, at least with regard to population planning, as the politicians. Still others—for example, the professionals— clearly distinguish between the two. To them, birth control has an unfortunate ideological bias, while family planning is looked upon, for the most part, as quite proper. Intensity of Support for Different Options We have stressed that the dispositions of the elites regarding the government's involvement in population planning do not fall tidily along a

50 • ELITE OPINION

spectrum from progressive to conservative. This fact does not mean that opinions on the issue are fragmented. Indeed, from the evidence just presented, it would seem that certain elite groups have rather coherent views about population policy. Still, the relation between opinions on specific policy measures and general attitudes toward birth control remains to be determined. For example, although the level of support for legalized abortion is abysmal, it may be that the strongly antinatalist elites, those who place themselves at or near the 100-point limit on the scale of birth control preferences, are deeply committed to the legalization of abortion and that, in addition, they view the generally popular information programs as mere placebos. If such a passionate minority exists, there may be less consensus between pronatalists and antinatalists on information programs and similar measures than might appear from an examination of policy choices in isolation from general orientations. The answer to this question is vital, for it concerns the internal structure of elite attitudes on population planning, regardless of their connection with opinions on other issues. The way to answer the question is to correlate the preferences of the elites regarding birth control in general with the importance that they give to the specific mechanisms of population policy. If the association between preferences for governmental involvement in birth control and orientations toward the legalization of abortion, for example, is strongly positive and if the corresponding correlation with the promotion of information programs and such milder measures is weak, then it could be argued that the population planning issue is substantially polarized. The pertinent data are given in Table 2.5, sector by sector. The policy measures are listed from top to bottom in descending order of the magnitude of their correlation with general orientations toward birth control. The antinatalist elites do not consider information programs or supplying contraceptives or birth control for low-income families as mere palliatives. The role attributed to these moderate measures increases with the antinatalist sentiment of the elites. The more the elites support birth control in general, the more likely is the substance of this support to be composed of preferences for programs directed at providing information and contraceptives, particularly for the poor. The four remaining policies, beginning with the legalization of abortion, are less strongly identified with population planning in general. The most ardently antinatalist elites do not advocate the legalization of abortion over the promotion of information programs. Conversely, they do not actually oppose programs designed to spread the population more evenly throughout the country. They simply attach less importance to that goal than do the pronatalists.

51

Table 2.5. Correlations between Birth Control Preference and Importance Given to Seven Population Measures by Elite Groups Elite Groups Policy Measures Information programs Supply of contraceptives Control for low-income families Legalization of abortion Sex education in schools Tax incentives for small families Dispersion of population Totals

Full Sample

Professionals

Labor

Industry

Bankers

Civil Servants

.54

.84

.57

.50

.76

.45

.49

.42

.57

.47

.37

.45

.31

.69

.38

.32

.23

.32

.27

.08

.25

MDB

Bishops

.60

.54

.25

.55

.54

.60

-.28

.60

.36

.51

.45

.00

.34

.38

.24

.44

.27

-.52

.33

.38

.53

.22

.50

.03

.40

.27

.38

.30

.31

.39

.42

-.28

-.52

.22

.10

.24

.21

.44

.18

.56

.25

-.17

(N = 259)

(N = 16)

(N = 53)

(N = 67)

(N = 15)

(N = 51)

(N = 33)

(N = 14)

Note: Correlations are product-moment correlation coefficients.

ARENA

(N = 10)

The primary exception to this pattern comes from the ARENA politicians. Even those who support government programs facilitating birth control among low-income families, a decidedly unleftist measure in the Brazilian context, also support government programs designed to populate the empty spaces of the country. The latter option is nationalistic rather than distinctively progressive or conservative. This configuration of attitudes is traditional, although not entirely consensual, among politicians in Brazil. In summary, the elites do not view the policy alternatives as zero-sum choices. They do not perceive the decision-making process in population as a black or white choice between, for example, encouraging the mass of poverty-stricken peasants in the Northeast to migrate toward the sparsely populated zones of Mato Grosso or Goiás or supporting a governmental effort to facilitate the access of low-income families to contraceptives. Although the elites are not visibly enthusiastic about population planning on the whole, neither do they seem to be vociferously opposed to population planning alternatives, with the important exception of the legalization of abortion.

CONCLUSION A conspicuous feature of elite thinking about population policy in Brazil is that it is not all of a piece. There is no strong consensus about population planning. In fact, a nonnegligible portion of the Brazilian elite does not believe that a population problem of any magnitude exists in the first place. Certainly, none of the elites considers family planning, birth control, or any of its variants to be a sufficient condition for the solution of the economic and social problems of Brazil. It is the relatively low salience of population issues that provides the common thread to elite opinion. The low priority assigned to such issues by the pronatalists is to be expected; but it is somewhat jarring to find that not even the antinatalists place population questions near the top of their agendas. It is important to understand, to begin with, the comparative unimportance of population issues among Brazilian elites. Some of the secondary position of the population question can be traced to the developmental euphoria of the Medici years. In the early seventies, a strongly perceived connection existed between authoritarian rule and economic success, as measured by high rates of economic growth and relatively low inflation. Complaints about the degree of dependence of this performance on foreign inputs and about the costs inflicted on the mass of the population by the forced-march model of the development, as well as

53

doubts about the possibly spurious or fortuitous role of government action in promoting this growth, had yet to come out in the open on a large scale. In this climate, it is easy to understand why population problems did not seem very pressing. In recent years, greater attention has been paid to population problems in official circles and the media. Yet they still do not stand at the top of the policy agenda because, among other things, the rate of population increase seems to be entering a period of decline. That the population issue is more salient now in Brazil than it once was is undeniable; but it is a questionable extrapolation from this trend to the supposition that it has attained the status of a burning question. Population planning still competes for a place on the elite agenda; and, even if it ranks higher now than before, one must remember that the Brazilian government sees itself as being under considerably greater economic constraints now than it did during the boom days of the early seventies. Not only is the issue of little importance to most of the elites; preferences about population policy, while divided, are not so polarized as opinions on other issues. The population debate is fuzzy partly because opinions on it cannot be reduced to progressive or conservative stereotypes. The relative isolation of population-related attitudes within the larger belief systems of the elites also seems to derive from the low salience of the issue. But the ambivalence of many of the elites with respect to population policy is not all in the mind. The links between policy alternatives in this and other areas, such as income policy, are not axiomatic, just as the full array of relations between population and development is the object of dispute among scholars.27 In addition, population questions seem extraordinarily susceptible to multiple interpretations—in particular, to eliciting private as well as collective standards that are difficult to reconcile and to fit under the customary rubrics of ideological discourse. The attitudes of the elites regarding specific population policy measures are more straightforward. A set of policies that can be identified as the core of an antinatalist program includes provision of contraceptive information, increased supplies of contraceptives, and birth control measures for low-income families. Only the first of these programs enjoys truly widespread support among the elites. Yet the latter two options appeal to the antinatalist elites, even though strong support for these two is expressed by fewer than half of the elites as a whole. The advantage of these programs—the provision of contraceptives and the development of family planning facilities for poor Brazilians—appears to be twofold. First, although they are controversial, the elites do not rule them out completely and a sizeable minority supports them. Second, they are thought of as politically more possible than the legalization

54 • ELITE OPINION

of induced abortion; at the same time they are not considered irrelevant to population planning, as is the dispersion-of-the-population ideal. In short, while they are not conflict free, such measures are not necessarily politically volatile. This last point, that population planning may not be so polarizing an object of political debate as might be expected, runs through our analysis. It is worth examining more closely, for it is an inference rather than a hard-and-fast conclusion. Let us consider three sorts of issues with varying degrees of conflict potential. At one extreme we can imagine an issue like relations between the government and the opposition, in which the immediate, vital interests of specific elite actors are plainly antagonistic. Debate around such issues is likely to assume an either-or quality. At stake is the right of certain groups to exist politically. Incremental bargaining and compromise tend to be the exception rather than the rule in conflicts of this sort. At the other extreme stands a nonissue like educational reform. It is not without controversy; but, in balance with a matter like government and opposition relations, educational reform does not have politically threatening overtones in Brazil, and debate has a way of focusing on the budgetary process. No member of the Brazilian elite is against, or would admit to being against, educational reform in principle. Toward the middle of this continuum of ideal types are issues like population planning. On the one hand, they have a certain divisibility. The elites can distinguish among rather detailed subpolicies related to population problems. On the other hand, when the elites think in larger terms, the issue begins to elicit arguments based on principle and on guesses about the future interaction between demographic and economic changes. In this sense, population policy is an ideological issue, even though it cannot be cast in the ideological vocabulary of left and right. The result, we believe, is a crisscrossing of standards, of levels and frames of reference, that renders elite attitudes on population planning ambivalent. Something important, possibly the future of the country, is at stake, but it is not something that elites (with the probable exception of the bishops) usually see as jeopardizing or benefiting the interests of specific elite groups. The question is whether, in the case of population policy, the rhetoric is as profound as it is dramatic relative to the controversy on other issues. Our answer is probably not. Our sense of the data is that, if the population debate is settled at all in Brazil, it may be resolved incrementally, among elites competing for shares of budgetary allocations.28 The observation that population issues in Brazil tend to be handled incrementally derives not only from the survey evidence, but also from the manner in which the government has inched toward an antinatalist posi-

55

tion: from the cautious revision of outright pronatalism at Bucharest in 1974 through the maternal and child health care measures announced in 1977 to the preparation of a national family planning program tentatively scheduled for implementation in 1981. The incremental nature of the policy process should not, however, lead to the inference that its outcome will come to nothing more than fine tuning the status quo. The expenditures under consideration, nearly two billion dollars over five years, are not trivial. Although the successive adjustments in the views of Brazilian elites regarding population policy may not seem so dramatic as, for example, the sudden turnaround toward family planning initiated by the Mexican government in the late seventies, the cumulative impact of the Brazilian program may still be substantial. Finally, population policy alternatives in Brazil do not form a seamless web. Government-sponsored family planning in its milder versions is acceptable to most of the elites. Modest reform in this area does not impel them to revise profoundly their views on other issues. Some population policy alternatives, however, are evidently controversial, and they are of two contrasting types. On the one hand, population planning through coercive means represents a virtually unthinkable alternative among Brazilian elites. On the other hand, the loosening of traditional controls over the autonomy of individual choice—an issue that is at the heart of the controversy over the legalization of abortion—constitutes a radical departure from the top-down style that has characterized much of Brazilian social policy. The legalization of abortion would entail not only increased demands on government for the delivery of services, but also a reduction in the sanctioning power of elite interests, a diminution in their control over the mass of the citizenry.

56 • ELITE OPINION

3 • Public Opinion It is known that a latent preference for smaller families exists in Latin America and that this preference is probably on the rise. Studies conducted in several parts of Latin America, including Brazil, have disclosed that on the average women prefer fewer children than they in fact have by the end of their childbearing years and that they would like to learn more about family planning methods. In addition, many women express their intention to use contraceptive methods to limit the size of their families. Where these methods are unknown or unavailable, there is a strong temptation even for presumably good Catholics to resort to illegal and often unprofessional abortion to terminate unwanted pregnancies.1 This body of evidence is impressive, for it dispels stereotypes about the supposed dominance of traditional, obscurantist attitudes toward birth control at the mass level. For our purposes, however, the literature is incomplete in two respects. First, many of the samples on which such studies are based focus on women during their childbearing years and exclude males; other studies are confined to metropolitan areas. Our sample does not suffer from these restrictions. Second, and theoretically more significant, almost all previous surveys of family planning preferences in Latin America have focused on fertility-related attitudes and behavior without reference to popular orientations about the role of the government in such matters. Precise knowledge about family planning beliefs as a public demand—that is, as a state of opinion with potential political consequence—is scanty.2 As in our examination of the ideologies of the elites, the primary emphasis in this chapter is on attitudes about what the government should or should not do with regard to family planning.

57

SOME BASIC CONCEPTS We treat preferences about the role of government regarding birth control as the result of the interplay between private needs and expectations on the one hand and, on the other, of the legitimacy ascribed to public action in family planning. Age and sex, among other indicators, serve as proxies of private needs, and expectations are most readily tapped by desired family size. Although related, the private and public dimensions of opinion on family planning need not be identical. Thus, for example, the felt need for fertility control is likely to grow in the busy stages of the individual's life cycle, typically in association with economic pressures brought upon the household by the number and ages of children. This utilitarian calculus, however, may not be the only or even the main influence on decisions affecting family size. Religion may be a mediating factor, either by imposing sanctions on the practice of contraception or by indoctrinating the faithful with the ideal of a large family. Moreover, the felt need for contraceptive use may in fact arise from at least three considerations. One, which we have just stated, is the desire to limit family size. Another, somewhat different, consideration involves the decision to space births, even if completed family size is not reduced. Still a third consideration is sexual enjoyment, whether inside or outside of marriage, without the risk of pregnancy.3 The extent to which such needs and expectations, whatever their sources, are converted into demands on government is, however, problematic. While it is plausible to expect a positive association between private needs and public demands, the relation is hardly axiomatic. For example, it simply may not occur to people that governmental action might or should have anything to do with the sizes of their families. Such unawareness may be particularly common among those whose welfare needs are greatest—for example, among illiterates whose lack of knowledge about national politics matches their material destitution. Conversely, many people may assign a high priority to and support a strong antinatalist policy even if they can get along quite well without public assistance in family planning. Such persons are liable to be well educated, and sufficiently well-off, so that the direct impact of governmental decisions regarding birth control on their own lives is small. Thus, education becomes a prime candidate for explaining how the translation process between private needs and public demands works. Our approach to examining the influence of education, it should be emphasized, does not involve the assumption that formal schooling has a narrowly secularizing influence on attitudes toward family planning,

58 • PUBLIC OPINION

where secularization denotes the acceptance of presumably modern ideals about small family size, for example.4 All that we have suggested so far is that education is strongly correlated with socioeconomic status in Brazil and that it enhances the cognitive resources of individuals. This last point is particularly important. While high socioeconomic position increases access to family planning methods and while education tends to make persons more aware of such methods and how they may be used, education may also make Catholics, even in a predominantly Catholic culture like the Brazilian, more receptive to the magisterium of the Church. The ability to comprehend the subtleties of Catholic doctrine—in particular, to understand the changes and flexibility in the teaching of the Church with respect to family-size limitation—is likely to be higher among college-educated than among illiterate Catholics. If education facilitates the translation of private needs into public demands, it may also work in a somewhat less obvious way—that is, to increase the understanding of, and perhaps the receptivity to, the positions of religious as well as secular authorities.5 From this perspective, it is helpful to review the major aspects of the Church's influence in Brazil discussed in previous chapters. In a country like Brazil, which is Catholic at least insofar as publicly expressed confessional inclinations are concerned, religion may provide not only a guide for private attitudes toward family size but also a standard for judging the appropriateness of public action toward family planning. Three related features of this influence are important. First, although when compared to other elite estates in Brazil the ecclesiastical hierarchy is hostile to the prevention or termination of pregnancy through "artificial" means, by and large the Brazilian bishops do not want the government actually to place a ban on the use of contraceptives and to pursue other actively pronatalist measures. Instead, and this is the second point, the Catholic Church in Brazil would like the government to stay clear of any tampering with the family that would encourage people to have fewer children than they might otherwise have. A dual shift is involved here: first, toward greater emphasis on the conscience, if not the total discretion, of individuals and, second, toward a reassertion of the inviolability and sacredness of family life. Thus, even Catholics who want to limit the size of their families, and who reject the stricter interpretations of Catholic doctrine, may be reluctant to call upon the state to help resolve their problem. Alternatively, even those who care little about the institutional autonomy of the Church and the family in relation to the government may still cling to traditional religious norms, which the more advanced sectors of the Church no longer stress, about the need to procreate and fill the earth or, less dramatically, to take children as they come.

59

This observation leads us to a consideration of a third aspect of the influence of Catholic teaching about family planning in Brazil. Whatever its success in using political strategies to guarantee influence, the Catholic Church in Brazil has not been noted for its penetration of the larger society. The Church lacks the institutional resources—that is, a large and well-trained clergy—to evangelize the population. This fact, together with the complexity of Church doctrine about family planning, may attenuate the influence of religiosity on attitudes toward family planning. Those at the lower end of the education (and economic) scale, for example, may hold to popular norms about family size without being aware of Church doctrine. In short, the degree to which the teachings of the Church are actually absorbed by the populace is an empirical question. The difference between religion as nominal affiliation and religiosity as practicing devotion and piety is one that we shall look at with care. A simple contrast helps to illustrate the interconnectedness of these distinctions. Catholic doctrine is unequivocal with respect to divorce, while the Church's teaching about family planning may be stretched or contracted a bit, depending on individual interests. In addition, the sanctions of the Church for transgressing the indissolubility of marriage are severe (excommunication) and enforceable, since violations are by their very nature public. By contrast, the private nature of birth control renders it less susceptible to effective sanction. The one instance in which the split between the public and the private tends to disappear may be in predominantly traditional settings, where age-old custom dictates private as well as public mores. Here, popular tradition rather than individual discretion reigns. These are the partially conflicting influences we analyze in the course of the present chapter. A previous question, however, must be answered first. The distinctions we have suggested would remain of largely conceptual interest if the family planning issue were of little importance to the Brazilian public. Our first task, then, before examining the correlates of attitudes about family planning is to determine the priority given to the issue by ordinary Brazilians.

THE SALIENCE OF THE FAMILY PLANNING ISSUE How important do Brazilians consider family planning? The question is really twofold. First, we have to determine the salience of the issue in the popular mind relative to the importance assigned to other issues, much as we did in analyzing elite opinion. The task is to estimate the sheer vis-

60 • PUBLIC OPINION

ibility of the issue before coming to terms with variations in opinion for and against the issue. Second, "the popular mind" is a shorthand for public opinion that may be as differentiated as the Brazilian social hierarchy is stratified. The average salience of the family planning question can be misleading unless we take into account variation in the importance attributed to the issue by different strata. Education assumes significance not only because it is strongly tied to broader indicators of status and class position but also because, of all these indicators, it is probably the best proxy of politicization, or the capacity to grasp the political ramifications of apparently mundane issues. Measurement Procedures Before we present our results, let us specify how attitudes toward the government's role in family planning were measured. Even though birth control might be a bread-and-butter issue, it is very difficult to phrase questions about it that are at once identical and equally comprehensible to elites and nonelites. In fact, there does not appear to be any simple solution to the problem of the comparability of questionnaire format across distant social strata.6 The problem is acute in Brazil because of the large numbers of illiterates and functional illiterates present even in the more developed regions, where we conducted our study. Accordingly, data gathering for the nonelite respondents followed four steps. We first posed a filter question, one designed less to estimate public preferences with precision than to get a sense of how many respondents had any opinions at all on the family planning issue. The question reads: "Some people feel that the government should prohibit the use of contraceptives [literally, should prohibit people from using devices for not having children]. Others feel that the government should distribute contraceptives free of charge to those who do not want to have children. Which of the two statements is closer to your own opinion?" The question is not a good measure of opinion on a complex issue, since it reduces alternatives to a forced choice between extremes. It does, however, serve the purpose of gauging the proportion of respondents who were willing, even when qualifying their answers, to state an opinion on the issue. Nonresponse was quite low on the question, and this is a promising sign of the salience of the issue generally. The entire distribution goes as follows: prohibit, 18 percent, and distribute, 58 percent; 12 percent thought it a private matter and 2 percent had other responses; 8 percent responded that they did not know and 2 percent refused to answer (N = 1,314). While the clustering of the majority of opinions in the "distribute"

61

category is of some interest, since it suggests that most Brazilians are not opposed to government-sponsored family planning policies, the main contribution of this preliminary tabulation is simply in demonstrating that nonresponse, of whatever type, is very low indeed. Most Brazilians have an opinion on the issue, and as we shall see this stands in contrast to their relative lack of information on other, less-immediate controversies.7 A second point should also be noted. Even though the alternative was not explicitly offered, fully 12 percent of the respondents volunteered that the government has no business mixing in the area of family planning and that birth control should remain a private matter to be settled at the discretion of couples. The 2 percent who gave other responses may be considered as adding to this category, for their answers are typically of the following sort: "The government should only orient but not interfere"; "It's God's will"; and "The problem does not exist: those who don't want children can buy contraceptives on their own." Such responses indicate that the issue itself cannot be properly construed as an either-or controversy. It is this sort of problem that our more finely graded item about attitudes toward family planning is designed to reduce. Respondents who passed the filter question were asked: "In comparison with the way things are nowadays in Brazil, do you think that the government should: 1. Prohibit the use of contraceptives? 2. Allow the use of contraceptives only in special cases? 3. Leave things as they are? 4. Facilitate the acquisition of contraceptives by people who do not want to have more children? 5. Distribute contraceptives free of charge to people who do not want to have more children?" This question is our measure of preferences about the government's role in family planning. It moves beyond a harsh dichotomy toward a continuum of specific options. In this sense, it is comparable to the broad birth control (controle de natalidade) item used with the elites, although we did not present the mass respondents with a 100-point scale; this kind of metric did not seem to be well understood by larger portions of the public.8 The primary objective of the question was to tap public opinion about the governments role in family planning and not merely preferences about birth control or family size, but the question is not about population planning in toto either. We did not elicit the views of nonelite respondents about other methods of population planning besides contraceptives. Hence, while we can assess something more than attitudes toward family planning as an

62 • PUBLIC OPINION

individual decision, we measured a good deal less than preferences about birth control in all its ramifications. Next, immediately after recording the policy preferences of the respondents, we asked them to state the reasons for their choices. The discursive explanations were registered verbatim, just as was done for the elites. The value of the probes is that they enable us to overcome, at least to some extent, the limitations of our single-item measure of family planning preferences. In particular, they allow us to see how ordinary Brazilians, as compared to elites, define the issue. Fourth, we asked the respondents to tell us how important the issue was "to people like yourself." They ranked the issue along a five-point scale, ranging from not important at all, of little importance, more or less important, very important, to extremely important. We now turn to this indicator of salience. The Popular Priority of Family Planning Table 3.1 compares the importance attributed to birth control with that given to six other political, economic, and social issues. The left column displays the percentage of respondents having no opinion on each of the issues. In the center is the mean importance attributed to the issues, where zero is the minimum and four the maximum, and where those without an opinion are given a score of zero. The right column also contains importance ratings, but here the "don't knows" have been removed from the calculations. The results are both striking and virtually self-explanatory. The percentage of nonopinion is lowest, never exceeding 20 percent, on three issues that seem close to home: agrarian reform ("don't knows" make up 8 percent), birth control (12 percent), and income redistribution (19 percent). Once past these bread-and-butter issues, we are in the realm of economic (foreign investment) and political (internal subversion) controversies that are less tangible to many Brazilians, whatever their importance to the elites.9 One-third of the respondents have no opinion about foreign investment—that is, about whether Brazil should permit more capital inflows from the outside or restrict the flow—and nearly half (49 percent) do not take a position on the question of internal subversion.10 Later we shall explore in detail the reasons for the mass public's relatively high awareness of the birth control issue. Even now, however, there can be little doubt of its salience and of the contrast this salience sets up with the agenda of the elites. The importance ratings confirm the tendency for ordinary Brazilians to be more concerned with bread-and-butter issues than with explicitly

63

Table 3.1. The Salience of Seven Issues in Public Opiniona

Issue Agrarian reform Birth control Income redistribution Control of labor Foreign investment Political opposition Internal subversion

Percentage without Opinion

Average Importance ("Don't Knows" Scored as No Importance)

Average Importance (Excluding "Don't Knows")

8 12 19 34 33 39 49

3.0 2.4 2.4 1.9 1.8 1.5 1.4

3.1 2.7 2.9 2.8 2.7 2.5 2.8

Importance scores range from 0 (no importance) to 4 (great importance).

political or remote economic questions.11 In this regard, classifying the "don't knows" as giving no importance to the issues is a reasonable procedure since, almost by definition, those without an opinion are not likely to consider an issue as crucial to them even if it objectively affects their interests. The issue of the government's involvement in birth control ranks very close to the top of the popular agenda, just below agrarian reform and tied with income redistribution. By contrast, controversies such as those over the relations between the government and the opposition fall to the bottom of the popular agenda. The evidence in Figure 3.1 permits us to answer the second part of the original question—namely, the extent to which the salience of issues changes according to educational levels. In effect, the data test two things: first, the degree to which education operates across the board, over more than one issue, so that the less educated are in general less tuned into issues of any sort and, second, the degree to which interissue differences emerge across the educational hierarchy, so that certain issues are less salient than others regardless of differences in educational levels. For the sake of simplicity, Figure 3.1 contrasts the incidence of "don't knows" for two quite different issues—birth control and the combat against subversion—by levels of education. It is evident, first of all, that a virtually monotonic, inverse relation exists between issue awareness and education, no matter what the issue. This fact is not surprising. If anything else emerged from the data, we would have grave doubts about their validity. The fact that nearly one-

64 • PUBLIC OPINION

quarter of the illiterates do not voice an opinion about birth control may be a bit puzzling, since such nonresponse seems at first glance to be on the high side for a presumably meaningful, immediate issue. The question, however, has to do with the role of the government in family planning, and the government is a distant entity for illiterate, unpoliticized Brazilians. In any event, the incidence of nonresponse regarding family planning need only be compared to the huge amount of ignorance about the subversion issue to get an idea of the comparative salience of and interest in the government's role in the provision of family planning services. Second, while issue awareness increases regularly with education, the association is much more pronounced for subversion than for birth control. More than three-quarters of the illiterates have no opinion about sub-

Fig. 3.1. The incidence of nonopinion on the issues of subversion and birth control by educational level.

65

version; the percentage drops to under 20 percent among the university educated. The upward trend of awareness associated with education in the case of birth control is substantially milder.12 The contrast demonstrates a point so obvious it may be easy to overlook. Birth control is of pressing concern to most Brazilians, while issues with a more direct political content generally stay in the forefront of the consciousness only of a thin stratum of well-educated persons. Lacking political guidance and information to understand how their interests are affected by broader issues of politics, the uneducated and unpoliticized majority are likely to confine their attention to policy results whose effect upon their lives they cannot fail to recognize. Interest in family planning as a problem to be dealt with by the government in the here-and-now is not only high, it is also fairly uniform across social strata, compared to the sharp variation in concern with less-immediate issues exhibited by Brazilians at different rungs of the social ladder. The fact that many Brazilians attach great importance to the birth control issue does not mean that an equal number favor antinatalist programs. Conceivably, some of those who think the issue is important oppose antinatalist measures promulgated by the government. We have yet to see how ordinary Brazilians define the issue. The evidence presented so far leads us to believe that most respondents not only think that birth control is important, but favor government action in support of family planning, and that they conceptualize the issue from a rather concrete, social welfare perspective. Let us examine the validity of these expectations.

CONTOURS OF OPINION Basic Distribution Family planning, sponsored by the government, not only ranks near the top of the agenda of the public in Brazil; it is also a popular preference, much more so than pronatalist alternatives. To a degree, this finding is unexceptionable. Given the high salience of the issue, it is improbable that many Brazilians would be opposed to some sort of governmental assistance with family planning, even though one can imagine situations in which corollary issues, such as abortion, might be quite polarized, with advocates at one extreme and the other viewing the issue with equal intensity. Let us consider first the overall distribution of preferences on the government's role in family planning: out of 1,314 responses 33 percent favored distribution; 18 percent, the status quo; 15 percent, facilitation;

66 • PUBLIC OPINION

12 percent, prohibition; 11 percent favored it in special cases; 10 percent did not know; and 2 percent refused to answer. Eliminating the "don't knows" and the refusals, we obtain the following distribution, which will be used throughout this analysis: 38 percent, distribute freely; 21 percent, status quo; 17 percent, facilitate; 13 percent, prohibit; and 11 percent, special cases (N = 1,153). Clearly, public opinion tilts toward the antinatalist side; the modal alternative is that favoring free distribution of contraceptives by the government. The total of those favoring any antinatalist policy reaches a majority (56 percent); the pronatalist minority is 24 percent. The remaining onefifth are satisfied with the status quo. These results are purely descriptive and, as such, ambiguous. We have yet to examine the rationales behind the various choices and to explore their determinants. Before we do this, however, let us describe the distribution of opinion on the legalization of divorce, an issue that, like family planning, has strong moral connotations and will be used for comparative purposes to estimate the distinctiveness of the structure of relations among factors influencing preferences on birth control. Respondents were asked: "Are you in favor of or against the legalization of divorce?" with the following results: Completely against, 35 percent; completely in favor, 33 percent; somewhat in favor, 9 percent; somewhat against, 8 percent; neither for nor against, 5 percent; refusal, 1 percent; do not know, 9 percent (N = 1,307). With nonresponses set aside the results were as follows: completely against, 39 percent; completely in favor, 37 percent; somewhat in favor, 10 percent; somewhat against, 9 percent; neither for nor against, 5 percent (N = 1,178). Neither the divorce nor the family planning items generate much nonresponse; for both issues the portion of Brazilians who for one reason or another fail to state an opinion is on the order of 10 percent. In addition, preferences on the issues are significantly, if not very tightly, correlated (r = .20). But there are substantial differences between the issues. The most striking is that preferences about the legalization of divorce are considerably more polarized than are opinions about the government's role in family planning. At least in 1973, there was no popular consensus about the legalization of divorce and, in fact, opinions tended to cluster at the extremes of the preference continuum.13 The divorce issue, then, offers a useful standard of comparison for our analysis of the correlates of opinion on birth control. In broad terms the issues are similar, but they are sufficiently different to enable us to identify some of the distinctive properties of each. The clearest substantive difference is that the divorce question has much less of a welfare, ser-

67

vice connotation than birth control. The fact that divorce has been an issue of controversy throughout the postwar period may also have lent it a more expressly public flavor, even though the birth control issue does involve judgments about the role of the public authorities. With these preliminaries in mind, let us examine how ordinary Brazilians interpret, in their own words, the issue of birth control. Defining the Issue We were able to discern a dozen different rationales among the nonelite respondents for their choices concerning the government's role regarding birth control. The number of rationales tends to err on the high side. Not all of them are mutually exclusive and, as with the elites, differences between the rationales are often rather fine than categorical. Nevertheless, the detailed coding permits us to retrieve a good deal of the subtlety in popular thinking about the issue without being swamped by information. Table 3.2 provides a summary of the rationales, together with the average preference score associated with each one and the percentage of respondents using the various rationales. In one respect, the results are not very discrepant from those presented for the elites. Many of the reasons that the elites use to justify their positions are used in the mass sample. Some nonelite respondents feel that excess population may slow economic growth; others believe that the use of contraceptives is a private matter and that the government should keep away from the area, and so on. Moreover, inspection of the mean preference scores reveals that the rationales used at either end of the scale are roughly similar. Some ordinary Brazilians, like some of the elites themselves, are quite concerned about the growing social inequities that they feel are caused by sheer numbers, and others are worried about the threat to national development implied by underpopulation. For all this, however, differences weigh more heavily than similarities in comparing elite and mass opinion. In the first place, there are a few rationales that, while fairly common among the nonelite respondents, do not occur at all among the elites. For example, a nontrivial portion—7 percent—of the mass sample objects to the use of contraceptives on the grounds that they pose a health hazard to women. This objection does not appear in our elite sample, even though it is a consideration mentioned by pronatalists in the Brazilian medical profession.14 Another contrast between mass and elite opinion is, however, the most important. Not only is the distribution of mass opinion more favorable to antinatalist policies than the overall cast of elite preferences; the mass respondents also define the issue much more often as a question of the delivery of services, especially to the poor.15 Government-sponsored

68 • PUBLIC OPINION

Table 3.2. Average Popular Preference on the Birth Control Issue by Rationale of Preference (High score = antinatalist) Rationale Growing misery, inequity Slow economic growth Child protection Birth control as everyone's fight Enlightenment, gradual orientation Class imbalance, control for the poor Private matter Welfare not control Laissez-faire Threat to women's health Morally wrong, church opposed Plenty of resources, national power, and security Totals

Average Preference

Percentage of Respondents

3.8 3.6 3.4

16 2 36

3.3

4

3.1

3

2.5 1.9 1.3 0.8

3 12 2 2

0.7

7

0.5

6

0.4 2.6

7 100 (N = 1,012)

family planning is favored because, although not exclusively because, it is seen as involving the provision of a social welfare service. The crucial figures for determining the major differences between mass and elite views on the issue are, thus, not so much the mean preferences, even though these give a good idea of the general pronatalist and antinatalist feelings between the strata, but rather the frequencies showing the relative popularity of the various rationales. The felt need to populate the country, for example, is an important reason among the elites for opposing antinatalist measures. It is less popular among ordinary Brazilians. Moreover, specific concern with national sovereignty and power are so uncommon in the sample of public opinion that we do not establish a separate category for this rationale; instead, the handful of responses that fall under this rubric are combined with the "empty spaces" line of reasoning.

69

To say that ordinary Brazilians tend to view the issue of the government's role in family planning from something less than a macroperspective is not to claim that they interpret it in wholly individual, personalistic terms. Proportionately about as many nonelites (16 percent) as elites (15 percent) are worried about the poverty and inequities that they feel accompany high rates of fertility. This rationale entails a sense of social distribution that cannot be reduced to an individual problem. Yet it is evident that most Brazilians are not concerned with what to them are the intangibles of economic growth and national power in the aggregate. Only 2 percent of the nonelite respondents refer to the possibility that population growth may slow down economic development, whereas the same rationale is cited by 10 percent of the elites. The most popular rationale among the general public, accounting for over a third of the responses, mentions the need to limit the number of children so that families can raise them with some hope that they will not add to the numbers of the poor and, in the process, become economic and possibly criminal marginals. On the whole, this is a restatement of the social equity argument. Such rationales are plainly more common among the public than among the elites. Some of the responses favoring antinatalist measures may be read as politically naive. Family planning as a means to control crime among the poor may seem to be both a simplistic and reactionary rationale. This judgment, however, should be set in the context of the quotidian experience of the urban poor in Brazil. If most petty criminals are from the lower class, so too, it is likely, are their victims. Moreover, the line of reasoning that proposes "birth control for the poor" has a distributive connotation. The message is that the lower classes should be given the same access to contraceptives as the rich now enjoy. The message is distributive rather than repressive or radical.16 The idea that most Brazilians look upon family planning and the government's role in the area in short-run to middle-run terms is, of course, compatible with the evidence presented earlier regarding the comparatively low salience of more remote economic and political issues. In order to round out the argument, it is useful to quote from the interviews. The statements are taken from the follow-up probes, and they are listed in the same order as the one used in Table 3.2. For the most part, they are selfexplanatory. 1. Growing Misery, Inequity: "Family planning is needed to help the poor have fewer children, because they can't afford to buy contraceptives themselves. There are people who have so many children they can't support them. The government should help them by making it easier for them to get contraceptives." 70 • PUBLIC OPINION

"There are already a lot of people in this country, and there are many women with children suffering, going hungry." 2. Slow Economic Growth: "If the population keeps growing, there won't be any capital left to build schools and hospitals and other things we need." 3. Child Protection: "I have two children and I want them to go to the university. But if I had three, I would have to make even more sacrifices than I do now. It is a shame that some people just don't care and keep on having children." "The government should have this program, to cut down on the number of abandoned children." "It would be good if the government could reduce the number of delinquents and criminals. There are too many people with so many children that they can't raise them, and they turn into criminals. If the government helped them to have fewer children, the number of criminals would go down." 4. Birth Control as Everyone's Right: "It's an individual option and the government should distribute contraceptives to people who can't afford to buy them. The government should distribute these things because poor people don't have a chance; only the rich can afford to limit the number of children they have." "If the government distributed contraceptives, it would avoid a lot of problems among young people nowadays. You wouldn't have so many abortions that end in a mess or people taking all kinds of medicine that ruin their health." 5. Enlightenment, Gradual Orientation: "The government should have a campaign to orient people. From the moral point of view, the problem should be settled by each couple. The government should only inform people through educational programs in the schools, in the churches, and on television and radio. It is a moral problem. To forbid family planning would be very difficult, and to give contraceptives away would not work because of the low level of education of most people. The government should watch over these things, because there are dangers for women and for children." 6. Class Imbalance, Control for the Poor: "The government should tell people how many children they can have in accordance with the wages they earn." "Only the poor should be allowed to use contraceptives. Anyone who 71

can afford to raise children should have lots of them, so that Brazil has enough people." "For the poor, the government should distribute contraceptives free of charge, but it shouldn't allow it for the rich, because they have enough money to raise children." 7. Private Matter, Individual Choice: "There's no law saying how many children couples can or can't have. The government has nothing to do with it." "The government shouldn't interfere with this. It is the people who have the children who should decide. The government should neither prohibit nor help." 8. Welfare, not Control: "Having children is something that's been going on since the beginning of the world, and God doesn't want us to stop having children. Now, the government should improve the situation of poor people. It's important to provide food and schooling for the children, and the way things are going, it's impossible to do this. The poor don't get any support." "The government should help out the parents who can't maintain the children they already have." "The government should help, it should provide schools and jobs, so that people can have children." 9. Laissez-faire: "Nowadays we have a happy medium: not too many people, and not too few." "People who don't want children don't have to get married." "It doesn't make any difference, more people or fewer people." 10. Threat to Women's Health: "You shouldn't use these things because sooner or later it's bad for your health. And children are the happiness of parents. I don't know what effect contraceptives will have on future generations. Maybe they make you sick." 11. Morally Wrong, Church Opposed: "There are a lot of young girls who get mixed up with this business of the pill. I think that people should have children to learn what life is all about." "This is God's business, he sends the children. People should not tamper with this. Neither the government nor anybody else can go against God's will."

72 • PUBLIC OPINION

12. Empty Spaces, Plenty of Resources, National Security: "The important thing for the country is that people have children, so that in case of war there will be enough people to defend the country." "The country is so large that the population should increase geometrically. Brazil has to be populated." In summary, not only do most ordinary Brazilians favor governmental measures that would make it easier for them to obtain contraceptives; they take this position largely out of welfare considerations. Such programs tend to be viewed as mechanisms for making hard times bearable and for providing fewer children with greater opportunities. Overall, the most common notion in these interviews is that the government should make life easier for poor people with too many children and that it should find ways to prevent the economic marginalization of yet another generation of Brazilians. This demand is meliorative rather than radical, perhaps by its very nature and certainly by the tone of the interviews.

THE DETERMINANTS OF PREFERENCES ON FAMILY PLANNING AND DIVORCE The Lay of the Data The literature on fertility-related attitudes is so extensive that it is easy to come up with more than a dozen plausible predictors of orientations toward family planning, with a vast number of conceivable causal paths linking them.17 In one important sense, however, our task is facilitated by the fact that we are primarily concerned with opinions about the role of the government in family planning and not with fertility behavior per se. Thus, instead of sorting through all the available correlates of fertilityrelated attitudes and behavior in general, we select those that seem most likely to influence such attitudes as a compound of private needs and public demands. We have argued that attitudes toward the role of the government in family planning should have a strong private component—that is, they should originate, in large measure though not completely, from a felt need for access to contraceptives and from a desire to limit family size. In partial contrast is an issue like the legalization of divorce. This issue is not without powerful moral substance; at the same time, it is a highly public issue, entailing a visible definition of social rights, and it is one that has been submitted to open political discussion for a long period in Brazil. A straightforward way to begin to estimate the supposedly more private na-

73

ture of attitudes about the government's role in family planning is to examine the impact of a comparable set of predictors on such attitudes, relative to the effects of the same variables on opinions about the legalization of divorce. Table 3.3 sets the stage for this undertaking, presenting a series of bivariate associations. It contains three dependent variables: preferences about the government's role regarding birth control, about the legalization of divorce, and about family-size ideals. The seven predictors are: sex, work-force participation of females, education, age, area of residence (urban or rural), religious denomination, and religiosity (measured by frequency of church attendance). Because the array of data is complex, it is convenient to begin our discussion by noting what does not happen. Neither work-force participation nor area of residence affects attitudes toward the government's role in family planning. Both variables are often thought to exert a powerful influence on fertility-related attitudes. Indeed, this has been shown to be the case, at least with regard to the work-force participation of females, in one study previously conducted in Brazil.18 Our data, however, do not reveal any significant impact of work-force participation where we might most expect it—that is, among females—and the effect of rural or urban residence is also negligible. Why should this be so? We suspect that there are no significant differences between rural and urban residents with respect to the government's role in family planning because there is no evident reason why either should have a distinctive bias, one way or another, when the issue is framed in terms of the extension of governmental services and programs. Whatever variation exists between the two areas is almost certainly a function of socioeconomic differentials rather than of rural or urban residence as such. Nevertheless, it is important to note that Brazilians living in rural areas are significantly more opposed to the legalization of divorce and that their desired family size is considerably larger than is the case among urban Brazilians. (The desired family-size question read: "In your opinion, what is the number of children that persons like yourself should have?") Thus, the rural and urban subcultures differ in certain respects and, at least as regards attitudes toward divorce and ideal family size, in the expected way. Again, however, these differences are substantially weakened when educational differentials are kept constant. Furthermore, working and nonworking women exhibit no consequential differences with respect to any of the variables of interest. What seems to happen is that the potentially great influences of work-force participation washes out because the kind of work in which many women engage in Brazil—for example, household service—does not usually open

74 • PUBLIC OPINION

up career and mobility tracks that encourage a reduction in childbearing or at least in family-size ideals.19 While gender role is, by itself, a powerful attitudinal predictor, we found little evidence to substantiate the notion that women's work-force participation per se has much effect on preferences about the role of the government in family planning. The data yield positive results as well. The most important of these has to do with the differential magnitude of the associations between the predictors and attitudes about the legalization of divorce and family planning. For example, the effect of religiosity, and indeed of most of the other predictors, appears to be stronger on attitudes toward divorce than on attitudes toward family planning. This finding is the first empirical sign that opinions regarding issues of prolonged public controversy, like divorce, may be more crystallized in the popular mind and, hence, easier to predict and explain than attitudes about a relatively new issue like family planning. This difference is not merely statistical. It also suggests that social norms and institutions can reinforce beliefs and practices in areas where deviations from prescribed behavior are detectable. In more exclusively intimate areas, such as birth control, couples have greater discretion, and their attitudes toward family planning are therefore less susceptible to straightforward explanation. The apparent exception to this rule seems to be age, or whatever it is that age represents about the life cycle and generational, historically specific differences. The bivariate relation between age and family planning orientations is slightly larger than the corresponding association between age and opinions about the legalization of divorce. On reflection, the supposed exception is not very surprising. One explanatory route, which we do not follow, is that age constitutes a dim surrogate of traditional, conservative social norms. Older Brazilians are on the average less educated than younger. Thus, to a degree, age may carry with it distinctive cultural and social norms and values that vary from one generation to the next. The trouble with this argument is that age itself is not a norm; it is at best a remote proxy of period-specific beliefs. In addition, it is extremely difficult to pinpoint truly generational discrepancies with cross-sectional materials such as ours. It is possible, however, to gain a purchase on the meaning of the impact of age by considering it not in terms of intergenerational differences but as an indicator of changing needs for birth control during the life cycle. The need for family planning may increase as individuals enter the life-cycle squeeze, a stage during which it becomes difficult to balance family resources and family demands engendered by the number and ages

75

Table 3.3. Social Bases of Support for Birth Control and Divorce: Bivariate Associations

Social Groupings Sex Men Women Women's employment Working women Nonworking women Education Illiterate Incomplete elementary Complete elementary Ginásio Colégio University Age 18 to 29 30 to 39 40 to 49 50 to 59 60 to 69 70 and older

Percentage of the Sample

Percentage in Favor of Birth Controla

49 51

49 60

35 65

61 60

24

50

40

3.6

20 26 14 10 6

52 54 58 59 65

32 43 60 67 70

3.5 3.2 2.8 2.8 3.0

38 24 24 10 8 2

62 59 52 37 42 17

ETA2

Percentage in Favor of the Legalization of Divorceb

.01

ETA2

Average Ideal Number of Children

— 46 46

—

— 3.2 3.2

— 52 43

.01

— 3.1 3.2

.06

.03

.03

.02 54 47 47 32 33 40

ETA2

.06 2.8 3.1 3.5 3.8 4.0 3.9

Area of residence Urban Rural Religionc Devout Catholics Nominal Catholics Protestants Spiritualists No religion Church attendanced Daily Weekly Monthly Annually Never a

— 76 24

56 54

47 34 7 4 8

50 61 47 53 63

2 39 34 21 4

16 50 58 60 69

.06 56 31

.02

.07 34 60 45 67 59

.02

.02 3.5 3.0 3.3 2.7 2.7

.05 45 36 49 55 81

Percentageof respondents in favor of governmental action to facilitate the acquisition of or to distribute free contraceptives. Percentage of respondents who are somewhat or completely in favor of the legalization of divorce. c Those who reported other religious affiliation (less than 1 percent) are excluded. d Includes only Catholics and Spiritualists. b

.04 3.0 3.9

.02 3.6 3.4 3.3 3.1 2.6

of children. After this stage, the need for family planning is likely to taper off.20 The pertinence of the life-cycle view is that it helps account for the comparative prominence of age as an influence on family planning attitudes, relative to the weaker impact of more purely normative indicators, such as religiosity. While the stage in the life cycle is not likely to render long-standing religious values inoperative, especially when it is remembered that the family planning issue does involve, however partially, a public dimension, it is not difficult to see how economic pressures, peaking at certain periods of the life cycle of individuals, may bear on reproductive decisions over and above culturally induced constraints. By contrast, attitudes toward divorce are not nearly so subject to change in the economic environment of individuals over the course of the life cycle. If age were primarily an indicator of tradition or modern norms, we would expect it to operate with equal strength on opinions about divorce as well. This does not happen.21 Several other patterns in Table 3.3 deserve mention. One of the most intriguing involves the comparatively mild effect of education on attitudes toward family planning. The small fraction of Brazilians with university education is clearly better disposed to government programs favoring family planning than the less educated (even though fully half of the illiterates are also antinatalists by this standard). Yet the impact of formal education is weak. The influence of schooling on family planning seems all the more insignificant when contrasted with its strong impact on attitudes toward divorce. In the latter instance, the impact is for the most part quite linear and secularizing; nearly three-quarters of university-educated Brazilians favor the legalization of divorce. In large measure, the mild influence of formal education corresponds to what by now should be familiar about family planning attitudes— namely, that they do not change in lock step with variations in standard indicators. Something else is also at work. If education exerted only a secularizing influence on fertility-related attitudes, it would strongly drive down, for example, ideals about family size. It does not do this. Desired family size, which undergoes a linear decline as education increases, shows a slight rise among the university educated. There appear to be good reasons for the mixed results. One is that education is indeed a secularizing agent, but along with this impulse come two countervailing forces. First is the fact that education is closely associated with economic position, so that those who are well-off can afford more children, even if they adopt positive attitudes toward family planning as a kind of civil right. Second is the fact that the better-educated Catholics are probably more finely attuned to the teachings of the Church

78 • PUBLIC OPINION

and, perhaps, more receptive to its sophisticated profamilism, if not its pronatalism. The upshot of this set of forces is that the effects of education—secularizing, economic, and cognitive—seem to offset one another. These preliminary results suggest, then, that attitudes toward the role of the government in family planning may in fact be more complex and more private and, hence, more difficult to predict than opinions about the legalization of divorce. They indicate, further, that age, as a proxy for life-cycle pressures, may be a better predictor of orientations toward family planning than formal education itself. At a minimum, the idea that education has an exclusively secularizing effect on fertility-related attitudes in Brazil does not receive much support. Because they merit special attention, we have so far said little about two critical elements in the data. One is the role of religion and religiosity; the other is the indicator of ideal family size. Let us consider each of these in turn. Religion and Religiosity Roman Catholics constitute by far the largest religious group in Brazil; more than 80 percent of our respondents identified themselves as such. Clearly, however, the declaration of affiliation with one or another religious denomination does not suffice as a measure of religious commitment and activism. Thus, when we asked respondents whether they considered themselves practicing Catholics or Catholics merely by virtue of baptism and upbringing, the incidence of devout Catholics in the sample dropped to less than 50 percent, with another 33 percent identifying themselves as Catholics in name only. Furthermore, only 40 percent of the respondents claimed to attend mass weekly, a duty whose fulfilment provides a working definition of practicing. While the Church is a formidable presence in Brazilian society, its penetration of that society can hardly be called extensive.22 The next largest religious group are the Protestants, including both members of mainstream denominations and Pentecostals. The two groups are distinctive entities, even though we have combined them because the total number of Protestants is quite small. The traditional Protestant churches in Brazil appeal mostly to the middle class. The Pentecostals, on the other hand, have been successful in attracting a large lower-class following. Paradoxically, their simpler, more emotional style is closer to popular, nominally Catholic religiosity, and this fact helps explain much of their success.23 Spiritualists come in third place numerically. They are also a mixture, including lower-class followers of syncretic Afro-Brazilian cults as well as Kardecistas, whose social composition tends to be somewhat more middle

79

class. We have almost certainly underestimated the true proportion of Spiritualists. An undetermined number of them are likely to claim to be Catholic unless prodded to report whether they also participate in the rituals of the Kardecist temples or Umbanda centers. This number may be fairly high especially in the case of the Umbandistas, whose syncretic devotions incorporate references to the Virgin and the saints and give them characteristics similar to those of ancestral African gods or Indian spirits.24 For this reason, Spiritualists but not Protestants are included in the index of religiosity (as measured by church attendance). Since the proportion of non-Catholics is so low, it is virtually impossible to tell which differences in fertility-related attitudes that appear between Catholics and non-Catholics are attributable to genuine differences in belief and which are artifacts of sampling fluctuations. Protestants and a handful of respondents who reported other non-Catholic religious affiliations are thus excluded from analysis. The strength of Catholic identification (devout or nominal) and the religiosity gradient (measured by church attendance) are used interchangeably as predictors of pronatalist and antinatalist sentiments, since it makes no difference statistically which one is employed. For our purposes, the most important feature of religiosity is that it does not seem to be an overwhelmingly powerful predictor of fertilityrelated preferences. For example, except among the 2 percent of the respondents who claim to attend church services daily, receptivity to government-sponsored family planning programs is not particularly low. Fifty percent of those attending church on a weekly basis support some form of population policy, and the proportion rises regularly as church attendance falls off. Not even devout Catholics seem to be strenuously pronatalist. Religiosity, however, does seem to be a fairly strong determinant of preferences about family size; the association is quite linear; the most devout reporting the largest ideal family size and those without any religion the lowest. We explore this pattern in the next section. A Note on Ideal Family Size While religion is not a supremely powerful predictor of family planning preferences, it may act as a conditioning factor, establishing norms about family size. These values are likely, in turn, to exert a strong influence on attitudes about the government's role in population policy. This notion fits well with our presumption that public demands in the area of family planning should derive mainly from private needs and expectations. The problem with tapping family-size ideals, as various analysts have noted, is that it is often difficult to disentangle the concept from a post hoc rationalization of the number of children already born to a couple, as op-

80 • PUBLIC OPINION

Table 3.4. Differences between Ideal and Actual Family Size by Number of Living Children (Currently married women, ages 18 to 49) Number of Living Children

Ideal Exceeds Actual Number

Ideal Equals Actual Number

Actual Exceeds Ideal Number

0 1 2 3 4 5 or 6 7 or more

100 86 44 21 27 2 2

— 14 56 65 31 30 4

— — — 14 42 68 94

(N (N (N (N (N (N (N

Percentage in category

46

34

20

(N = 330)

Total (100%) = = = = = = =

32) 73) 81) 53) 37) 31) 23)

posed to a representation of intended family size.25 Since the measure is crucial to our larger objective of determining the correlates of family planning preferences, it is worth examining this problem in some detail. One way to evaluate the validity of the measure of ideal family size is to match it against the number of living children reported by respondents. Table 3.4 does this for currently married women between 18 and 49 years of age. For each category of living children, ranging from none to seven or more, the congruence between ideal and actual family size is calculated. This procedure yields three figures: ideal greater than actual, equivalence between ideal and actual, and a surplus of actual number of children over the ideal. Since the results for male respondents are virtually identical to those for females, they are omitted. At first glance, our results may seem discouraging to advocates of family planning in Brazil. Nearly half of the women state that they want more children than they currently have, and this is the modal category. It is just as clear, however, that ideal family size is not simply, or even mainly, a rationalization of the number of children that individuals already have. While all of the women currently without children state that they want to have some children, and, indeed, while those with only one also state that they want more, the excess of ideal over actual family size diminishes rapidly as the actual parity increases. If there is any number of children at which norms and reality come into balance, it is, approximately, three.26

81

Once the actual number of children passes three, the proportion of women reporting that they have too many children becomes quite large. Thus, for example, over 40 percent of the women with four children claim they have too many; nearly 70 percent of those with five or six say the same thing; and among those with seven or more children, the figure reaches almost 95 percent. Ideal family size, then, is not necessarily an after-the-fact rationalization of the circumstances of childbearing. At least by the time they have had four or more children, Brazilian women become increasingly aware that they may have too many.27 Who, more precisely, are the women who feel that they want more or fewer children? Table 3.5 helps answer this question. They vary by age, the older women having on the average more children than they want; and they vary strikingly according to achieved parity. Among those women who feel they have too many children, the average number of living children is nearly six, while 2.7 is the average number of children for women who feel they have enough. Women who are in the surplus and deficit categories also have distinctive social characteristics. Only 15 percent of those who are satisfied with the number of children they have are illiterate, but fully 45 percent of those who feel they have too many children cannot read or write. This fact belies the notion that uneducated women in Brazil actually want to have

Table 3.5. Some Correlates of Congruence in Family Size (Currently married women, ages 18 to 49) Congruence in Family

Characteristics of Family Size Categories Average age Average desired number of children Average number of living children Percentage illiterate Percentage reporting family income inadequate a a

Actual Equals Ideal Number 35

Actual Falls Short of Ideal Number

Size

Actual Exceeds Ideal Number

30

2.7

3.5

2.9

2.7 15

1.4 25

5.8 45

46

55

79

The question was: "Does your family make enough money to get by or not?"

82 • PUBLIC OPINION

36

many children. What they want is control over their reproductive behavior; almost all the women in this category favor government action in the area of family planning. Similarly, nearly 80 percent of the women with "too many children" feel economically deprived. The greater the number of children, the greater the dependency ratio and the harder it is for the family to survive with a modicum of social well-being. In short, family-size ideals seem to be an adequate expression of the number of children that Brazilian women want and not simply a measure of the number of children that they feel they have no choice but to bear. As the number of living children increases—in particular, as this number gets beyond three—the sense of hardship becomes more acute, as does the sense that fewer children would be better. It is striking, furthermore, that the perception of having excess children is especially marked among the least-educated females—that is, among those whose fertility tends to be highest largely because their control over fertility decisions and their access to contraceptives are low. For all this, it must be remembered that family-size ideals are not especially low among the less-educated females. Indeed, as we saw earlier, they tend to be somewhat higher among the less-educated than among the more-educated women. The comparative disadvantages of undereducation are strikingly illustrated in Table 3.6, which compares the ideal and actual family size for women along different rungs of the educational hierarchy. In order to specify the impact of education, we have further divided the respondents between devout and nominal Catholics. The procedure also enables us to estimate the influence of religion on ideal and actual family size. It should be noted, first of all, that the association between education and ideal family size is generally weak and slightly curvilinear. That is, although the desired number of children begins to decline with increasing education, this decline is arrested and begins to reverse itself at the highest educational levels. Thus, for example, for the university-educated females considered as a whole, ideal family size reaches three—not quite so large as among the illiterates but not drastically smaller either. However this may be, comparison of the differences between ideal and actual family size across the educational strata reveals the low level of control that less-educated females have over childbearing. On the average, actual family size declines quite regularly with increasing education. It is the illiterate females, regardless of their degree of religiosity, who report having children in excess of the number they want. It is crucial to note as well that religiosity does have some direct net effect on family-size ideals. It works to suppress and contain the more secularizing influence of education on both desired and actual family size. For

83

Table 3.6. Ideal and Actual Family Size by Educational Level and Religiosity (Married women, ages 18 to 49)

Educational Level

All Married Women Ideal Actual

Devout Catholic Women Ideal Actual

Nominal Catholic Women Ideal Actual

Illiterate Incomplete elementary Complete elementary Ginásio Colégio University

3.3 3.3 3.0 2.6 2.8 3.0

3.8 3.0 2.4 1.9 1.8 1.8

3.3 3.5 3.0 2.7 3.1 2.6

3.6 3.1 2.4 2.1 1.6 2.2

3.4 3.2 2.7 2.2 2.5 3.0

4.5 3.0 2.6 1.6 1.7 1.3

Grand means Proportion of variance (eta2) accounted for by education

3.1

2.8

3.2

2.7

2.9

2.9

2 (371)

10 (392)

None (166)

6 (178)

9 (131)

19 (133)

N

example, among devout women the impact of education on preferences about the number of children is insignificant and on the actual number of children quite modest. Among females who consider themselves only nominal Catholics, however, the effect of education is much more pronounced. For example, education accounts for nearly 20 percent of the variance in actual family size and for almost 10 percent of the variance in ideal family size among the nominal Catholics. Without doubt, some of the falloff in fertility among highly educated females can be attributed to age; the university-educated women tend to be younger than their less-educated peers, and many of them have most of their childbearing years ahead of them. In addition, as we have noted, the ideal family size of highly educated Brazilian females is still above replacement level, even though they have generally greater control over their actual fertility than the less educated. Religion, therefore, may not serve as a brake on reductions in actual fertility even among devout Catholics. Yet it clearly contributes to the preservation of a large family norm.28 A Closer Look at the Effects of Education and Religiosity We have seen that both education and religiosity influence fertility preferences and fertility behavior. Education enables couples to exercise genuine choice over childbearing decisions, so that the most highly educated Bra-

84 • PUBLIC OPINION

zilian women rarely have more children than they want, even if their ideal family size is substantial and even when religiosity raises standards of what constitutes the desirable number of children for the average family. The question now becomes: to what extent do religiosity and education, along with other variables, influence attitudes about the government's role in family planning? The customary way to answer such a question is to elaborate a structural model in which the direct and indirect links between the relevant variables are specified and estimated. We take this approach in the next section. It is one thing, however, to state multiple relations in statistical form; it is another to visualize their operation. In order to prepare the way for the more general model, let us examine the relative effects of two primary variables, education and religiosity, on attitudes toward family planning and divorce. Table 3.7 shows the impact of education on attitudes about the government's role in family planning for each of the two major categories of religiosity: practicing and nominal Catholics. Table 3.8 does the same for attitudes toward the legalization of divorce. For both issues, education acts as a liberating influence. By and large, better-educated Brazilians are more likely than those with less schooling to favor government-sponsored family planning and the legalization of divorce. At the same time, religiosity acts as a brake on this influence. Compare, for example, the relation between education and attitudes toward the legalization of divorce among devout and nominal Catholics. As education increases among the devout Catholics, the proportion of respondents who are actually opposed to legalizing divorce declines, although the association is not impeccably monotonic. In fact, the difference between the least-educated and most-educated devout Catholics is on the order of 20 percent. Thus, religiosity does not completely suppress the liberalizing impact of education. Yet it is among the nominal Catholics that education gains substantial force. The difference between the least and the most educated, regarding their opinions about divorce, reaches roughly 40 percent, about twice the size of the corresponding difference among devout Catholics. Nominal, university-educated Catholics are secular in everything but name. Nine out of ten of them support the legalization of divorce, whereas only about half of the devout, university-educated Catholics support such a move. It is not as if devout Catholics are any less educated than those who are Catholic merely in name. The association between education and religiosity is virtually nonexistent (r = - . 0 5 ) . This fact alone serves to dispel the more simplistic caricatures of the supposed secularizing repercussions of education on religiosity.

85

Table 3.7. Attitudes about Government's Role in Birth Control as a Function of Education, Controlling for Religiosity (Percentage) Educational Level

Oppose

Devout Catholics As Is Favor

Total (100%)

Illiterate Incomplete elementary Complete elementary Ginásio Colégio University

33 26 27 25 34 11

23 23 21 18 20 34

44 51 52 57 46 55

(N (N (N (N (N (N

All respondents

28

22

50

(N = 517)

= = = = = =

111) 127) 146) 63) 45) 30)

Oppose

Nominal Catholics As Is Favor

Total (100%)

25 23 22 12 15 7

12 20 21 28 17 22

63 57 57 60 67 71

(N (N (N (N (N (N

19

20

61

(N = 392)

= = = = = =

84) 58) 99) 75) 50) 26)

Table 3.8. Attitudes toward the Legalization of Divorce as a Function of Education, Controlling for Religiosity (Percentage) Education Level

Oppose

Devout Catholics As Favor Is

Total (100%) = = = = = =

Oppose

Nominal Catholics As Is Favor

Total (100%)

Illiterate Incomplete elementary Complete elementary Ginásio Colégio University

68 75 62 43 48 43

6 3 4 5 2 10

26 22 34 52 50 47

(N (N (N (N (N (N

109) 124) 152) 68) 48) 34)

46 40 36 39 15 8

6 12 6 3 4 3

48 48 58 58 81 89

(N (N (N (N (N (N

= 78) = 65) = 101) = 78) = 53) = 27)

All respondents

61

5

34

(N = 535)

34

6

60

(N = 400)

Rather, it is mainly among those whose Catholicism is frail to begin with that the secularizing impact of education takes hold. Educated, devout Catholics are more progressive than their uneducated brethren, but they are still cautious. The most telling indication of this difference is that the progressivism of the most highly educated devout Catholics ends where that of the least educated nominal Catholics begins. About 50 percent of the well-educated practicing Catholics favor the legalization of divorce; so do about 50 percent of the illiterate nominal Catholics. In Table 3.7, where the dependent variable is opinion about the government's role in family planning, the influence of both education and religiosity is less striking, although still tangible. For example, the difference between the least and the most educated, practicing and nominal alike, with respect to birth control preferences is slight, about 10 percent. So is the difference between nominal and practicing Catholics, regardless of education. The important aspect of Table 3.7 involves the devout Catholics. Except for the university educated in this category, somewhere between onequarter and one-third of these respondents favor a more strongly pronatalist position than they perceive the government as currently holding. Notice, however, what happens among the university-educated devout Catholics as compared to the nominal Catholics. The "as is" alternative fills up. Rather than vigorously opposing birth control policies, an alternative which is more common (although never a majority) among the devout but less-educated Catholics, the highly educated among them incline either towards a tentative antinatalism or to supporting the status quo. What does this option signify? Essentially, it implies the belief that the state should not interfere in the realm of the family. In contrast to the less-educated Catholics, whose pronatalist activism is often based on the Church's injunctions against contraception or the defense of a traditional morality regarding marriage and the family, educated, devout Catholics are fairly sensitive to the finer points of Catholic doctrine, particularly to questions involving the separation of Church and state and government intervention in the regulation of birth. In brief, about the role of the government in family planning the better-educated Catholics seem to be more enlightened but also more ambivalent than those below them on the social hierarchy. They tend to be moderates, more or less content with the laissez-faire policy of the government. By contrast, the less-educated Catholics tend toward black or white positions: either the state should outlaw birth control or it should help control the size of families. It would, of course, be erroneous to infer that all the better-educated, devout Catholics are uniformly receptive to the ministry of the Church regarding family life. This is clearly not the case, for they tend to be consid-

87

erably more reluctant to endorse the Church's prohibition against divorce than are the less educated. Almost certainly, some of the devout Catholics at the upper reaches of the stratification system exercise caution regarding family planning policy either because they themselves are quite able to dispense with government support or out of traditional religious devotion. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to suppose that a good number of highly educated, devout Catholics respond to the Church's warnings about the impropriety of government intrusion into family life, while limiting the size of their families through means to which their social position gives them access. Multivariate Models We are now in a position to evaluate the relative effects of the main predictors on orientations toward the government's role in family planning. We do this in two steps. First, we consider the determinants of family planning preferences, in comparison with the determinants of opinions about divorce, excluding ideal family size as a predictor. We then repeat the procedure, this time including ideal family size. The objective of this twostage process is to specify the degree to which private needs and expectations are in fact translated into public demands. We expect family-size ideals to be a crucial influence, although not the only significant influence, on preferences about the government's role in family planning. The results of the first stage of the analysis are presented in Table 3.9. Attitudes toward family planning and divorce are regressed on four major variables: sex, age, religiosity, and education.29 Statistically, we are more successful in explaining divorce than birth control attitudes, using the same four predictors. In neither case is the proportion of variance accounted for very high. Nevertheless, the coefficient of determination for the regression of opinions about the legalization of divorce is significantly higher than the corresponding statistic for family planning. This differential pattern supports our hunch that divorce is a more public controversy than family planning and that opinions on the issue are therefore easier to predict as a function of rather standard indicators of social position. Second, it is evident that the direct effects of the predictor variables —and by implication, the structure of the causal models—are quite different for the family planning and the divorce issues. Age, sex, and religiosity, in that order, are the main influences on birth control preferences. Education contributes nothing once the impact of the other predictors is taken into account. It should not be concluded that educational attainment has nothing to do with fertility-related preferences; the point is that its direct effects are attenuated and conditioned by other variables.

88 • PUBLIC OPINION

By contrast, education stands next only to religiosity as an influence on opinions about the legalization of divorce, whereas little is gained by considering the respondents' sex and age. At least as regards divorce, education does have a marked secularizing influence, religiosity has the opposite effect, and age and sex differences count hardly at all. When set against the results for family planning attitudes, this indicates that the influence of education is less than sweeping—that is, it does not operate across the board, generating presumably modern orientations in a variety of areas. While formal education no doubt increases the capacity to process information, it does not follow that this ability regularly produces "modernity," narrowly defined. What probably happens is that education enhances the discretionary capacity of individuals, not only because their cognitive sophistication is fairly high, but also because the social resources attendant on formal education are comparatively great, so that decisions about family size can be assumed to be more voluntaristic among the better than the less educated. Whether this discretionary capacity is translated into preferences favoring government-sponsored family planning depends not so much on education per se as it does on age (life-cycle constraints), gender role differences, religiosity, and (as we shall see) norms about family size, none of which is closely tied to education. Gender role turns out to have a powerful effect on attitudes toward family planning, while its impact is trivial with regard to divorce. Women are significantly more favorable to family planning programs than men in Brazil. Although this sex differential is expected, it is important in light of the fact that sex did not appear to play a significant role when the bivariate associations were examined earlier. Brazilian women tend to be somewhat more religious than men. Yet they have a greater stake in family planning, on the average, than men. Thus, when the conflicting influences of sex and religiosity are sorted out in the multivariate analysis, the independent effect of gender role takes on significance. We have, then, two main predictors of attitudes toward family planning: sex and age, with religiosity assuming a subsidiary position and education having no direct impact. The effect of age is not obvious and, somewhat like education, its conceptualization is ambiguous. We have suggested that age is probably a better indicator of the variable pressures associated with the life cycle than of intergenerational differences in social and familial norms. While we cannot rule out the intergenerational interpretation entirely, one way to determine the impact of age is to assess its correlation with desired family size as well as with preferences about the government's role in family planning. Table 3.10 presents the results of two regressions. In the left panels,

89

Table 3.9. Multiple Regression on Four Predictors of Attitudes toward Birth Control and Divorce a Birth Control Unstandardized Regression Level of Significanceb Coefficients

Predictors Sex Age Religiosity Education

.141 -.146 -.103 .036

.001 .001 .01 NS

Divorce Unstandardized Regression Coefficients .203 -.082 -.188 .165

5

Percentage of variance accounted for

Level of Significanceb NS .01 .001 .001 7

a Given that the measure of religiosity refers only to Catholics, Spiritualists, and those who had no religion, Protestants and members of other religions are excluded from this analysis. b T-test.

Table 3.10. Multiple Regression on Four Predictors of Birth Control Preferences and Ideal Family Size a

Predictors

Ideal Family Size Unstandardized Level of Regression Coefficients Significance

Age Religiosity Education Sex Ideal family size Percentage of variance accounted for a

See footnotes a and b to Table 3.9.

.245 .144 -.068 -.044

.001 .001 NS NS 10

Birth Control Unstandardized Regression Coefficients -.084 -.066 .019 .130 -.255

Level of Significance NS NS NS .001 .001 11

desired family size is predicted as a function of the four standard indicators. In the right panels, desired family size is itself entered as an independent variable in order to estimate what it adds to the explanation of family planning preferences. The results are striking. Age and religiosity are, in that order, the principal determinants of family-size ideals. Older, more religious Brazilians favor large families, for the most part regardless of their sex. Younger Brazilians in their childraising years and those whose religious devotion is weak or moderate tend to value smaller families. In both cases, it should be emphasized that presumed life-cycle constraints do not eliminate completely the impress of religiosity, although it is reduced. Thus, while economic and familial pressures overtake religious constraints in the determination of completed fertility, religious values continue to exercise a secondary influence on family-size norms. When ideal family size is introduced as a predictor of policy preferences, this pattern changes. Not unexpectedly, family-size norms become the primary determinant of family planning preferences.30 In a moment, we shall examine this causal structure more closely, for it is not as transparent as it may seem. Now, however, the important fact is that despite the magnitude of the influence of family-size norms, gender role retains an independent, significant influence on opinions regarding the government's role in family planning. It retains this impact not only in balance with desires about family size but also in comparison with religiosity and age, whose direct impact fades to insignificance. This is an extremely important result. While private needs do tend to filter into public demands—that is, while family-size preferences are strongly linked to opinions about family planning services—birth control is also very much a women's issue in Brazil. On the whole, it is females more than males who want the government actively to promote family planning services. Women want families as large or small as those men want; there are no significant differences between the sexes regarding ideal family size. But women decidedly want access to contraceptives and, it would appear, a measure of control over their sexual life and fertility behavior. Conversely, once ideal family size is added to the model, the effect of religiosity is attenuated to the vanishing point. In part, this is because ideal family size and religiosity are themselves correlated, albeit imperfectly (r = .16). Religiosity operates to elevate norms about family size, and it is these norms that in turn affect attitudes toward family planning. By itself, however, religiosity, like education, has little direct impact on family planning preferences. To summarize: although they are themselves loosely related, opinions

91

about divorce and family planning can best be understood according to different causal structures. Typically, attitudes toward the legalization of divorce vary as a function of straightforward traditional-secular orientations. Formal education, for example, has a discernibly secularizing influence on attitudes toward divorce, just as religiosity affects opinions in the opposite direction. The explanatory power of this simple model leaves much to be desired, but the broad outlines of the determinants of opinion on divorce are not obscure. Distinctively age-related factors, whether of the life-cycle or the generational variety, are unimportant in accounting for variations in preferences on this issue, as are male-female differences. In the case of attitudes towards the government's role in family planning, two important modifications of this pattern emerge. First, the overall impact of the conventional predictors diminishes. For example, although religiosity is negatively associated with antinatalist sympathies, the relation becomes rather weak. Second, certain factors that are irrelevant in understanding attitudes towards the legalization of divorce have a crucial effect on family planning attitudes. Age and, to a great extent, gender role are significant determinants of opinion in this area. Figure 3.2 summarizes the causal structure behind variations in opinion on birth control. The diagram systematizes three key points of the analysis.31 First, it is religiosity and age, rather than education, that condition family-size norms. Over and above whatever secularizing effects it may have, education makes fertility planning possible, but it does not determine familysize preferences. Instead, for the less educated, religiosity interacts with traditional norms, as well as life-cycle pressures, to influence ideals about the desired number of children. For the well educated, changes accom-

Fig. 3.2. Summary diagram of the determinants of attitudes toward the role of government regarding birth control.

92 • PUBLIC OPINION

panying the life cycle also exert pressure on fertility decisions but religious beliefs probably become more a matter of voluntaristic interpretation than traditional ritualism. Second, the influence of religiosity on family planning preferences is transmitted by way of norms about ideal family size. Religiosity, like ideology, is a somewhat ambiguous phenomenon. It may signify unthinking piety, sophisticated commitment, or a range of positions between these poles. It does not translate automatically into opinions about the government's role in family planning. It does, however, influence norms about family size, and these are closely tied to expectations about what the government should or should not do about family planning. Third, the only factor besides ideal family size that has a direct impact on attitudes towards the government's role in family planning is gender. In this respect, birth control is clearly a women's issue in Brazil. After the fact, perhaps, the finding is obvious. Yet it is remarkable that the sex differential maintains its direct significance (while age does not) in the midst of presumably more proximate attitudinal measures, such as religiosity and family-size ideals. The pattern is sufficiently important to examine more closely. Table 3.11 documents how family-size norms influence family planning preferences for the male and female subsamples separately. Even though the family-size norms of females are not particularly different from those of males, women are markedly more favorable to governmental programs facilitating birth control—that is, to measures that give women access to contraceptives. While women in Brazil need not be in favor of very small families, it is reasonable for them to try to exercise control over their own fertility, rather than leave such decisions to males and to the family setting generally. Thus, the crucial factor dividing males and females is not ideal family size but the force with which ideal family size is translated into family planning preferences among females. As a rule, for all females, except the exceedingly small number whose ideal family size is seven or more children, the preference for governmental assistance with birth control is greater than it is among males with equivalent family-size norms.

PROTOCONSTITUENCIES FOR FAMILY PLANNING There are two ways of looking at what our analysis has accomplished so far. One is to view it as an attempt to identify the structure of effects on attitudes about family planning and divorce. The results have not been disappointing, even though by statistical criteria most of the variance in opinions about birth control and divorce remains unaccounted for. The

93

Table 3.11. Percentage in Favor of Government Action Regarding Birth Control by Sex and Ideal Family Sizea Percentage in Favor

ofan Antinatalist Policy Ideal Number of Children

All Respondents

Men

Women

72 64 65 60 51 31 37 16

58 68 58 50 40 31 36 21

100 60 71 70 59 32 38 8

49 (N = 537)

60 (N = 595)

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 or more children Percentage in favor of an antinatalist policy (N

Proportion of variance (eta2) accounted for by ideal family size

56 = 1,082)

9

6

12

a Includes all respondents who were in favor of government action to facilitate the acquisition of or to distribute contraceptives free of charge.

unexplained variance suggests the necessity of examining with greater care: (a) the microdeterminants of fertility decisions—e.g., the structure of power and demographic decision making within the family—and (b) contextual, community, and work-place norms.32 We do not have sufficient data to explore these factors. It is evident that, while childbearing is an eminently private decision, it may be affected by factors that we have not measured, at both the microlevel and the macrolevel. A second way of considering the analysis is as a mapping operation. Here the purpose is less to identify the multiplicity of psychological and structural elements that influence attitudes toward family planning and fertility behavior itself than to classify collectivities in the Brazilian public who are recognizably favorable or opposed to government intervention in family planning. The approach is not so much causal as it is taxonomical. It is pertinent to our concern with the politics of family planning in Brazil, and it is especially relevant if we are to isolate what portions of the Brazilian public the elites might have in mind when they try to diagnose popular demands.

94 • PUBLIC OPINION

The mapping operation is simple, for the requisite information is contained in the causal analysis already conducted. Our classification uses three major variables: sex, age and religiosity and omits education not because it is entirely irrelevant but because the addition of one more indicator would unduly complicate an already large number of combinations between categories of variables. Confining the procedure, then, to three main indicators, we obtain the mapping of the Brazilian public in Table 3.12. Six principal collectivities, or protoconstituencies, as we shall call them, emerge. The results are simplified in that we ignore differences in religiosity within the younger cohort. The omission is justified because, within the younger age group, degrees of religiosity exert virtually no influence on attitudes toward family planning. It is the younger females who are the most favorably inclined to governmental programs in support of family planning. Older religious males form the most visibly conservative constituency. They are not, it should be noticed, clamorously pronatalist. Instead, they tend disproportionately to favor the status quo in opposition to government intervention in matters that they apparently interpret as pertaining to the exclusive domain of the family. In between come protoconstituencies whose preferences are mixed. Even so, the modal categories are more often than not those favoring some sort of antinatalist programs. Moreover, the evidence does not support

Table 3.12. Principal Protoconstituencies Regarding the Issue of Birth Control

Protoconstituencies Younger women Younger men Older less-religious women Older morereligious women Older less-religious men Older morereligious men

Percentage in Favorof: A More A More The Antinatalist Status Pronatalist Stance Quo Stance

Total (100%)

20 20

13 23

67 57

(N = 321) (N = 337)

28

12

60

(N = 101)

28

27

45

(N =

30

29

41

(N = 134)

30

43

27

(N =

96)

62)

95

what can be termed the little-old-ladies-in-black-shawls hypothesis— namely, that older Brazilian females, especially the pious, are inordinately fond of more and more grandchildren. Fully 45 percent of these older females favor government family planning programs. If there is one protoconstituency that is unequivocal in its conservativism, it is the older religious males.

CONCLUSION Five key points emerge from our analysis of Brazilian public opinion about the government's role in family planning. First, the issue is highly salient; it matters much more to most Brazilians than either strictly political or abstractly economic questions. It is a bread-and-butter issue. Second, family planning is perceived as important largely because it is defined as a welfare, or delivery-of-services, issue. Ordinary Brazilians are not wrought up about the destiny of the nation in the aggregate. Instead, they tend to see family planning as a mechanism for remedying concrete inequities, for helping the poor and the prolific who cannot help themselves. It is crucial to understand that birth control is not viewed in entirely personal parochial terms. It elicits distributive, hence social, values. At the same time, the issue is rarely conceptualized from the perspective of the nation as a whole. Considerations of national power, for example, are quite uncommon among the general public. Third, the majority preference in Brazil is antinatalist. This inclination is, of course, implied by the importance assigned to the issue and by the way in which it tends to be interpreted. The modal opinion is remedial rather than radical. It is not intimately tied to far-reaching redistributive demands. Instead, the support for government-sponsored antinatalist measures seems largely distributive and reformist in nature. Fourth, preferences regarding the government's role in family planning are not easy to predict. The issue retains a strongly moral, private component. This fact does not mean that fertility-related attitudes are exceptionally complex. It does indicate that the decisive influences on such attitudes have yet to be measured. Such indicators are most probably linked to the distribution of power and the decision-making process within the family and to the specific socioeconomic, community context of the family. Nevertheless, despite these difficulties and omissions, it is apparent that certain pronatalist and antinatalist constituencies exist in the Brazilian populace. Younger females favor government-supported family planning; older (and, especially, religious) males generally do not. The motives for

96 • PUBLIC OPINION

the varying preferences within these protoconstituencies are fairly clear. Women in their childbearing years want some control over their fertility, whereas older men want to ward off outside interference with demographic decision making, thereby enforcing an image of the good life that implies acquiescent women and a large, attendant family. It bears repeating that family planning is distinctively a women's issue, an issue for younger women in particular. Even religious devotion fails to deter many Brazilian women in their desire for some sort of governmental assistance in providing access to contraceptives. Just as there is a latent demand for smaller families, so too is there a large, young, and predominantly female protoconstituency for government-sponsored antinatalist measures.33 Fifth, when we examine the rationales behind the various pronatalist and antinatalist positions in the public at large, together with the major correlates of opinion on the issue, it becomes apparent that religiosity, in the sense of traditional piety and the adherence to customary norms, has an appreciable, though not overwhelming influence, on the less educated. A splintering of opinion can be detected among the illiterates, for example. They tend either to oppose birth control for moral and religious reasons or to favor it as a welfare measure; relatively few of them select the status quo. There are also many highly educated religious Catholics, and these persons tend to support the status quo. Within this group, religious conviction has an added dimension beyond sheer piety, evoking sentiments about the impropriety of government intervention in family life. Perhaps, for deeply religious educated Catholics in Brazil, the issue is one not only of the sacredness of the family, but also of the institutional autonomy of the Church.

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4 • Elite Perceptions The purpose of this chapter is to assess elite perceptions of the stands of both other elites and the public on the issue of the government's role in family planning. We know that the elites are internally divided on the question, even though it is not very polarizing. We also know that the drift of public opinion is ahead of the general position of the elites in favoring family planning measures. It remains to be seen, however, whether the elites are actually aware of these differences. The opinion that the elites ascribe to others, to the public as well as to their colleagues, constitutes an important element of the policy environment. Elite perceptions can be considered expectations, correct or otherwise, about the structure of political demands. 1 Elites, especially in an authoritarian setting, are not likely to feel that all demands have to be taken into account, much less met. Nevertheless, some demands are more important than others. If, for example, the Church stakes out a position on birth control, or divorce, it is in the interest of the elites to inform themselves of this position, even if neither the Church nor any other group can exercise veto power over policy initiatives. Similarly, it would be simplistic to characterize the elites as whimsical despots. If they can push through policy changes without offending vast portions of the Brazilian public, their own positions are likely to be more secure than if they run roughshod over popular opinion. Thus, the question is whether they have any idea of public opinion at all. In order to answer this question, we shall resort to a comparative device used in previous chapters. We shall evaluate the accuracy of elite perceptions on one other issue besides family planning—in this case, income redistribution. If we focused exclusively on the issue of the government's role in family planning, we would be able to detect variations in perceptual accuracy across the elite groups, but we would not be able to conclude that this perception, or misperception, was somehow unique to the birth control issue. Conceivably, the elites might misconstrue the opinions of their fellow elites and of the general public on several issues, in the same mis-

98

guided fashion. The question of perceptual accuracy cuts two ways: it has an interissue as well as a cross-elite component. Let us first examine how well or poorly the elites do in estimating the preferences of their peers.

INTERELITE PERCEPTIONS The Conceptual Framework Early in the interviews, the elites were asked to state their opinions concerning the government's role in family planning; their answers provided the data analyzed in Chapter 2. Later, after several other topics had been explored, we asked them to tell us where they felt certain significant others stood on five key issues: birth control, foreign investments, income redistribution, government-labor relations and government-opposition relations. In the case of birth control, the elites were presented with the same 100-point scale used in eliciting their own opinions. Now, however, the question read: "We would like you to compare the positions of some groups regarding certain issues. For example, with respect to the question of birth control [controle de natalidade], what is your impression of the general position of these groups? On this scale that goes from 'complete prohibition of birth control programs' to 'many more governmental incentives in favor of control,' where would you place the groups?" The elites were then given a list of eight groups: ARENA politicians, MDB politicians, bankers, industrialists, leaders of labor sindicatos, bishops, top civil servants, and the high military (os altos militares). The elites estimated the position of each group except their own.2 Even though we have no separate sample of the armed forces command and hence no hard data against which to compare the attributions made about them, all of the elites were asked to give their impressions of the position of the military. The reason is that the military is an extremely significant other in Brazilian politics, and it is therefore crucial to obtain an idea of civilian perceptions of military thinking. This exercise in opinion estimation produces a complex maze of data. Confining ourselves to the symmetrical case, in which we have information on preferences as well as perceptions for each group, a matrix is generated, filled with thirty-six mutual attributions for seven distinct groups: ARENA politicians, MDB politicians, bankers, industrialists, labor leaders, bishops, and top civil servants—all for the single issue of birth control. Because the data are so abundant, it is worth considering beforehand what might be expected in the way of perceptual accuracy, given these

99

groups and given the issue of birth control.3 We know, first of all, that the bishops are the least favorably inclined toward governmental measures favoring family planning. While they do not as a group locate themselves at the pronatalist extreme of the scale, on the average the bishops would like to see something of a retrenchment from the government's laissezfaire policy. Second, the Brazilian bishops constitute an exception among the elites in that they have a fairly well-defined position on the issue of birth control. For most of the other elites, the issue is not of great urgency, and positions seem to be moderate and indistinct, even though the general stance of the businessmen is more antinatalist than that of, say, the politicians. In short, the issue is rather fuzzy. It is neither very salient nor extremely polarizing. Third, one reason why the issue does not appear to be as conflictive as it is often thought to be is that preferences on birth control do not fit squarely along the conventional, and presumably more conflict-ridden, left-to-right cleavage. This fact suggests that there might be a fair degree of uncertainty in the minds of the elites about where their colleagues stand on the issue. The position of most groups on a reasonably clear-cut issue like income redistribution is not particularly mysterious. It is questionable, however, whether elite actors, with the possible exception of the bishops, are perceived as having well-defined positions on birth control. If, as we have argued, the population controversy has a rather low profile and is somewhat confused in debate, what are the implications of these properties of the issue for interelite perceptions? One possibility is that, to the extent that the issue is not sharply defined, the elites will engage in what amounts to wild guessing in attributing opinions to others. This eventually, however, seems improbable, for two reasons. First, in the absence of hard information about the opinions of others, the elites are likely to project—that is, to assume that the preferences of others resemble their own. This outcome seems especially likely not only because of the lack of clear signals from others (excepting the bishops), but also because the birth control issue is not especially polarized and the elites have therefore little incentive to caricature or stereotype one another as extreme radicals and reactionaries. Hence, even if the elites are inclined to project their own views on their colleagues, the probable outcome is at most a modest degree of misperception, since elite opinions on birth control, while varied, tend to fall within a rather narrow range around the laissez-faire to moderate antinatalist points of the preference continuum. In short, if the elites assume that the opinions of their colleagues on birth control resemble their own, their perceptions are not likely to be totally erroneous.

100 • ELITE PERCEPTIONS

A second tendency may reinforce the modest degree of misperception on the birth control issue. Again, without much information to go on, we believe that the safest guess to make about the opinions of others involves a centrist averaging—that is, selecting a position at or near the midpoint of the presumed distribution of preferences. This is, in fact, the drift of elite opinion, with a slight tilt toward the antinatalist direction.4 In summary, we have little reason to expect the elites to misperceive one another grotesquely on such an issue as birth control, despite the facts that the issue is rather muddy and uncertainty about the position of others is, therefore, probably high. The question then becomes: so what? What differences does it make if the elites misperceive or understand the avowed preferences of one another? The answer requires us to consider both the magnitude and the direction of misperception. We do not expect the elites to be right on target in their attributions of opinions. We asked them only to state their general impressions of the positions of their colleagues. This impression inevitably involves an averaging process, and the true opinion of a given group can better be imagined as a distribution, within certain limits, around this average than as a single point. If, after allowing for some margin for error, the gap between avowed and attributed opinion is substantial, then we may infer that the elites are in error. Specifically, we can conclude that the formulation of policy on the issue is likely to be confused, if not because of genuine conflict then because the elites simply do not get their signals straight. Pluralistic ignorance may breed conflict where little existed before. The other dimension of misperception is its direction. It may be that the elites view one another as rather favorable to antinatalist measures when in fact they tend toward a conservative-to-moderate position. Alternatively, they may perceive one another as more conservative than each claims to be. The elites were asked to state their perceptions of the supposed public positions of prominent groups, not the opinions of private individuals. In this case, whatever misperception we encounter on an issue like family planning is liable to underestimate any relative progressivism that the elites cultivate in private and to overstate their commitment to a pronatalist position. Here again, the problem is pluralistic ignorance. What matters about the phenomenon is that it may justify a lack of movement on population planning to the extent that significant others are perceived as hostile to change. A third possibility is a bit more complex but also, perhaps, more realistic. The elites may misperceive certain groups in one way and other groups in the opposite direction, for reasons that have to do with their preconceptions about particular actors. The bishops are the most obvious

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candidates for misunderstanding, since it is easy for the other elites to suppose that the Church maintains an extreme pronatalist position on family planning, even if individual bishops might be privately more flexible. While we do not expect the inclination to stereotype to operate very forcefully for all the elite groups, it seems reasonable that the tendency to label others as pronatalist or antinatalist may vary from one elite sector to another. Analysis We can now examine the empirical results. Three initial findings are straightforward. We have reasoned that birth control is a comparatively fuzzy controversy. A simple way to estimate the degree of perceptual uncertainty is to calculate the incidence of "don't knows" given by the elites when they were asked to gauge the opinions of others. For the birth control issue, such nonresponse reaches 14 percent. This figure is not large, but no other issue evokes as many admissions of ignorance. The closest rival is foreign investment (9 percent); the lowest is government-opposition relations (7 percent). Thus, birth control is a relatively obscure issue among the elites. A significant fraction of the elites is unwilling even to guess about the preferences of their colleagues on the issue. Second, the tendency for the elites to project their opinions on others is directly tied to the degree of perceptual uncertainty on the issues. The number of significant positive correlations between the elites' own preferences on birth control and the preferences which they attribute to others is eighteen. This is greater than the extent of projection for any other issue. For example, on the issue of income redistribution, the number of significant associations between opinions and perceptions is only nine.5 Third, the elites do not perceive the military as being either exceptionally pronatalist or antinatalist. On the average, they place them at 52 on the 100-point scale, where a high score signifies an antinatalist preference. That is, the military is seen as standing just about at the status quo position. The average attribution made for all other groups, excluding the military, is 49. In brief, the military is not seen as holding a policy position that deviates from that held by the other elites as a whole. Although the armed forces are the first among equals in Brazil and may, therefore, exercise veto power on a variety of policy matters, they are not viewed as opposing the mainstream of civilian elite opinion on birth control. We come, then, to the mutual perceptions of the elites. The relevant data are given in Table 4.1. The perceiving elite sectors are listed in the columns, and the matching elite groups to whom preferences are ascribed are listed in the rows. The figures are the algebraic differences between perceptions and preferences. A negative sign indicates that the elites per-

102 • ELITE PERCEPTIONS

Table 4.1. Average Differences between Avowed and Attributed Opinions on Birth Control by Elite Sector a Perceiving Perceived MDB Labor Bishops Civil service Bankers ARENA Industry a

MDB

Labor

Bishops

Civil Service

Bankers

— 25 34 8 -3 10 -8

3 — 30b 2 8 1 5

3 10 — -4 -14 10 -19

6 10 25 — -2 4 3

0 1 27 -1 — -2 -5

ARENA

A positive difference indicates that perceptions are more pronatalist than preferences of the perceived group. Significant at p < .10.

b

14 13 27 8 6 — 2

Industry

Average Differences

8 2 29 -4 -5 2 —

6 9 28 1 0 3 0

ceive another group in an antinatalist direction, ascribing to that group a position that is in fact more antinatalist than the members claim to have. It is necessary to examine these results from a purely statistical point of view before coming to terms with their substance. If we confine ourselves only to the differences between ascribed and avowed opinion—that is, between perceptions and preferences—only one is statistically significant: namely, the attribution on the part of the labor leaders of an extreme pronatalism to the bishops. Technically speaking, none of the other discrepancies is significant.6 Now, on the face of it, this finding seems absurd. The MDB politicians are on the average even further off (34 points) than the labor leaders (30 points) in their estimation of the bishops, and yet the misperception of the politicians does not qualify as significant, since there are so few MDB politicians that an exceedingly large misperception is required before it reaches statistical significance. Of course, it is precisely the mistaken imputation of differences that significance tests are designed to protect against when one is dealing with small samples. In a moment, we shall argue that the strict application of such standards may be misleading. For now it is useful to recognize that we cannot take every departure» from perceptual accuracy as definitive proof of misperception. It is also useful to set the incidence of misperception on the birth control issue in perspective. With the identical set of elite groups, the frequency of statistically significant misperceptions is higher for all the other issues than it is for birth control, and it reaches substantial proportions on the presumably touchier and more conflictive issues. For example, on the question of income redistribution, a classic left-versus-right controversy, the elites misperceive one another fourteen times out of thirty-six (always attributing to their colleagues a good deal more conservativism than they themselves admit to). On a truly black-or-white issue, such as the freedom of the political opposition, the incidence of interelite misperception soars to a total of twenty-three out of thirty-six. Thus, as the issues become increasingly polarized—that is, as the stakes that various elite groups have in their resolution become more directly antagonistic—the gap between "our moderation" and "their intransigence" widens. Hence, while the sheer magnitude of misperception on the issue of birth control may seem quite large when considered in isolation, whatever the tests of statistical significance indicate, birth control is an issue for which serious interelite misunderstanding is comparatively rare. It is within this framework, then, that the patterns in Table 4.1 should be interpreted. We can examine the discrepancies between avowed and ascribed opinion as suggestive tendencies, keeping in mind that only one of them satisfies rigorous statistical requirements.

104 • ELITE PERCEPTIONS

First of all, the elite groups regularly perceive the bishops as being considerably more conservative on the birth control issue than the bishops themselves claim to be. Conservative stereotypes of the bishops may be accurate on such issues as the legalization of divorce and abortion, but the bishops are not outright reactionaries on the question of the government's role in family planning. They are not violently upset with the government's laissez-faire position. It is reasonable to suppose that what the elites have in mind in stereotyping the bishops is papal dogma and Church tradition rather than the somewhat more latitudinarian views of individual clergymen. Second, this fact reflects an overall tendency for the elites to perceive each other as somewhat less progressive on the issue than they say they are. As we shall see, there are some intriguing deviations from this pattern, but the net inclination is toward the attribution of pronatalist rather than antinatalist leanings. For example, the MDB politicians, who themselves are comparatively pronatalist, consider the labor leaders to be pronatalist as well, whereas in fact the labor leadership is fairly centrist on the issue. Evidently, the MDB politicians envision the labor leadership as taking a more-or-less orthodox Latin American position—that is, that family planning and related measures are superficial remedies for the more serious problems of social inequity. Not only the politicians of the MDB, but also members of the ARENA tend to ascribe pronatalist views to others. The ARENA and the MDB politicians are virtually indistinguishable in their own preferences about birth control, and it is not surprising that they are inclined to perceive many others, especially labor and the Church, as unsympathetic to family planning programs. Some groups, however, are thought to be more favorable to government-sponsored birth control programs than they claim to be. These are the bankers and the industrialists and, to a lesser extent, the civil servants. It is the bishops who are most inclined to exaggerate the antinatalism of others. There is a simple explanation for this. On the whole, the bishops are socially progressive, while the businessmen are conservative. The bishops, like the MDB politicians, accentuate the antinatalism of the businessmen probably because they perceive them as socially retrograde, favoring birth control as a way around serious reforms. The cautious antinatalism attributed to the businessmen and the civil servants is important, whatever the perceptual distortions involved in this attribution. It suggests that the elites perceive the policy environment as rather favorable to moderate antinatalist measures. The pattern is particularly striking in view of the timing of our study: just before the Bucharest conference. We do not have the information to trace the maneuvers that

105

preceded the subtle shift in policy toward a position of laissez-faire with incentives. Yet it is clear that the policy environment within the elite establishment favored such a move. In summary, the extent of interelite misperception on the birth control issue is comparatively modest. While the issue is not especially clearcut, neither is it very conflictive. On a controversy like income redistribution, or government control of the opposition, there is a pronounced split between the private declarations of progressivism made by the elites and the images that their colleagues have of them as conservatives or, at most, cautious moderates. In the case of birth control, however, there is not much of a divide between the private opinions and the public positions of the elites, with the exception of those of the bishops; as a result very little significant misperception occurs. In balance, whatever inklings of misperception do occur are propitious for change in the policy environment toward slightly more antinatalist measures, despite the tendency for most of the elites to suppose that some of their colleagues are actually rather conservative or satisfied with the status quo. Although the politicians and the labor leaders, not to mention the bishops, are perceived as more or less pronatalist, the weightier elites—the businessmen and the civil servants—are seen as favoring a bit more movement, however slight, in the direction of providing access to family planning information and methods. This is the coalitional setting from which the delicately worded document that the Brazilian delegation presented at Bucharest emerged.

ELITE PERCEPTIONS OF PUBLIC OPINION At least half of the work of diagnosing the differences between elite and mass opinion about the government's role in family planning is already done. We know that the elites attach much less importance to the issue than does the public generally, and we know that the elites are less enthusiastic than ordinary Brazilians about possible governmental measures favoring birth control. Again, it is important to specify what might be expected in the way of the relative accuracy of elite perceptions of public preferences. It is conceivable, but hardly probable, that the elites are fully aware of the profile of public opinion, but flout it anyway. It is more likely for the elites actually to believe that ordinary Brazilians do not care much about the issue and that the public is conservative on the matter. The latter alternative takes on plausibility when it is realized that what might be called the incentive structure of perception differs for the

106 • ELITE PERCEPTIONS

elites when they are asked to estimate the opinions of Brazilians in general, as opposed to the opinions of their fellow elites. The primary difference stems from the assumption, which might be quite reasonable, that most Brazilians are simply not very interested in matters of public policy—at least, not so interested as the elites themselves. This assumption may vary in strength from issue to issue and from one elite group to another, but the general tendency is not seriously in doubt. The effect of this rule of thumb will be, of course, to make it less likely that the elites will go out of their way to gauge directly the prevailing sentiment among the public regarding birth control and related issues of controversy. They are likely to assume, as they seem to do for their colleagues, that most Brazilians think as they do, with the condition that nonelites probably do not think very much about public policy at all. Furthermore, elite perceptions of public opinion may be less than accurate even when the elites try to keep up on the drift of opinion of the general populace. The reason is simply that certain groups are likely to enjoy a visibility and influence far in excess of their actual number. For example, it is not improbable that the image of the devout, traditional men and women of advancing years comes first to the minds of the elites when asked about the birth control preferences of Brazilians.7 In short, the elites are prone to underestimate the degree of antinatalist sentiment in the general populace. Perceptions of Mass Priorities After the elites had stated the importance that they gave to the fifteen issues described in Chapter 2, they were asked, for a selected subset of seven issues that included birth control and income redistribution: "What degree of importance do Brazilians attribute to each of the following questions?" Let us concentrate on the contrast between birth control and income redistribution, detailed in Table 4.2. The amount of information generated by this comparison is considerable, so that it is useful to focus on the essentials. For reference, we give the importance that the elites themselves assign to the two issues: birth control and income redistribution. The next column for each of the issues shows the importance that the elites think the public gives. The third column lists the difference between this perceived importance and the priority that Brazilians actually assign the issues. Finally, the measure of perceptual accuracy is nothing more than this difference squared, computed in order to get an idea of the absolute discrepancy between elite perceptions and the opinions of the public. Two major patterns are evident. First, the elites do indeed have a tendency to impute lower priorities to the public than they themselves hold,

107

Table 4.2. Birth Control and Income Redistribution: Elite Importance Ratings and Elite Perceptions of Popular Importance Ratingsa

Elite Groups

Elites' Importance Rating

Birth Control Average Elite Perceptions Difference of Popular between Ratings Rating

Average Elite Accuracy

Elites' Importance Rating

Income Redistribution Elite Average Perceptions Difference of Popular between Rating Ratings

Average Elite Accuracy

ARENA politicians MDB politicians Bishops Labor leaders Civil servants Industrialists Professionals Bankers

33 35 42 50 51 52 59 65

37 19 43 35 40 38 32 57

-31 -49 -26 -33 -28 -30 -36 -12

.14 .27 .16 .19 .13 .16 .24 .09

79 85 92 90 79 79 77 63

68 72 70 82 68 71 57 61

-5 -1 -3 +8 -5 -2 -16 -12

.04 .08 .07 .06 .05 .06 .14 .10

Average scores Proportion of variance accounted for by elite membership

49

38

-31

.16

81

71

-2

.06

6

5

5

7

9

7

7

6

a Importance ratings are measured on a scale ranging from 0 (no importance) to 100 (extremely important). Perceptual accuracy scores vary between 0 (for accurate elite perception of popular priorities) and 1 (for complete misperception).

and this tendency is as true for income redistribution as for birth control. On the average, they downgrade the popular importance of these issues by about ten points. Although the tendency varies a bit from one elite sector to another, none of the elite groups (with two striking exceptions) actually thinks that the public places a higher priority on any of the issues than they do themselves. The bishops and the ARENA politicians are the exceptions. Both of these groups themselves assign family planning very low priority. The conservative ARENA senators and deputies (unlike the politically more progressive MDB politicians) have some sense that the public at large might attach a bit more importance to the problem. The bishops react in a similar fashion. Evidently, they realize that not all Brazilians share their moral and religious scruples about birth control. Even the deviation of the government politicians and the bishops fails to change by much the overall tendency of the elites to discount the importance of family planning in the popular mind. The bishops and the ARENA politicians do not, after all, perceive the public as assigning extraordinarily high priority to family planning. The rest of the elites assume that family planning, as a matter for the government to deal with, is even less salient to ordinary Brazilians than it is to them. The importance that the elites assign to birth control is already so low—on the average, 49 along the 100-point scale—and the priority that the issue enjoys among the public at large so high that any lowering of the elites' estimates serves to throw them further off the mark in their perceptions of public opinion. Thus, there is a high degree of misperception of popular priorities about family planning among all the elites. Some elite groups, like the MDB politicians, are wholly mistaken. They project their own views, with a vengeance, on the mass public. None of the elites comes particularly close in their estimates, although the bankers, who give birth control a comparatively high priority, are not disastrously mistaken in their perceptions. Practically the opposite pattern emerges on the issue of income redistribution. Here, most of the elites do pretty well in estimating the importance that the issue has for ordinary Brazilians. Wage controls have been perhaps the most conspicuous feature of the Brazilian model, and the question of the maldistribution of the fruits of economic growth was an object of heated debate even during the boom times of the Medici administration. Thus, it is difficult for the elites to miss the popular salience of the controversy. Again, there is some variation in perceptual accuracy among the elite groups, but it is slight compared to their serious misconstruction of popular opinion on birth control, and it is easily explicable. For example, the

109

labor leaders actually overestimate by a small margin the priority that ordinary Brazilians give to income redistribution. This deviation is virtually self-explanatory, for the labor leaders themselves are highly concerned with the issue and their commitment no doubt colors their perceptions. Similarly, the economically more conservative and moderate elites tend to underestimate the popular importance of the issue, at least in part because it serves their own ends to do so. In general, then, conservatives and progressives alike are inclined to bend reality according to their own interests. With the exception of the bishops and the government politicians, none of them seems to be aware that they might be flouting public opinion, or the public interest, to a significant degree. Instead, the common syndrome is for the elites to project their priorities onto the public, after taking into account the probability that the Brazilian public is generally less attuned to national controversies than they are. We have suggested that this procedure is not altogether erroneous, so long as the ordering of elite priorities is more or less equivalent to that of ordinary Brazilians, but such is clearly not the case. On the whole, the elites give a fairly high priority to income redistribution; so does the public, and the elites seem to be reasonably aware of the importance of the issue among the citizenry. Birth control, however, ranks at the bottom of the elite agenda, whereas it is close to the top, right next to income redistribution, for the public. The result is that the discounting procedure used by the elites increases their ignorance of popular demand. Elite Perceptions of Mass Preferences Much the same story emerges with regard to elite perceptions of popular preferences, for and against birth control, as it does for their perceptions of popular priorities. Elites were asked the following question: "Could you estimate, in percentages, the proportion of Brazilians who support, who oppose and who are indifferent with respect to the following issue(s)?" For the two controversies under study, the policy alternatives presented to the elites were governmental incentives favoring birth control, and a more equitable distribution of income. Table 4.3 compares the elite estimates on these two issues and contrasts both estimates with the distribution of popular preferences. All of the elite groups do worse in their perceptions of popular preferences on birth control; they are reasonably accurate in divining public opinion about income redistribution. It is important to note, at the same time, that all of the elite sectors, pronatalist as well as antinatalist, take as their favorite category for public opinion on birth control the "indiffer-

110 • ELITE PERCEPTIONS

Table 4.3. Birth Control and Income Redistribution: Elite Perceptions of Popular Preferencesa

Elite Groups Bishops MDB politicians Professionals Civil servants Labor leaders Industrialists ARENA politicians Bankers Overall elite perception of popular preference Actual popular preference Proportion of variance accounted for by elite membership a

Perceived Percentage in Favor

Birth Control Perceived Perceived Percentage Percentage Indifferent Opposed

Average Elite Accuracy

Perceived Percentage in Favor

Income Redistribution Perceived Perceived Average Percentage Percentage Elite Indifferent Opposed Accuracy

Total (100%)

25

40

35

.38

72

18

10

.07

(N = 8)

17 28 22 33 25

48 43 48 40 53

35 29 30 27 22

.36 .29 .23 .22 .15

79 70 66 72 66

13 21 23 18 25

8 9 11 10 9

.09 .06 .07 .10 .09

(N (N (N (N (N

23 30

55 50

22 20

.14 .10

63 53

24 35

13 12

.12 .09

(N = 24) (N = 11)

26

48

26

.21

67

22

11

.09

(N = 200)

55

21

24

—

63

27

10

—

(N = 1,054)

6

Perceptual accuracy scores vary between 0 (for accurate elite perception of popular opinion) and 1 (for complete misperception).

1

= = = = =

11) 14) 35) 45) 52)

ent" or "as is" position. This choice matches their tendency to assume that ordinary Brazilians do not accord the issue much importance. It is clear, however, that the elite sectors differ considerably in the relative inaccuracy of their perceptions about birth control, whereas they are almost uniformly correct in their perceptions of public opinion about income redistribution. Specifically, the industrialists, the bankers and the ARENA politicians—all generally conservative sectors—do not do badly, in comparison to the politically more progressive bishops and MDB politicians. The businessmen and the government party do not believe that the Brazilian public is very enthusiastic about government-sponsored programs of family planning; instead, they claim that most Brazilians are indifferent on the issue. What they do not do is claim that many Brazilians are actively opposed to such measures. On the other hand, the bishops and the opposition politicians are convinced that upward of a third of the Brazilian people are opposed to family planning programs. The result is more-or-less accurate perception in the first case, and gross misperception in the latter. It is difficult to account for the varying success that the elites have in estimating public opinion on the issue of birth control and income redistribution except in terms of the differential clarity of the issues. By and large, income redistribution is an obvious controversy, and it would be perverse of the elites to misconstrue seriously the main contours of popular preferences on such an issue. To be sure, the biases of the elites shade their perceptions. The bishops and the MDB politicians are strong advocates of a more rapid redistribution of income, and they believe that the public stands with them fully. They overestimate, by a little, the progressivism of their presumed constituents. Conversely, the conservative businessmen underestimate somewhat the redistributive leanings of ordinary Brazilians. In brief, the income redistribution controversy elicits a slight amount of apparently self-serving projection on the part of the elites. By comparison, the birth control issue seems eminently susceptible to multiple interpretations. The surest sign of the polysemous nature of the issue is the proliferation of terms that may be used to describe it: population planning, family planning, birth control, and so on. Income redistribution, while hardly a simple issue, suffers from no such lexical confusion. Thus, on the birth control issue, the elites have considerable latitude to define the controversy, emphasizing one or another aspect of it. Their tendency is to see the aggregate as well as the moral dilemmas involved in the controversy, and their vision of public opinion is profoundly affected by this perspective. The elites have difficulty realizing that many ordinary Brazilians are sensitive neither to the aggregate (especially national power) implications nor to the moral dilemmas of population policy,

112 • ELITE PERCEPTIONS

and so they misconstrue the profile of public opinion favoring government-sponsored family planning as a welfare measure. Ironically, their own views about the government's involvement in population policy are actually less pronatalist than those they ascribe to the general populace. If we were to disregard elite perceptions and merely compare elite and public opinion, the Brazilian establishment would not appear to be quite so removed from the main lines of popular demands. 8 It seems quite unlikely, however, that the magnitude of elite misperception is wholly or even principally a function of question wording. Another factor is also at work in biasing elite perceptions of public opinion. The elites are all males, and they are older males. Sex and age are important determinants of public opinion about the government's role in family planning. While neither the elites nor ordinary Brazilians are prisoners of these factors, it is probable that the perspective of the elites on population policy is affected by their positions in the age and gender structure of Brazilian society. Table 4.4 lends support to this hypothesis. After dividing the population sample into protoconstituencies by age, sex, and religiosity, as we did in Chapter 3, we calculated the proximity of the elites' perceptions to the distribution of opinion within each of the relevant collectivities. The elite sectors are arrayed from top to bottom in Table 4.4 in descending order of the discrepancy between their perceptions and the average of nonelite opinion. The bishops are the least accurate and the bankers the most accurate perceivers. The protoconstituencies are aligned from left to right in decreasing order of their receptivity to government-sponsored family planning programs. Younger women are toward the left, older religious men to the right. The contrast between the most accurate elites (for example, the bankers, the ARENA politicians, and the industrialists) and the least accurate (the bishops and the MDB politicians) is marked. To take the extreme case: the closest that the bishops come to understanding public opinion is in the case of older religious males (proximity measure = .20). The reason is not that the bankers or the ARENA politicians or the industrialists believe that most Brazilians favor birth control. Rather, they consider the public to be indifferent to the matter, or at least not actively opposed to government-sponsored family planning programs. The bishops and the MDB politicians, on the other hand, tend to believe that a substantial proportion of the populace is adamantly against such programs. They overestimate the opposition even of older males. In short, while none of the elite groups do particularly well in estimating public preferences on birth control, some perform less badly than others. There is a rough correlation between the general ideological pro-

113

Table 4.4. Elites' Proximity to Protoconstituencies' Opinions on Birth Controla Protoconstituencies Older LessYounger Religious Men Women

Older MoreReligious Women

Older LessReligious Men

Older MoreReligious Men

All Respondents

Younger Women

Bishops MDB politicians Professionals Civil servants Labor leaders Industrialists ARENA politicians Bankers

.38 .36 .29 .23 .22 .15 .14 .10

.54 .55 .43 .39 .33 .28 .26 .20

.42 .41 .33 .28 .25 .19 .17 .13

.25 .20 .20 .11 .16 .07 .05 .06

.39 .37 .30 .24 .23 .16 .14 .11

.24 .19 .20 .10 .16 .07 .05 .06

.20 .14 .18 .07 .16 .06 .04 .07

Average scores Proportion of variance accounted for by elite membership

.21

.34

.25

.12

.22

.11

.10

None

None

None

None

8

8

9

Elite Groups

a

Proximity or perceptual accuracy scores vary between 0 (for accurate elite perceptions of popular opinion) and 1 (for complete misperception).

clivities of the elites and the accuracy of their perceptions on the issue. The comparative progressives—for example, the bishops and the MDB politicians—are less accurate in their perceptions than the politically more conservative groups, such as the bankers, the industrialists, and the ARENA politicians. The outstanding finding, however, is that elite perceptions are most accurate with respect to the opinion of devout older males in the population at large. The accuracy of elite perceptions is at its lowest where younger women are concerned. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this finding, even if we cannot determine with the data at hand the sources of the elites' selective perceptions and misperceptions of the birth control preferences of the relevant protoconstituencies. The fact that the elites, and in particular the bishops, are more attuned to the opinion of devout older males may stem from the higher visibility and political influence enjoyed by this group. It is equally possible, however, that no differential accuracy in perceptions is at stake here. That is, the degree of fit between elite perceptions and the preferences of devout older males may be purely coincidental. Rather than reflecting greater sensitivity to the sentiment of an influential minority, the observed congruence may result from the attribution to the public of the elites' own preferences—the elites themselves being older, and often religious, men. This simple fact, together with their proclivity for viewing the birth control controversy in aggregate terms, contributes to their insensitivity to popular opinion.

CONCLUSION Brazilian elites are considerably more successful in understanding the positions of their colleagues on the birth control issue than in estimating popular demands on the controversy. On the surface, this finding may appear banal, for elites everywhere can be expected to show familiarity with the opinions of those among whom they move. The pattern becomes less obvious, however, once it is recognized that the elites do quite well in estimating public opinion on other issues, such as income redistribution. Thus, it is not the case that Brazilian elites are totally unaware of the state of public opinion. Instead, the issue of the government's role in family planning tends to be comparatively ill defined and therefore open to multiple interpretations. At the interelite level, the ambiguity of the issue does not generate much misperception because, among other things, the issue is not very divisive. The absence of precise information about the opinions of other elites is not a crippling handicap, because the opinions of these men, with the partial exception of the bishops,

115

are not in fact terribly precise. What happens is that the elites, given the policy uncertainty about birth control, tend to project their own opinions on their colleagues. Since elite preferences on the issue are not widely disparate to begin with, the perceptions of the elite are generally on target or not far from it. The analysis of interelite perceptions has also enabled us to understand the policy environment surrounding the issue just before the Bucharest conference. Again with the partial exception of the bishops, the elites do not perceive one another as actively hostile to policy initiatives in a mildly antinatalist sense. Indeed, the more truly powerful of the elites— the businessmen and the top bureaucrats—are seen as somewhat more in favor of antinatalist measures than they actually are, or admit to being. It is the weaker elites, including the bishops, who are thought to be in opposition to an opening toward family planning. At least in hindsight, then, it is not difficult to see the potential for the change toward the policy emphasizing laissez-faire with information programs that was set forth at Bucharest. The elites, however, badly underestimate the interest of the Brazilian public in family planning. For most of the elites, it is hardly a mass issue at all. For ordinary Brazilians, however, family planning, like income redistribution, tends to be viewed as a bread-and-butter issue. While it is difficult for the elites to miss this aspect of the debate over income redistribution, many of them cannot bring themselves to imagine that family planning is practically just as meaningful to the public at large. The elites themselves do not face the consequences of a nonpolicy on family planning in day-to-day terms, while ordinary citizens, especially younger women, can scarcely avoid them. In a literal, descriptive sense, the members of the male Brazilian establishment, whether of a progressive or a conservative persuasion, do not represent the views of the large sectors of Brazilian society that are most favorable to government-sponsored programs designed to facilitate access to contraceptives.

116 • ELITE PERCEPTIONS

5 • Summing Up The major findings of our study can be stated simply. There is widespread popular support for governmental initiatives encouraging family planning in Brazil. Birth control is a meaningful, central issue for large sectors of the Brazilian public, especially for younger women. Religious feelings act to moderate this demand. But in balance with the pressures experienced by younger females to gain control over fertility decisions, religious sentiment is of distinctively secondary importance. The impact of education on fertility-related attitudes is also indirect. The family-size norms of well-educated women (and men) do not differ markedly from those of the less educated. Education is an indicator of economic as well as cognitive resources. In the former sense, it increases the possibility for couples to raise a large number of children. In the latter, it opens up the option for couples to raise the number of children they want. By and large, educated couples control their actual family size more successfully than do those without education. It is those with the least education who tend to wind up with more children than they want. As a consequence, a considerable proportion of lower-class Brazilians feel strongly about the need for the government to make it easier for them to engage in effective family planning. Thus, formal education by itself is not a crucial determinant of attitudes about the government's role in family planning, even though it affects the ability of couples to control their family size and hence influence the number of children they are likely to have in fact. Receptivity to government-sponsored family planning programs is very much a function of age and gender role—that is, of felt needs. These factors are more important than either religiosity or education in explaining popular attitudes toward the role of the government in birth control. Among the public, the most forceful opposition to family planning comes from older males, especially from the devout among them. They stand on the reverse side of the issue from younger women. The older

117

males are not very numerous in relation to any other stratum, but they wield disproportionate power in Brazilian society. The elites themselves are on the whole less sympathetic to government-sponsored family planning than are ordinary Brazilians. In general, their perspective on the issue tends to differ from that of nonelites. Population policy stands low on the elite agenda. It does not touch the vital interests of the elites, with the exception of the bishops and even they are less adamant about family planning in its milder forms than they are about divorce and abortion. The crucial difference in the way elites and the public view the issue derives from discrepant frames of reference. Many of the elites are concerned with the national power ramifications of population policy. Such an aggregate vision is quite uncommon among ordinary Brazilians, who tend to define the issue in terms of the delivery of social services. The elites, however, are not totally unaware of the more pedestrian aspects of family planning. Even those who object to birth control as a policy of national scope and as a set of measures that might smack of coercion are not uniformly hostile to the adoption of meliorative programs, such as those which would increase knowledge of family planning practices, at the regional and local levels. Thus, while the elites can scarcely be described as committed antinatalists, neither are they intransigently opposed to some family planning measures that might be promulgated by the government. One of the reasons why the issue is not terribly divisive is that it constitutes a series of issues, ranging from the mildest of reforms to, for example, the legalization of abortion. It is possible for the elites to pick and choose across a diverse set of policy options. This range is smaller for the truly explosive controversies, such as government-opposition relations, in which the vital interests of specific elite groups are at odds. Moreover, elite opinions about the issue are not consistently tied to their positions on the other great developmental and political issues. Population planning in Brazil is not a characteristically left-versus-right controversy. In brief, population issues seem to be less ideologically loaded, and more susceptible to pragmatic or piecemeal resolution, than many other controversies in Brazil. What are the implications for policy of our findings? We think they are threefold. First, some movement on the part of the government toward facilitating access to family planning services is clearly possible. In fact, by the middle and late seventies, tentative steps in just this direction had been taken. Conceivably, the elites are more aware now than they were at the time we conducted our field work of the growth in public demand for family planning assistance. Regardless of this possible input,

118 • SUMMING UP

prominent Brazilians seem to be less taken with the ambitious themes of Brasil grande than they were in the early seventies, especially since the dark side of the Brazilian miracle has been exposed. The costs of uncontrolled fertility not only to Brazilians who are both powerless and poor but also to the continued development of the nation as a whole are more visible now than they were previously. Even though the elites rather persistently underestimate the magnitude of mass demands for family planning assistance, they are not far off in assessing the policy environment surrounding the issue within the elite establishment itself. On the average, the elites are inclined to believe that their peers lean a bit more to the pronatalist side of the issue than those peers actually claim to do. This average inclination is misleading. Although the bishops and the politicians, for fairly obvious reasons, are seen as less than enthusiastic about population planning, the decisive actors— the state managers, the businessmen, and to some extent the military— tend to be viewed as either neutral or in favor of some change toward involving the government in family planning reform. In short, for some time, the climate of opinion in elite circles has been moderately favorable to such a course. In the least, with the exception of the bishops, very little strong opposition to these policy initiatives is apparent. It is most improbable that the Catholic Church can block the basically moderate family planning measures favored by many of the other elites in Brazil. To attempt to do so would almost certainly be politically costly. On the one hand, the Church has very little support among the public for such an undertaking, and, on the other hand, and perhaps even more importantly, the Brazilian clergy is itself divided. The Church seems to have little to gain from pressing a virulently pronatalist policy. A second implication of our study has to do with what we have termed the generally pragmatic slant of Brazilian elites toward population planning. The issue, we have suggested, is negotiable; it does not cut to the core of the authoritarian political system, even if decisions on population policy have tremendous consequences for future generations. We have also suggested that decisions about population policy are more likely to be worked out in light of budgetary considerations and constraints than by principled debate. To the degree that this suggestion is so, the result of incremental bargaining will most probably be partial. A basic preconception of many of the elites is that population planning is not a major instrument of developmental policy. On the contrary, it is viewed as a moral, individual, or local issue. This view is the primary reason why attitudes on the issue are not integrated into the left-right ideologies of the elites. Thus, the residual priority attributed to the issue, together with the

119

fact that population planning is a melange of issues, probably lends it a certain malleability. Reform, rather than a radical commitment one way or the other, seems therefore to be the most likely scenario for policy change.1 The generally pragmatic, experimental nature of elite attitudes toward population planning in Brazil raises the question of costs and benefits—that is, of budgetary politics. The Brazilian government now sees itself as suffering from more severe economic constraints than was the case in the boom times of the early seventies. This creates a problem. Although elite opinion may be drifting toward a more antinatalist position, the possibility of implementing such measures may be diminished by the fact that resources are considered less abundant. Strictly speaking, evaluation of the economic costs and benefits of population planning goes beyond the scope of our study.2 Nevertheless, it is entirely feasible to speculate about the politics of the decision-making process. If population planning is regarded as a series of mechanisms for regulating population growth, then it is questionable whether the tentative measures that enjoy some support along the elites will make much of a dent on the problem in Brazil. Programs involving the dissemination of family planning information, and even measures designed to facilitate access to contraceptives, may contribute to a decline in the birthrate. Much would also depend on the seriousness and the extent of the effort, as well as on the integration of such efforts with broader programs of social reform. At the same time, it is instructive to consider the costs of doing nothing. Although hard evidence is difficult to come by, the expenditures incurred by the Brazilian national health service in providing remedial medical service for women who attempt illegal abortions are probably considerable. These expenditures do nothing to control fertility; they serve no preventive function. Neither do they contribute to the gross national product. They represent part of the costs of neglecting the demand for family planning services. Hence, the argument about shrinking resources does not necessarily favor a pronatalist or benign neglect policy. Coping with the health care needs of the Brazilian public in a preventive manner—that is, in a manner that includes meeting the demand for contraceptive information and facilities—may be more efficient than adjourning the problem and investing resources in medical services after the fact. Although the direct effects of family planning services on the rate of population growth may be minor, the negative effects of withholding family planning programs from the mass of the population may be substantial. The savings accruing from a decision not to invest in family planning may be wiped out, and perhaps

120 • SUMMING UP

turned into net losses, by hidden and not-so-hidden expenditures for medical patching and sewing. The third policy implication of our analysis is the one for which we believe the strongest case can be made. Population planning may not be an eminently ideological issue in Brazil, but it is still profoundly political.3 It divides males from females, and elites from nonelites. Under present conditions, lower-class women are deprived of control over their reproductive behavior and so, for the most part, is the mass of the Brazilian citizenry, in contrast to the facilities to which elites and the upper strata in general have access. Family planning is one instance of a more generic problem. The developmental course followed in Brazil since 1964 has not been responsive to the welfare needs of the majority of Brazilians. It has been politically exclusionary and socially regressive.4 In our view, the provision of family planning services is fundamentally a question of social equity and human rights, regardless of its presumed long-run effects on the growth and size of the population.5 Brazilian elites are not unaware of this perspective. The trouble is that a laissez-faire policy is a biased and ineffective one in a highly stratified society. It favors those who are already situated in a favorable economic position; it does little for those at the bottom of the social hierarchy. The paramount fact about the population debate in Brazil is that it suffers from a complete lack of popular input. Instead of listening to public opinion, the elites tend to argue among themselves about the propriety and the utility of population planning. No doubt, this discourse is necessary; but it is time that the silent interlocutor, the Brazilian people, gains a voice in the discussion. Finally, it is appropriate to ask what the broader implications of the Brazilian experience with population planning might be. To be sure, Brazil may be viewed as idiosyncratic in Latin America by reason of its size and its Portuguese heritage. Then, too, nothing strictly comparable to the kind of data on elite and mass opinions on population issues that we have examined here exists on which to base extensive cross-national comparisons with other Latin American countries. With the usual disclaimers about national exceptions and the limits of scientific exactitude in place, at least three generic observations about the politics of population can be made. First, if there is a single factor that can be thought seriously to impede antinatalist initiatives almost everywhere, it is deeply rooted, traditional religious sentiment. We are not thinking so much of denominational differences—even though some non-Western creeds, for example, contain

121

few pronatalist injunctions or none at all6—as of degrees of popular religiosity and of religious institutionalization in predominantly Catholic cultures. In Brazil, as several authors have noted and as we have stressed to the point of tedium, the hold of the Catholic church on the popular mind is less than thoroughgoing. Although the bishops enjoy certain contacts in elite circles, the church as an institution has never been so intimately associated with the supposed fate of the nation as it has been in, for example, Spain or Ireland. Conversely, severe anticlericalism of the sort associated with simultaneously secularizing and leftist ideologies (as opposed to the progress-with-order current of the positivist movement) has been quite uncommon in Brazil. In this last respect, the history of the church in Brazil differs from its persecution at the hands of the Mexican authorities during the early postrevolutionary period. By now, however, the civil power of the church in both Brazil and Mexico is subdued, and it is no accident that vociferous opposition to governmental support of the milder forms of family planning is scarcely to be heard from religious interests in either country. The implications of the marginal position of the Catholic church as a public power are twofold. On the one hand, attitudes on "moral" issues like family planning and divorce are less bound up with positions on issues that are customarily defined as secular and as pitting hidebound reactionaries against wholesale progressives. To a significant degree, therefore, battles over population policy in Brazil rarely tend to be viewed as tearing at the fabric of the institutional order. The debate over divorce, for example, is probably more charged with intense feeling among larger numbers of people in Spain, where the church's influence has pervaded several institutions of the larger society (for example, the educational system). On the other hand, it should be clear that the weakness of religiosity in Brazil is the result of a specific institutional history. The virtual distinctiveness of moral issues in the minds of Brazilian elites—that is, the near isolation of attitudes on these issues from the usual confines of ideological discourse—is more appropriately seen as a reflection of a longstanding separation of religious and political battles in Brazil than as a demonstration of a peculiar cognitive style per se.7 Second, if it is the case that pronatalist passions are not so intractable in Brazil as is sometimes imagined, it is equally true that few of the elites can be characterized as committed antinatalists. Set in the context of other issues, population planning arouses, for the most part, neither strong support nor strong opposition, and it is close to the bottom of the agenda of most of the elites. The largest antinatalist constituency in Brazil is composed of younger women. Statistically, this fact is not surprising. Politi-

122 • SUMMING UP

cally, it is unpromising. The demand for government-sponsored family planning assistance is largely unorganized. At the same time, it is worth remembering that a similar configuration of indifference and latent demand seems to have been prevalent in other countries—Mexico, for example—that have gone on to adopt forceful population measures. The Mexican government was probably not moved to undertake its revision of population policy in response to a tidal wave of public opinion favoring family planning. Rather, elements within the elite establishment itself—in particular, parts of the medical profession and of the pharmaceutical industry—found it economically as well as politically useful to press the government in the direction of family planning. Such elite pressure is not apparent at the moment in Brazil, although a growing commitment to antinatalist measures is not inconceivable for somewhat different reasons. Even if the 1980 census confirms the downturn in the net increase of the Brazilian population, the momentum built into the growth rate and the absolute size of the population are still considerable. It is unlikely that elites in Brazil will ever again, in the post-1973 period, dismiss population growth as lightly as they were prone to do when the economy performed miraculously. Here again, a parallel with the Spanish experience is revealing. It was not until 1978 that the post-Franco regime legalized the sale of contraceptives in Spain. It has so far refused to commit any public funds to subsidizing the distribution of contraceptives. Similar roadblocks to the use of public money, for induced abortions, have arisen in the United States. The issues involved in population planning entail not only governmental toleration and permissiveness but also promotion, which costs money. The distinction is especially acute in steeply stratified societies like the Brazilian, where the inertia of laissez-faire works to the advantage of those who are better off to begin with. Cost considerations raise a third question. Quite regardless of its effects on the birth rate, the implementation of family planning by the government in Brazil implies a budgetary reallocation toward public health programs. The point is obvious, but it opens up a pair of more intricate questions. First, the allocation of public funds to family planning entails not so much coercion on the part of elites against the public as it does hard bargaining among elite factions themselves. Almost all of the elites share a concern about population measures that might be blatantly coercive, about programs of forced sterilization, for example. In the Brazilian context, however, such fears thrive on an eventuality that is hypothetical in the extreme, and they draw attention away from the more mundane but

123

vitally important elements of coercion that go into authoritative decision making on budgetary priorities. The fact that population planning is near the bottom of the agenda of the elites reflects in part the low priority assigned to welfare, social service, and public health generally under the Brazilian developmental model. Serious change in this agenda, even under conditions of a democratic opening, can scarcely be thought of as painless and automatic. Second, the politics of population in Brazil is a special example of the larger problem of the politics of public health in authoritarian regimes. While a fair amount of research has been conducted about the workings of housing policy and the social security system, knowledge of the goals and effects of basic health measures promulgated by the government is fragmentary and anecdotal, perhaps because the area is politically unglamorous and the government's efforts routinely assumed to be inconsequential. For us, a major question involves the extent to which public health activities in Brazil differ, if at all, from those in systems that are industrially more advanced and politically more open. The answer to this question is not at all self-evident, and it is here that comparative studies could make a genuine contribution.8

124 • SUMMING UP

Appendix I • The Elite Sample Sampling proceeded in two stages. The first entailed the selection of elite sectors, the second the selection of individual elites within sectors.

THE SELECTION OF ELITE GROUPS The fact that Brazil is a frankly authoritarian system makes the preliminary stage of sampling easy. There is hardly any doubt about the identities of the principal actors. Three criteria guided the selection process at the preliminary stage. First, an elite sector had to be considered powerful in national affairs by informed observers of the Brazilian scene. By this standard, the top civil servants and the directors of the leading industrial and financial companies qualified. The top civil servants include the executive officers of the large state-owned companies as well as high-level ministerial bureaucrats.1 The businessmen include directors of the large multinational and domestic enterprises.2 Second, an elite sector was included, even if it did not meet the first criterion, if it exercised some formal representative function. This criterion drew in the politicians from the opposition and government parties as well as the presidents of the national labor confederations, state federations, and the larger local syndicates in metropolitan Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.3 Leaders of the largest business interest associations in Rio and São Paulo were added by reason of the first and second criteria. These associations form the counterpart, among the "productive classes," of the workers' organizations. Third, an elite sector might be omitted from the study, even though it met one or both of the foregoing criteria, if problems of access were deemed insuperable. This consideration accounts for the omission of the military. Another key group we did not interview is composed of the men assigned to the president's office: the heads of the civil and military coun-

125

selors, the director of the National Information Service (the internal security apparatus), and the like. One group that does not fit under any of the sampling guidelines is the peak of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The bishops are neither transparently powerful nor representative; moreover, access to them was made difficult by their geographical dispersion throughout the country. In the end, we decided to interview a sample of bishops. A major reason for undertaking this task was the central role which the Church plays in the debate over population planning. We also interviewed eighteen leaders of the liberal professions (law, engineering, and so forth) and prominent journalists and editorialists in Rio and São Paulo. Our motivation for interviewing these men is that intellectuals have traditionally been thought to wield power, of some sort, in Brazil and in Latin America generally. The scientific validity of the sample of liberal professionals is, however, uncertain. It is extremely difficult to fix criteria for defining a population of such individuals. Their institutional affiliations are varied, quantitative measures of membership in the population are dubious, and reputational measures tend to suffer from ideological distortions. In short, it is hard to document the representativeness of the sample of liberal professionals. At the same time, the intellectuals turn out to be a very heterogeneous group on most attitudinal measures, a possible sign that the subsample is less biased than we are able to demonstrate. In other words, the results from this group do not violate descriptions of the political orientations of the liberal professions in Brazil that can be gleaned from such collateral sources as journalistic accounts. Since we have no reason to believe that the sample of liberal professionals is biased in any particular way, their interviews are therefore included in the analysis. The Selection of Elites within Sectors 4 One of our chief concerns in selecting the elites was to avoid padding the sample with persons of peripheral or semielite status. Thus, for example, we confined interviews in the business sectors to executives of a randomly selected number of the top five hundred industrial corporations and of the leading two hundred banks. Similarly, the result of our cutoff standards for the civil service was to exclude a great many middle-ranking and lower-ranking técnicos. Some of these individuals are influential, especially if they are attached to powerful ministries. Furthermore, a few of them are rising stars of ministerial caliber. Their inclusion, however, would have to be based on comparatively subjective sampling methods, for example, by reputation. Therefore, the middle managers were not interviewed. On the other hand, the top echelon of state managers is made up of an unequiv-

126 • APPENDIX I

ocally powerful stratum of elites, all of whom command organizational resources. As we shall see in the following discussion, the application of strict cutoff points within each of the elite sectors lowered the response rate. This fact has the disadvantage of limiting the possibility of multivariate analysis within the smaller elite groups. It does not, however, bias the samples themselves by contaminating them with figures whose elite status is dubious. Results Table 1.1 gives a detailed breakdown of the number and relative frequency of respondents in each sector. The "target N " is the number of elites selected within each sector as possible respondents. Sometimes, as with the labor leaders, the civil servants, the heads of the public companies and the presidents of the business interest groups, this number takes in the entire population. For the remaining sectors, such as the politicians, the bishops, and the directors of the industrial and financial enterprises, the target N is a fraction of the larger population. For example, from among the largest five hundred nonfinancial companies, we selected every third company by systematic random sampling. At the outset of the study, we expected to obtain about a 50 percent response rate, and we also wanted to secure enough interviews in each sector to permit statistical analysis. Thus, in those sectors where the universe of elites is relatively small, such as the labor leaders and the civil servants, we kept the target N equivalent to the population. Where the elite population is larger, as in the case of the politicians and the businessmen, we sampled within the sector to arrive at the target N. The average response rate was 41 percent, ranging from a high of 62 percent among the labor leaders to a low of 25 percent among the bishops.5 The sample of labor leaders is therefore the most complete. The labor leaders, unlike most of the other elites in the Medici era, had time on their hands. They were not put off by the length of the interview schedule, which consumed on the average about an hour and a half. The sample of opposition politicians is quite small because their congressional representation before the elections of 1974 was marginal. In fact, the MDB is somewhat overrepresented in our sample relative to the ARENA. We boosted the proportion of MDB politicians in order to reach a minimum number of cases for analysis.6 The number of bishops is reduced for a different reason. Very few of them are to be found in Rio, São Paulo, and Brasilia, and the cost of traveling to their dioceses for interviews was prohibitive. The sample of bish-

127

Table I.l. The Elite Sample in Detail (In descending order of response rate) Percentage

Percentage Target

of

N

of

N

Total

Obtained

Sample

Labor leaders Business association leaders Public company officials Professionals ARENA politicians Multinational company executives National finance executives MDB politicians National industry executives Civil servants Bishops

85 33 27 33 65 56 43 39 76 155 44

13 5 4 5 10 8 6 6 12 24 7

53 19 15 18 33 23 16 14 26 41 11

20 7 6 7 12 8 6 5 10 15 4

62.4 57.6 55.6 54.8 50.8 41.1 37.2 36.9 34.2 26.5 25.0

Totals

656

100%

269

100%

41.0

Elite sector

Response Rate

ops is not, however, confined to individuals from these three metropolitan areas. We interviewed bishops from the interior during their infrequent trips to Rio. There is no indication that the differential response rates can be attributed to a variable propensity among the elite groups to refuse to be interviewed for political reasons. While some elites turned down requests for interviews out of caution and discretion, this tendency is not peculiar to certain sectors rather than others. None of the sector samples is biased in such a way as to prevent valid inferences about the elite populations. This is a strong claim, and it merits explanation. First, a principal cause of nonresponse was the length of the questionnaire. Asking for more than fifteen minutes of a national figure's time for the purpose of conducting an academic interview will reduce the response rate. Nevertheless, with the partial exception of the labor leaders and in some instances the politicians, this refusal factor operates uniformly across the elite sectors. Second, logistic and circumstantial factors reduced response rates unevenly across the sectors. Simultaneously with the elite survey, we conducted two others: of the general population, described in Appendix II, and of labor syndicate members. Resources were spread thin. We eliminated the Northeast, an extremely interesting area for the study of agrarian politics, in order to complete the special sample of the labor syndicates. As for the elite sample, respondents in Rio and São Paulo were closer than those in Brasilia. Our distance from Brasilia and the costs of maintaining an interviewing staff there were the main reasons for the modest response rate among the politicians, who are actually quite approachable. Because of their busy schedules, the civil servants are less accessible, and their isolation in Brasilia compounds the problem. In retrospect, we probably could have attained a response rate greater than 50 percent by devoting exclusive attention to the elite study. This hypothetical possibility does not change the results, but neither do the logistics of the study suggest that the fluctuating response rates are themselves indicative of bias. Another possible source of bias can be traced to the temptation to interview secondary figures for the sake of padding the sample. This temptation is particularly strong in the face of access problems and the need to obtain a statistically adequate number of interviews. Our position on this difficulty was, first, not to attempt interviews at all in those sectors where problems of access were daunting (for example, the military) and, second, to stick with the top figures in the sectors chosen. We could probably have managed to interview a handful of generals, but not more. The product would not have been worth the effort or the

129

risk. Within the sectors chosen, however, sampling procedures were methodical. Again, this practice drags down the response rate, but it does not damage the quality of the sample in the sense of creating a bias within the sectors. There are hierarchies within as well as between sectors. For example, our listing of industrialists includes the executive officers of the largest five hundred firms, and the bankers are drawn from among the executive officers of the top two hundred financial organizations. Both rankings are highly skewed, with a very small number of extremely large companies and a much larger incidence of relative pigmies. Yet for each of the companies selected, we interviewed the principal figures. We did not interview vice-presidents for public relations, corporate counsels, and other front men; we confined ourselves to members of the executive boards. Another reason for our decision not to interview middle- and lowerlevel elites stems from a judgment that they respond differently from the way the higher-ups respond. In the course of preparing for the survey, we examined interview protocols from an earlier study of middle managers and bureaucrats.7 It became apparent that respondents in subordinate strata tend to qualify their answers for political reasons. They make a point of their agreement with the policies of the regime. In our sample, we encountered greater self-confidence and a willingness to sound progressive. We have no reason to believe that we missed the "true reactionaries" by refraining from sampling the military and the president's staff. The middle and lower ranks of the elite hierarchy within an organization tend to follow the party line and to look over their shoulders while doing so. Those at the top tend to be less preoccupied with this sort of problem, probably because many of them are the originators of the party line. Thus, while our failure to obtain interviews at the supreme heights of the Brazilian state makes the elite sample incomplete, it is debatable whether the results are biased. Observers have noted the extreme concentration of power in Brazil and the manner in which key decisions are often taken, without consultation, by a small group of individuals or even by a single individual, the president himself. This fact affects the representativeness of our sample only if it can be assumed that the attitudes and perceptions of the top military command and the men in the president's office differ markedly from those of the groups, especially conservative groups, from whom we obtained interviews. In summary, the problem of bias—of systematic error in the elite sample—does not seem very troubling. Two other difficulties should be recognized. One is caused by the low response rates in some of the sectors;

130 • APPENDIX I

the other is the result of the low absolute number of respondents, whatever the response rate. When response rates go down, standard errors go up. Even though results might not be biased, they may be subject to random noise, which tends to deflate correlations. This difficulty can be endured, since its worst effect is to encourage cautious rather than overstated inferences. Even if response rates were higher, however, the number of interviews in certain sectors might still have to remain small. The logic of sampling elites tends to be the reverse of that involved in sampling general populations. Large samples of elites are not necessarily more representative, since elites are by definition few in number. This fact restricts the applicability of conventional statistical techniques, which rely on a "reasonable" number of observations. We handled this problem by a mixture of common sense, qualitative analysis of the discursive responses of the elites, and an illustrative, rather than rigorous, use of tests of statistical significance.

131

Appendix II • The Sample of Southeast Brazil The sample of the population was designed to collect attitudinal data to be matched against elite perceptions of the prevailing public sentiment on current issues. Our inclination was to select a sample of the general population of the country, but budgetary constraints led us to restrict the survey to the population of Southeast Brazil, a large geographical area with over 50 percent of the national population in 1970 and with the country's largest urban and industrial centers. By definition, then, the sample population is the total, noninstitutionalized population of Southeast Brazil, eighteen years and older.

SAMPLE SELECTION The general design consists of a multistage area probability sample of the population. Six states, which included 92 percent of the total population of Southeast Brazil in 1970, were intentionally chosen as basic sample modules. They are Espírito Santo, Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, what was at that time the state of Guanabara (currently the city of Rio de Janeiro), São Paulo, and Rio Grande do Sul. Because of the considerable difficulties of access in the rural areas of Espírito Santo, that state was sampled as if it were part of neighboring Minas Gerais. Sample probability selection was effected in five stages: first, municípios (the county-like units of local government in Brazil); second, census sectors or enumeration areas within selected municípios; third, segments or subsectors of selected enumeration areas; fourth, households; and, fifth, individual respondents. In contrast to the U.S. concept of the municipality as uniquely urban, municípios are similar to counties or to New England townships in that they are expected to serve a geographical area delimited by a city and the surrounding countryside. Municípios were stratified according to their 1970 population and degree of urbanization and, then, selected within

132

strata with probabilities proportional to population size. The overall sampling rate was 1 subject to every 16,550 inhabitants and the selected municípios constituted our primary sampling units. Table II.1 displays the 1970 adult population of each of the twentyfour primary sampling units. Wide variations in population size among the primary sampling units necessitated the design of finer municipal subdivisions. Some municípios included municipal districts; and the city-state, at that time, of Rio de Janeiro was fully organized into twenty-three administrative zones. Most municípios, however, had no internal subdivisions beyond urban and rural areas. Within primary sampling units, census sectors or enumeration areas, each uniquely delimited on a geographic basis and fully delineated on maps, constituted the best available sampling frames. A total of ninetyeight urban and sixteen rural census sectors were selected with probabilities proportional to their 1970 population. Census sectors, however, are clusters of population and dwelling units of variable size. In the urban areas, census sectors included an average of 1,400 persons and some 300 dwelling units, decreasing in rural areas to an average of 900 inhabitants and 200 households. That is, census sectors were population clusters still too large to provide efficient and reliable sampling frames for the selection of households. The fourth sampling stage, therefore, consisted of the delimitation and selection of segments within selected census sectors. There is no optimum procedure for subdividing enumeration areas of variable size. The delimitation and selection of segments were effected in one of two ways. In urban areas, the enumeration maps clearly identified the component blocks of structures but provided no information about the population or number of dwelling units in each block. Thus the selection procedure consisted of successive random drawings of blocks of unequal size up to the total number of addresses to be attempted in any given sector. A street corner in each block was randomly chosen and interviewers were instructed to circle each block clockwise from the random starting point, enumerating all dwelling units and attempting to take an interview at every fifth household until all scheduled interviews were taken. Field work was controlled by weekly checks of enumeration lists and random calls to households where interviews were alleged to have been attempted. Rural areas posed a completely different problem. It was no surprise that census maps were far from accurate; with help from the rural extension services, we updated rural maps and divided them into large areas along existing roads. Households were then selected in proportion to the estimated number of rural dwellings within each map area.

133

Table II.1. T h e Sample of the Population of Southeast Brazil: States and Primary Sampling Units 1970 Adult Populationa States and Primary Sampling Units Guanabara Rio de Janeiro Rio de Janeiro Nova Iguaçú Niteroi b Campos Minas Gerais-Espirito Santo Belo Horizonte Juiz de Fora Governador Valadares Vitoria Caratinga Paraisopolis Poço Fundo c Ouro Branco São Paulo São Paulo Santos Jundiaíb São Caetano do Sul São José dos Campos Mauá Rio Claro Avaré Rio Grande do Sul Porto Alegre Gravataíc Erechim Humaitá c Total adult population In selected states In Southeast Brazil In Brazil

States

Primary Sampling Units

2,691,404 2,691,404 2,487,330 344,624 185,663 146,187 6,432,257 619,438 123,655 69,575 65,510 46,765 6,190 5,777 2,885 10,068,407 3,395,998 212,581 92,666 89,286 71,502 47,903 43,628 19,207 3,592,345 515,851 26,180 24,077 4,625 25,271,740 27,587,134 47,469,837

a Data are from the 1970 Census of Population of Brazil. Because of different classifications used by the census, data on states refer to the population 18 years and older, whereas data on municipios include the population 20 years and older. b Both urban and rural population sampled. c Only rural population sampled.

134 • APPENDIX II

The survey design called for the selection of one adult respondent in each household. In each eligible household, all permanent adult residents were first listed and then selected by means of probability selection tables.1 No replacement of households or respondents was allowed.

WEIGHTING FOR NONRESPONSE There were 1,314 successfully completed interviews out of a total of 1,527 selected addresses. Although high, the 86 percent response to the survey indicates that the sample is not free from distortion. The 14 percent nonresponse includes 6 percent of the sample addresses classified as refusals; 5 percent as not at home (meaning that we failed to get an interview after a maximum of three calls), and 3 percent as unobtainable because the selected respondents were senile, seriously ill, or otherwise incapable of answering the questionnaire. Nonresponse tends to occur with unusual frequency among certain groups of the population. Men, for example, are more likely to be absent from home over long periods of time. Women are easier to find but are more likely to refuse to be interviewed. A similar pattern characterizes age groups: the young are often not at home and the old are more resistant to interviews. Those who live in large cities are hard to find and when found, are either too suspicious or too busy to answer the interview; small town and rural people are more receptive but frequently unavailable.2 It is apparent, then, that nonresponses created imperfections in what was originally designed to be a self-weighting sample. Such imperfections affected directly three main variables: sex, age, and rural or urban residence. Unweighted sample estimates of those characteristics are off the aggregate population values by a factor of 7 percent in the case of area of residence, 6 percent in the case of sex, and 2 percent in the case of age. At the risk of increased sampling variances, unequal weighting of the responses of different sample elements was used to compensate for nonresponse. Twelve population strata were defined for each state module. Stratification factors were urban-rural residence, sex, and three broad age groups, and the sample responses were adjusted to reflect the relative distribution of such characteristics in the population.

RESPONDENT'S SUSPICION AND INTERVIEW RESULTS The failure to interview certain elements of the population—because they could not be found at home, were senile or too ill to participate in the in-

135

terview, or simply refused to be interviewed—is one source of bias in survey results. Another source is no opinion (or "don't knows") as well as refusals to answer specific questions. The possibility that respondents may have deliberately misrepresented their opinions out of the suspicion or fear that they might be penalized for candidly answering questions that were too private (for example, those about birth control) or politically sensitive (those about internal subversion) is of particular concern. There is substantial evidence that very few respondents were afraid to answer questions about the government or political issues in general and that whatever amount of fear or outright deception occurred would not have been sufficient to substantially bias survey results.3 It is possible, however, that respondents may have misrepresented their opinions in subtler ways: for example, by stating that they had no opinion—that is, "did not know"—about a particular issue rather than refusing to answer the question. Our inferences regarding the nature of attitudes toward birth control relative to attitudes toward more remote political and economic issues would be flawed if the reported nonopinions represented disguised refusals to state a viewpoint rather than ignorance of what was at stake. Our belief that reported nonopinion is a reliable measure of lack of knowledge about the issue at hand is based on the interviewers' evaluations of respondents' behavior following the completion of each interview. Of particular interest are three items that deal with the respondents' hesitation during the interview, the degree of sincerity with which they answered most questions, and their difficulty in understanding what they were being asked about. Evaluations were recorded on a 100-point scale; a score of zero indicates a minimum value for each item (no hesitation, insincerity, or difficulty). Table II.2 displays the mean hesitation, sincerity, and difficulty scores arrayed by respondents who did state an opinion and those who said they had no opinion or simply refused to answer the questions. To avoid cluttering the text with excessive detail, Table II.2 includes two issues of quite a different nature: the government's role regarding birth control and the combat against internal subversion. Overall, the results indicate that most respondents expressed little hesitation throughout the interview, did not seem to experience much difficulty with the questions they were asked, and were rather sincere in their answers. As expected, respondents who refused to answer the questions were significantly more hesitant and less sincere in answering the interview schedule. They were also more likely to be among the 10 percent of the respondents who expressed fear or suspicion that their answers might somehow inconvenience them in the future.

136 • APPENDIX II

Table II.2. Interviewer Evaluations of Responses to the Issues of Birth Control and Internal Subversiona Birth Control (Averages) Evaluations of Behavior during Interview Hesitation Insincerity Difficulty Percentage in each category Number of cases

Internal Subversion (Averages)

Opinion

No Opinion

Refusal

ETA2

Opinion

No Opinion

Refusal

ETA2

17 19 28

33 21 51

33 28 34

.05 — .06

15 18 28

22 19 51

42 33 34

.05 .01 .06

88% (1,147)

10% (136)

2% (22)

51% (667)

46% (601)

3% (38)

Interviewer evaluations were recorded on a 100-point scale where 0 indicates a minimum value (no hesitation, insincerity, or difficulty) and 100 a maximum (considerable hesitation, insincerity, or difficulty). Missing data are excluded.

Respondents who confessed to having no opinion, however, were altogether different from those who refused to answer the questions. The former were at least as sincere in their responses to the interview as the respondents who stated outright their issue preferences, although they also seem to have been a bit more hesitant. The foremost difference between the three groups of respondents, however, is that those who had no opinion were precisely those who had most difficulty in understanding what the questions were about in the first place. Respondents who refused to answer understood very well what was at stake. In short, the measures of nonopinion and refusals appear to be quite reliable. Nonopinion indicates lack of knowledge or understanding and not disguised refusals to answer the questions.

138 • APPENDIX II

Notes 1. Overview 1. See Thomas W. Merrick's testimony before the U.S. Congress, Select Committee on Population, Population and Development, pp. 68-74, 399-419. See also Thomas W. Merrick and Ricardo Moran, "Population," in Brazil: Human Resources Special Report. 2. For a discussion of the differential access to contraceptives by income class, see Raimar Richers and Edwardo Augusto Buarque de Almeida, "O Planejamento Familiar e o Mercado de Anticoncepcionais no Brasil," Revista de Administração de Empresas 15 (July-August 1975): 7-21. In contrast, the argument that high fertility constitutes rational economic behavior, especially among poor families, gives much less emphasis to the factor of contraceptive availability and to the regressive effects on income of a large parity. This line of reasoning rests on the proposition that the economic well-being of the family in subsistence economies, rural and urban alike, is a direct function of the number of workhands it can mobilize. It is argued that children represent a viable resource for increasing the earning capacities of poor households as well as a source of security for the parents in old age. For an application of a similar argument to Brazil, see Paul I. Singer, "População: Crise ou Pretexto?" Opiniao 82 (June 1974): 14-15; for El Salvador, see William H. Durham, Scarcity and Survival in Central America: Ecological Origins of the Soccer War. A judicious discussion of the relation between fertility and land-tenure patterns in Costa Rica can be found in Mitchell A. Seligson, "Public Policies in Conflict: Land Reform and Family Planning in Costa Rica," Comparative Politics 11 (October 1979): 49-62; and, more generally, Julian L. Simon, "The Positive Effect of Population Growth on Agricultural Saving in Irrigation Systems," Review of Economics and Statistics 57 (February 1975): 71-79. Part of the confusion in this debate stems from imprecision about what constitutes "well-being." While the availability of low-cost labor in the form of numerous children may be conducive to the survival of the family in dire economic circumstances, it is doubtful that they add to the family's chances of social mobility. Moreover, high fertility seems almost always to be detrimental to the position of women within the family and the broader society. For an elaboration of the proposition linking high fertility to the unequal distribution of power within households, see John C. Caldwell, "Toward a Restatement of Demographic Transition Theory," Population and Development Review 2 (September-December 1976): 321-366, and "A Theory of Fertility:

139

From High Plateau to Destabilization," Population and Development Review 4 (December 1978): 553-577. It should be noted that causal interpretation of the association between high fertility and poverty (e.g., low educational attainment) remains an area of uncertainty and controversy at the national as well as the household levels; see, for example, Julian L. Simon and Adam M. Pilarski, "The Effect of Population Growth upon the Quantity of Education Children Receive," Review of Economics and Statistics 61 (November 1979): 572-584. 3. For updating on the political economy of post-1973 Brazil, see Edmar L. Bacha, "Issues and Evidence on Recent Brazilian Economic Growth," World Development 5, nos. 1/2 (1977): 47-67; Norman Gall, "The Rise of Brazil," Commentary 63 (January 1977): 45-55; and Pedro S. Malan and Regis Bonelli, "The Brazilian Economy in the Seventies: Old and New Developments," World Development 5, nos. 1/2 (1977): 19-45. 4. Analyses of changes in population policy in Brazil can be found in Thomas W. Merrick, "Population, Development, and Planning in Brazil," Population and Development Review 2 (June 1976): 181-199; Thomas W. Merrick, "Brazil's Population to be Hemisphere's Largest in 21st Century," Intercom 7 (November-December 1979): 6 - 9 ; Juan De Onis, "Birth Control in Latin America Making Little Headway as Population Pressures Grow," New York Times, June 12, 1977, p. 12; "Rumo à Família Planejada?" Veja, May 25, 1977, pp. 70-77; Alex Mundigo, "Brazil's Changing Family Planning Policy: A First Step?" International Family Planning Perspectives and Digest 4 (Spring 1978): 18-20; and Thomas W. Merrick and Douglas H. Graham, Population and Economic Development in Brazil since 1800: Evidence and Interpretations. 5. See Jason L. Finkle and Barbara B. Crane, "The Politics of Bucharest: Population, Development, and the New International Economic Order," Population and Development Review 1 (September 1975): 87-114. 6. The definition of high-risk pregnancy is technically elaborate, but basically it covers pregnancies that might endanger the lives of the mother, the unborn infant, or both. See Pedro Augusto Marcondes de Almeida et al., "Identificação e Avaliação dos Fatores Clínicos da Gestação de Alto Risco," Revista de Saúde Pública 9 (September 1975): 417-425. 7. Brasil, Ministério de Saúde, Saúde Materno-Infantil. 8. Quoted in José Carlos Bardawill, "Estão Dourando a Pílula," Isto É, April 30, 1980, p. 20. 9. See "Governo Já Admite Adotar o Controle da Natalidade," Jornal do Brasil, March 5, 1980, p. 6; and "Projeto para Evitar Filho Prevê Uso da Pílula e Vasectomia," Jornal do Brasil, May 14, 1980, p. 8. 10. João Yunes and Vera S. C. Ronchezel, "Evolução da Mortalidade Geral, Infantil e Proporcional no Brasil," Revista de Saúde Pública 8 (June 1975): 3-48. 11. An estimated yearly 1.5 million abortions which "produce complications requiring hospitalization" are reported by Cora Ronai, "Planejamento Familiar: Uma Tentativa de Democratizar a Informação," Jornal do Brasil, December 4, 1979, p. 4. A figure of 3 million abortions a year (apparently of all kinds) is given in Ligia Rodrigues and Karen Leone, "Aborto," Em Tempo, January 24-February 7, 1980, pp. 8-9.

140 • NOTES TO PAGES 4 - 8

12. Warren Hoge, "Hard-Driving São Paulo: It Can Even Smell Like a Garage," New York Times, December 19, 1979, p. 2. 13. See, for example, João Lyra Madeira et al., A Dinâmica do Movimento Natural de População Brasileira; Milton S. Nakamura and Joaquim de Paula Barreto Fonseca, São Paulo State Contraceptive Prevalence Survey: Final Report; Frank Wm. Oechsli and Dudley Kirk, "Modernization and the Demographic Transition in Latin America and the Caribbean," Economic Development and Cultural Change 23 (April 1975): 391-419; and J. Mayone Stycos, "Recent Trends in Latin American Fertility," Population Studies 32 (1978): 407-425. 14. See "O Parto Difícil: Cai a Natalidade entre as Famílias Mais Pobres," Veja, October 24, 1979, p. 139. Furthermore, Nakamura and Fonseca, São Paulo State Contraceptive Prevalence Survey, show that São Paulo has a level of contraceptive use surpassed in the Western Hemisphere only by the United States— without any particular encouragement from the government. Contraceptive use, and the recourse to induced abortion, have increased sharply over a brief period of time, from 1965 to 1978, with the biggest increases taking place among lower-class families. The base-line data for São Paulo are provided by Elza S. Berquó, Maria Coleta, A. F. de Oliveiria, and Candido Procópio F. de Camargo, eds., A Fecundidade em São Paulo. For a further discussion of the probable decline in Brazilian fertility, see Gilberto Paim, "A População do Brasil Estaria Aumentando ou Está Declinando?" Revista Bancária Brasileira (February 1979). 15. The population targeted by the maternal-child health program comprises women between 15 to 49 years of age, children from birth to 15 years of age, and adolescents from 15 to 19. A thorough review of this and complementary programs, including the private family planning projects conducted by the BEMFAM (Sociedade para o Bem Estar da Família) and the demographic and health studies sponsored by the government, is given by Morvan DeMello, Lea Melo Da Silva, and Robert McLaughlin, Brasil: Perfil Nacional, [translation of "Country Profiles: Brazil"], Population Council Report (January 1979). Amaury de Souza, "População e Política Populacional no Brasil: Uma Resenha de Estudos Recentes," Boletim Informativo e Bibliográfico de Ciências Sociais 8 (1979): 7-22, provides a summary of the most recent research on population in Brazil. 16. Different interpretations may be found in Paul I. Singer, Dinâmica Populacional e Desenvolvimento; Rubens Vaz da Costa, O Primeiro Passo; Herman E. Daly, "The Population Question in Northeast Brazil: Its Economic and Ideological Dimensions," Economic Development and Cultural Change 18 (July 1970): 536— 574, and "A Marxian-Malthusian View of Poverty and Development," Population Studies 25 (March 1971): 25-37; Edy Luiz Kogut and Carlos Geraldo Langoni, "Population Growth, Income Distribution, and Economic Development," International Labor Review 3 (April 1975): 321-333; Steven E. Beaver, Demographic Transition Theory Reconsidered: An Application to Recent Natality Trends in Latin America; and Bonnie Mass, Population Target: The Political Economy of Population Growth in Latin America. 17. An excellent discussion of changes within the Catholic Church in Brazil with respect to the population question is Thomas G. Sanders, The Politics of Population in Brazil, American Universities Field Staff Reports, vol. 15 (April 1971),

141

and "Population Planning and Belief Systems: The Catholic Church in Latin America," in Are Our Descendants Doomed? Technological Change and Population Growth, ed. Harrison Brown and Edward Hutchings, Jr. In the absence of an unequivocal and easily communicable message regarding the issue, the Church in Brazil has generally kept a low profile on matters of family planning and contraceptive use, while reasserting the primacy of an integral policy of development for the resolution of population problems and the inviolability of the family in making decisions that affect its members. In addition, birth control as a controversy has probably lost some of its salience as the Church has begun to focus attention on pastoral concerns, discussed at the Medellin and Puebla conferences in the late 1970s, involving the defense of human rights, the formation of grass-roots religious communities, and social action on behalf of the impoverished and oppressed. In short, the Church in Brazil has developed, even if it does not conspicuously exhibit, a certain flexibility with regard to family planning, and its doctrinal conservatism on the issue shows signs of being overshadowed by attention to problems of social reform that are not wholly moral in scope. See Antonio Flávio de Oliveira Pierucci, Igreja: Contradições e Acomodação. Ideologia do Clero Católico sobre a Reprodução Humana no Brasil. 18. For an overview of the development of Catholic thinking about contraception, see Lincoln H. Day and Alice Taylor Day, Too Many Americans; and John T. Noonan, Jr., Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists. More recent changes in the Church's position regarding contraception and population growth generally are discussed in Francis X. Murphy and Joseph F. Erhart, "Catholic Perspectives on Population Issues," Population Bulletin 30 (1974): 3-31. 19. For a general statement about the influence of religion, see Richard H. White, "Toward a Theory of Religious Influence," Pacific Sociological Review 11 (1968): 23-28. 20. A general survey of the impact of Catholicism on fertility is found in Gavin Jones and Dorothy Nortman, "Roman Catholic Fertility and Family Planning: A Comparative Review of the Research Literature," Studies in Family Planning 34 (October 1968): 1-27. Evidence that Catholics in Brazil and in Latin America generally use proscribed methods of contraception is found in Carmen A. Miró, "Some Misconceptions Disproved: A Program of Comparative Fertility Studies in Latin America," in Fertility and Family Planning in Metropolitan Latin America, ed. CELADE and CESC; J. Mayone Stycos, "Social Class and Preferred Family Size in Peru," American Journal of Sociology 70 (May 1965): 651-658; and Jones and Nortman, "Roman Catholic Fertility and Family Planning," pp. 1-27. Widespread recourse to surgical sterilization and induced abortion by Catholic women in Brazil is substantiated by Bertram Hutchinson, "Induced Abortion in Brazilian Married Women," America Latina 7 (October-December 1964): 21-33; Candido Procópio F. Camargo and Elza S. Berquó, Diferenciais de Fertilidade; Elza S. Berquó et al., "Levels and Variations in Fertility in São Paulo," Milbank Memorial Quarterly 46 (July 1968): 167-185; and Maria Lucila Milanesi, O Aborto Provocado. What these studies, in conjunction with Nakamura and Fonseca, São Paulo State Contraceptive Prevalence Survey, demonstrate is that abortion is the

142 • NOTES TO PAGES 8-9

foremost method of birth control among lower-class women and that the number of pregnancies terminating in induced abortion has risen steadily in the past fifteen years. It seems plausible to infer from these studies that the legalization of abortion would enjoy wide popular support in Brazil. 21. The institutional weakness of the Catholic Church in Brazil is discussed by Emanuel De Kadt, "Religion, the Church, and Social Change in Brazil," in The Politics of Conformity in Latin America, ed. Claudio Veliz; David E. Mutchler, "Roman Catholicism in Brazil," Studies in Comparative International Development 1 (1968): 104-117; Ralph Delia Cava, "Catholicism and Society in Twentieth Century Brazil," Latin American Research Review 11 (1976): 7-50; and Fausto Cupertino, As Muitas Religiões do Brasileiro. This situation stands in contrast to the still powerful position of the Church in Spain, where it has traditionally been closely associated with conservative secular authorities (with the monarchy, for example) and to the Church's hold on society in the Irish Republic, where the priest-toparishioner ratio is extremely high. 22. There are numerous studies of popular religiosity or folk Catholicism. See, among others, Roger Bastide, "Religion and the Church in Brazil," in Brazil: Portrait of a Half-Continent, ed. T Lynn Smith and Alexander Marchant; Thaïes de Azevedo, O Catolicismo no Brasil; Cupertino, As Muitas Religiões; and Thomas C. Bruneau, Religiosity and Politicization in Brazil: The Church in an Authoritarian Regime (forthcoming). 23. Thomas C. Bruneau, The Political Transformation of the Brazilian Catholic Church, characterizes this strategy of influence through proximity to the secular authorities as the "neo-Christendom" influence model. See also De Kadt, "Religion, the Church, and Social Change in Brazil." The use of political pressure by the Church in Latin America to forestall unfavorable legislation on family matters is discussed by Lincoln H. Day, "Catholicism and Fertility: A Cross-Cultural Analysis," in Population Policies and Growth in Latin America, ed. David Chaplin, pp. 37-48. 24. Another group that rivals the Church in this respect, aside from factions within the military itself, is the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB, Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil). The OAB has a certain amount of influence in monitoring the legitimacy of the regime. 25. It should be stressed that the accord between conservative and progressive elements in the Church is very tenuous indeed and that the acquiescence of the progressives to the conservative line on family planning may be more apparent than real. The government has consulted several bishops about the draft version of its national family planning program, and the president of the CNBB has urged his colleagues "to study [details of the plan] on a case-by-case basis," implicitly recommending that it not be rejected out of hand. See "Igreja Vai Colaborar no Controle Familiar," Estado de São Paulo, May 24, 1980, p. 11, and "Soares: Controle Começa Este Ano," Estado de São Paulo, May 25, 1980, p. 14. See also Warren Hoge, "Brazilians Battle over Land, with Church Backing Poor," New York Times, March 4, 1980, p. 2; idem, "Papal Visit Divides Catholics in Brazil," New York Times, April 27, 1980, p. 5; " D . Luciano: Aborto é Ato Covarde contra Indefeso," Última Hora, March 19, 1980, p. 9; "CNBB Forma Comissão para Campanha con-

143

tra Controle da Natalidade e o Aborto," Jornal do Brasil, April 12, 1980, p. 11; and Charles Antoine, "L'Église Catholique: De la Résistance à l'Opposition," Le Monde Diplomatique (February 1980): 4 - 5 . 26. An accessible compendium of the views of the Brazilian government with critiques of official policy is Manuel J. Carvajal, ed., Population Growth and Productivity. See, in particular, the addresses by the then ministers of health (Mário Machado de Lemos), education (Jarbas G. Passarinho), and labor (Júlio Barata) in this volume. For the diverse views of Brazilian intellectuals, see the special issue of Folhetim (March 23, 1980), entitled "Planejamento Familiar e Crescimento Populacional." 27. A classic statement of this fact is in J. Mayone Stycos, ed., Ideology, Faith, and Family Planning in Latin America. For empirical evidence, see Alex Mundigo, "Factors Affecting the Population Attitudes of Latin American Elites," in The Dynamics of Population Policy in Latin America, ed. Terry L. McCoy, pp. 37-57. Opinions on most other issues in Brazil—for example, on income redistribution, on government-opposition relations, on agrarian reform, and so forth—can be understood as reflecting positions on an underlying progressive-to-conservative continuum. They are interconnected, so that a change in wage policy, for instance, tends to be perceived as having rather direct implications for other areas, such as the power of labor organizations and, indeed, of the political parties. Because of the relatedness of elite attitudes on these issues, policy moves on any one of them are often freighted with severe controversy. 28. See Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies. 29. Compare Peter Bachrach and Elihu Bergman, Power and Choice. 30. An overview of the foreign policy implications of population planning is provided by Nicholas J. Demerath, Birth Control and Foreign Policy: The Alternatives to Family Planning. 31. Compare Barbara Baumberger Crane, "Elites and Population Policy: An Analysis of Research on Elite Attitudes toward Population Issues," Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1975, and J. Mayone Stycos, "Population Policy and Development," Population and Development Review 3 (March-June 1977): 103-112, both of whom suggest that population policy ranks low on national agenda almost everywhere. 32. For a presentation of the more forceful pronatalist position, see José Thomaz Nabuco, Política Demográfica para o Brasil. 33. The fact that family planning is not purely a bread-and-butter issue for Brazilians bears stressing. At least for some, it is freighted with cultural and religious symbols that cannot be reduced to self-interest politics. For an elaboration of this point, see David O. Sears, Carl P. Hensler, and Leslie K. Speer, "Whites' Opposition to 'Bussing': Self-interests or Symbolic Politics?" American Political Science Review 73 (June 1979): 369-384. In relative terms, however—that is, in comparison with preferences on most expressly political issues—the opinions of Brazilians on family planning and related matters seem quite concrete and pragmatic. 34. Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, argues that, historically, public acceptance of birth control re-

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suited from women's struggle for civil rights, including the right to sexual and reproductive self-determination. Compare David M. Kennedy, "Decrease and Stultify: Contraception and Abortion in American Society," Reviews in American History 7 (March 1977): 18-25. In Brazil, although the women's movement remains fairly weak, feminist organizations have become increasingly vocal, especially with respect to abortion. See Jacqueline Pitanguy de Romani, "Aborto, o Direito de Opção," Jornal do Brasil, February 22, 1980, pp. 4 - 5 ; Eva Spitz, "A Conquista do Corpo," Veja, February 20, 1980, pp. 3-5; and "Programa da Sociedade Brasil Mulher," mimeo., Rio de Janeiro, n.d. [1979?]. 35. A major gap in our survey concerns women's role in economic and demographic decision making within the household. A pioneering study of the interaction between fertility and women's labor-force participation in Brazil is Bernard C. Rosen and Alan B. Simmons, "Industrialization, Family, and Fertility: A Structural-Psychological Analysis of the Brazilian Case," Demography 8 (February 1971): 46-69. 36. See John Sheahan, "Market-Oriented Economic Policies and Political Repression in Latin America," Economic Development and Cultural Change 28 (January 1980): 267-291 for an overview. Case studies of specific policy areas are also fairly abundant. See for example "Housing Policy, Urban Poverty, and the State: The Favelas of Rio de Janeiro, 1972-76," Latin American Research Review 14 (1979): 3-24; and Carmelo Mesa-Lago, Social Security in Latin America: Pressure Groups, Stratification, and Inequality. A case even more in point is provided by the tribulations of an agency, CEME (Central de Medicamentos), which the government established to facilitate the access of the Brazilian poor to basic medicines; see Peter Evans, Dependent Development, especially pp. 255-262. It should be noted, however, that the agency has been reorganized, and we have found no evidence that the program to subsidize the distribution of medicine was abandoned or its funds cut. See "Cerne Deixa Anticoncepcionais Fora da Lista," Jornal do Brasil, March 19, 1980, p. 9. 37. See "Da Pílula à Vasectomia," Veja, April 16, 1980, p. 13. 38. The cooptadve beneficence of authoritarianism has long been recognized as a hallmark of the politics of some Latin American countries, and as an important mechanism of social control. The anticipatory, top-down distribution of selective benefits is one of the trademarks of Brazilian corporatism. See the essays in James Malloy, ed., Authoritarianism and Corporatism in Latin America, and in Frederick B. Pike and Thomas Stritch, eds., The New Corporatism. 39. Brazil: Human Resources Report, p. vii. For an extensive coverage of the development of Brazilian health policy from a cross-national and historical perspective, see Wanderley Guilherme Dos Santos, Cidadania e Justiça. 40. See Peter T. Knight, Dennis Mahar, and Ricardo Moran, "Health, Nutrition, and Education," in Brazil: Human Resources Special Report. 41. See Rubens Vaz da Costa, "A Dívida Social," Jornal do Brasil, March 3, 1980, p. 4. 42. Dos Santos, Cidadania e Justiça. Some elites argue that inattention to basic social services, including family planning assistance, undercuts the movement toward political opening. The rationale is that growing numbers of im-

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poverished Brazilians diminish the probability of liberalization by confronting the government with virtually intractable social problems. See the interview with the medical researcher Elsimar Coutinho in Ricardo Noblat, "Natalidade e Ditadura," Veja, May 28, 1980, pp. 3-6. 43. Although the contemporary Church has been intransigent with respect to abortion, there is some historical evidence that Catholic doctrine has not always been so fixed. See Symona Gropper, "Viva o Control da Natalidade," Jornal do Brasil, April 17, 1980, p. 10. The position of the Church also seems to be more ambiguous, on theological grounds, than is usually thought; see Susan T. Nicholson, Abortion and the Roman Catholic Church, and compare Barbara Hayler, "Abortion," Signs 5 (Winter 1979): 307-323. 44. This approach draws in part from the work of Theodore J. Lowi, "Population Policies and the American Political System," in Political Science in Population Studies, ed. Richard L. Clinton, William S. Flash, and R. Kenneth Godwin, on the classification of public policies. We are more concerned, however, with the differential polarization of issues, including population-related issues, as determined by the perceptions of elites themselves. For an assessment of Lowi's perspective, see George D. Greenberg et al., "Developing Public Policy Theory: Perspectives from Empirical Research," American Political Science Review 71 (December 1977): 1532-1543. 45. John A. Booth, "Political Participation in Latin America: Levels, Structure, Context, Concentration and Rationality," Latin American Research Review 14 (1979): 29-60, makes the useful point that "efforts to influence the distribution of public goods [in Latin America] do not always take either redistributive or defensive forms," citing as an example communal improvement activity. Population policy in Brazil shares some of these low conflict-potential traits. It does not incite defensive passions at the heart of the state, nor is it seen as radically redistributive. 46. See Lea Melo da Silva and Maria do Carmo Fonseca do Vale, "Notas sobre as Estratégias Governmentais e a Dinâmica Populacional no Brasil," in VII Encontro Nacional de Economia. 47. Occasionally, however, we do compare Brazil with other countries, especially with Spain, where we have firsthand research experience. The contrast between Brazil and Spain is particularly revealing with respect to the different weights of religion in the two societies. While rigorous comparative studies of population policy are rare, analyses along these lines can be found in Marilyn Field Clark, "The Comparative Politics of Birth Control," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, I11., April 21-23, 1977; Marilyn J. Field, "Models of Policy Determination: Contraception and Abortion Policies in Developed States," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, I11., April 20-22, 1978; and Terry L. McCoy and Frank J. Traina, "Correlates of Population Policy Adoption in the Third World," paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, I11., April 21-23, 1977. 48. One problem we encountered in our study design is that terminology in the field of population is notoriously value laden. In general we use population planning to refer to a set of government measures designed primarily to reduce the

146 • NOTES TO PAGES 14-23

rate of population growth. We reserve the more neutral term population policy for explicit discussions of policy alternatives. In the text, an effort has been made to specify the terms used in the questions themselves. Where these terms may have introduced bias, that is noted; and where different elites appear to have interpreted terms differently, that too is noted. Finally, we use the term birth control mainly as a lexical variation on population planning, in order to avoid monotony; no substantive distinction is intended. 49. Results from public opinion polls conducted in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo from 1967 to 1977 are reported in Walter Rodrigues's testimony to the United States Congress, Select Committee on Population (1978), pp. 57-63, 355-384; and Mundigo, "Brazil's Changing Family Planning Policy," pp. 18-20. 50. There has been considerable debate over the nature of political attitudes in Latin America; see John A. Booth and Mitchell A. Seligson, eds., Political Participation in Latin America, Volume I: Citizen and State; Mitchell A. Seligson and John A. Booth, eds., Political Participation in Latin America, Volume II: Politics and the Poor, Susan Eckstein, "On Questioning the Questionnaire: Research Experiences," Latin American Research Review 14 (1979): 141-149. It should be plain that we are not making a case for the irrationality of mass attitudes in Brazil. 51. The simulation procedure involved regressing opinions about the government's role in family planning on the rural proportion of the population in the states where interviews were conducted. We then extrapolated from these results to estimate the extent of possible opinion variation, by the rural proportion, in the remaining states and territories. 52. This claim may sound more sweeping than it is actually meant to be. Although we uncovered no significant rural-urban differences in opinions about the role of the government in family planning, such differences do exist with regard to opinions on family size and divorce (and probably with regard to other issues), even though they tend to be attenuated by multivariate analysis. The weight of the rural-urban split depends on the issue. (The reasons for the failure of this indicator to affect attitudes about the government's role in family planning are discussed in Chapter 3.) Another possible objection should also be mentioned. It may be that the rural interior of Brazil, or certain subregions, have distinctive cultural norms. Whatever linear extrapolation we calculate on the basis of rural-urban differences in south-central Brazil may miss this eventuality. But, at least with regard to the demand for family planning services, the data do not even hint at such a possibility. 53. We use syndicates rather than unions to refer to the labor organizations because, in Brazil, such organizations are licensed and often created by the government; they need official authorization to operate at all. The Portuguese term is sindicatos. 54. The omission of the military creates serious problems only if it can be assumed that the military has a viewpoint on birth control that is significantly different from that of the rest of the elites. As we demonstrate in Chapter 4, the elites themselves do not believe that the military has a particularly discrepant view on the issue. For a helpful analysis of the military establishment in Brazil, see Alfred Stepan, The Military in Politics. 147

55. Youssef Cohen, "Popular Support for Authoritarian Regimes: Brazil under Medici," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1979, presents an extensive analysis of the levels of political awareness within the Brazilian populace, drawing on the same data we use. 56. Divorce was legalized in Brazil in 1977. 2. Elite Opinion This chapter contains material that appeared in Peter McDonough and Amaury de Souza, "Brazilian Elites and Population Policy," Population and Development Review 3 (December 1977): 377-401. 1. Dr. Martiano Fernandes, quoted in Jornal do Brasil, December 14, 1971, p. 27. 2. Rubens Costa, then president of the National Housing Bank, quoted in Jornal do Brasil, August 28, 1973, p. 15. 3. Delfim Neto, then Minister of Finance, quoted in Jornal do Brasil, January 1, 1972, p. 14. 4. Elites were not asked directly whether they believed a population problem existed in Brazil. Instead, the proportion of outright pronatalists was derived from the numbers of elites who, in response to a series of items tapping preferences about specific policy mechanisms designed to remedy Brazil's population "problem," said that no such problem existed. The failure to ask the question directly may have biased downward the estimate of the number of pronatalist elites, since it required them to volunteer their objections spontaneously. But since our principal interest is in comparisons between elite groups, rather than in absolute measurements, any such bias should not affect the direction of the findings. 5. See Hal Hellman, ed., Psychosocial and Cultural Determinants of Population Policy. On the other hand, Brazilian doctors do not seem to be markedly antinatalist. The medical association of Rio de Janeiro, for example, has been vocally pronatalist. Our sample of professionals contains very few physicians. 6. The percentage of variation in this and subsequent tables accounted for by the classification of the elites into groups is measured by the eta2 statistic. This statistical measurement is comparable to the coefficient of determination (r2) and is used when the independent variable is a nominal attribute and the dependent variable has interval properties. 7. Compare Edmar L. Bacha, Os Mitos de uma Década: Ensaios de Economia Brasileira. 8. The elites were asked to what extent they considered birth control (and six other issues) to be "moral," "technical," or "political" questions. The bishops, alone among the elites, consistently termed the birth control issue "moral." It may be noted that this paragraph implicitly equates perceived importance with an antinatalist policy stance. As will be shown in Figure 2.2, the assumption is largely correct. 9. It might be argued, more generally, that the average difference between the politicians, at one end of Figure 2.1, and the professionals and bankers at the other is in fact larger than we have interpreted it as being. After all, the distance between

148 • NOTES TO PAGES 24-35

them is on the order of thirty-five points. What is not shown in Figure 2.1 is the variation in importance attributed to the birth control issue within each of the elite groups. This intragroup variance is considerable, as the small eta2 indicates. Hence, intergroup differences, while significant, are modest. 10. As we stressed in the previous chapter, the tentative steps that the government has taken in the direction of offering assistance with family planning have been enveloped in a larger program of health care directed particularly at women in their childbearing years. There are also private family planning programs in Brazil, BEMFAM being by far the largest. We focus on governmental sponsorship of family planning because this seems to be the most controversial of all these activities. 11. Phrasing the question in such a way as to emphasize not only the government's role but also "birth control" instead of the milder "family planning" may have produced a distribution of elite opinion apparently less favorable to some sort of antinatalist policy than it might otherwise be. This reservation is especially germane in light of subsequent developments, starting with the 1974 policy statements at Bucharest and in the II National Development Plan, which have been delicately structured to distinguish "family planning as an integral part of family welfare programs" from "population control." Several comments are in order in this regard. First, as was the case in the discussion of the recognition or denial of a population program, we are less concerned with absolute point estimates than with the relative distribution of opinion across elite groups. Second, the variable meanings that elites attach to birth control will become evident in the analysis of the follow-up probes to this question and in the examination of the specific population policies that elites support and oppose. In brief, it cannot be stressed too strongly that no single item in survey research should be treated as a referendum, as a definitive indicator of opinion on a policy issue, especially one that is so complex as population planning. 12. On the questions of divorce and abortion, the elites were also presented with 100-point scales. The questions read: "To what extent are you in favor of or against the legalization of divorce?" and "To what extent are you in favor of or against the legalization of abortion?" The low end of the scale represents "completely opposed," the upper end "entirely in favor," and the midpoint "indifferent." 13. It bears emphasizing that the score of 40 for the bishops on the birth control issue does not mean that 40 percent of them approve of a governmental commitment to birth control. Rather, it means that on the average the bishops are a bit below approving "the situation nowadays" in Brazil (represented by a score of 50); they lean slightly toward the pronatalist side. 14. The most vocal proponent of the legalization of abortion in the MDB is the federal deputy João Menezes, who has stressed the importance of reducing the number of illegal abortions as a means of protecting the health of women. 15. In Table 2.2, the larger etas 2 for divorce and abortion suggest that these controversies are more polarized than the birth control issue. A primary reason for this possibility is that liberalization of the divorce and abortion laws openly threatens the institutional power of the Church, whereas the bishops may countenance

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some movement on family planning since it is a more private and less policeable matter. As the data show, almost all the adamant opposition to the legalization of divorce and abortion comes from the bishops. 16. It should be remembered, however, that while Marxists have been ambivalent about government-sponsored family planning measures, they are generally progressive with respect to divorce and abortion legislation. See Kevin McQuillan, "Common Themes in Catholic and Marxist Thought on Population and Development," Population and Development Review 5 (December 1979): 689-698. 17. On an issue like government relations with the opposition party, for example, the curve tracing "importance" according to preferences is much flatter than the one portrayed in Figure 2.2. The same happens with other issues, such as government-labor relations, in which the group interests of the elites are directly involved. Those on one side of the issue give it about as much importance as those on the other side; hence, policy debate on the issue tends to be sharply polarized. 18. The empirical criterion for this assessment is straightforward: the correlations between all these classic left-or-right issues are strong, on the order of .40 to .50. 19. The method used to produce Figure 2.3 is smallest-space analysis. It generates results similar to those of factor analysis without some of the latter's restrictive assumptions (e.g., interval-level measurement). See Milton Bloombaum, "Doing Smallest-Space Analysis," Journal of Conflict Resolution 14 (September 1970): 409-416. It may be noted that the solution depicted in Figure 2.3 is statistically adequate. Kruskall's stress coefficient is .08. A coefficient larger than .20 would indicate that more dimensions were needed to interpret the correlations between the variables. The results in Figure 2.3 are based on calculations for the entire elite sample; they vary a bit from group to group. 20. All data in Figure 2.3 are drawn from responses to 100-point scales. The agrarian reform and subversion questions read: "To what extent do you favor or oppose agrarian reform (a reforma agrária)? a greater fight against internal subversion {um maior combate à subversão interna)?" For both these items, the midpoint (50) signifies "indifferent." The format for the remaining questions is quite similar, except that the midpoint represents "the situation nowadays in Brazil." The literal translations are as follows: "Where would you place yourself on this scale with respect to foreign investment {investimentos estrangeiros) in comparison with the situation nowadays in Brazil?" "Again in comparison with the current situation, where would you place yourself regarding the degree of control of the workers' syndicates by the government (o grau de controle sobre sindicatos trabalhistas pelo governo)?" "In comparison to the situation in Brazil today, where would you place yourself with respect to the limits on opposition to the government (os limites à oposição ao governo)?" "Finally, and still keeping in mind Brazil nowadays, where would you place yourself with respect to the redistribution of income (a redistribuição da renda)?" 21. See J. Mayone Stycos, ed., Ideology, Faith, and Family Planning in Latin America, pp. 3-144, and idem, "Some Dimensions of Population and Family Planning: Goals and Means," Journal of Social Issues 30 (1974): 1-29. 22. Caution must be used in extending this argument to Latin America and to

150 • NOTES TO PAGES 36-57

Latin societies generally, since hard evidence for it is rather skimpy. One factor that strongly influences the relation of opinions on moral issues to opinions on more evidently secular controversies probably has to do with the history of the institutional association between the Church and the state, a relation that varies from country to country. Another, perhaps equally important element is the history of leftist thinking on birth control; this, too, has not remained constant. 23. Of course, the fact that elite opinions on birth control, divorce, and abortion cluster together does not mean that these issues are politically indistinguishable. Abortion, for example, tends to be more controversial than the package of policies usually understood as "family planning" in Brazil. This much was suggested in our earlier discussion of the relative progressivism of the MDB politicians and the conservatism of most of the other elite groups regarding the legalization of abortion. 24. To illustrate the breakdown of rationales by elite group, the "enlightenment" rationale is most popular among the civil servants. The "economic growth" argument is most common among the professionals, the businessmen, and the labor leaders. The politicians are most likely to mention the "redistributive" argument, as well as the argument based on considerations of national power. 25. The seven policy measures have been translated literally. They were prefaced with the question, "As for the problem of population growth, what degree of importance do you give to the following methods?" It should be noted that the fourth alternative mentions "birth control" (controle de natalidade) and not "family planning" (planejamento familiar). This phrasing was decided upon for the purpose of tapping reactions to the belief that birth control programs were a device for circumventing the needs of the poor for a more equitable distribution of income and opportunity. The fifth option, increasing the supply of contraceptives, was intended to gauge opinion about a specific policy associated with family planning. Whether these items actually get at such distinctions is, of course, an empirical as well as theoretical question. As the results in Table 2.4 suggest, different elites attribute divergent meanings to the policy choices. 26. For a fuller discussion of the orientations of the labor leaders, see Amaury de Souza, "The Nature of Corporatist Representation: Leaders and Members of Organized Labor in Brazil," Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1978. 27. Compare Thomas K. Burch, "Theories of Fertility as Guides to Population Policy," Social Forces 54 (September 1975): 126-138. 28. Another "actuarial" element that is bound to figure in the decision process regarding population is the 1980 census, the results of which should make possible a firmer estimate of the apparent decline in the rate of total increase of the Brazilian population. 3. Public Opinion 1. See, for example, J. Mayone Stycos, "Social Class and Preferred Family Size in Peru," American Journal of Sociology 70 (May 1965): 651-658; idem, "Contraception and Catholicism in Latin America," Journal of Social Issues 34 (October 1967): 115-133; idem, "Recent Trends in Latin American Fertility," Population

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Studies 32 (1978): 407-425; Miro, "Some Misconceptions Disproved"; Gavin Jones and Dorothy Nortman, "Roman Catholic Fertility and Family Planning," Studies in Family Planning 34 (October 1968): 1-27. 2. A notable exception is Stycos, Ideology, Faith, and Family Planning in Latin America. 3. For a discussion of different motivations for contraceptive use, see Helen Ware, "Motivations for Birth Control: Evidence from West Africa," Demography 13 (November 1976): 479-493. Also, Ira L. Reiss, Albert Banwart, and Harry Foreman, "Premarital Contraceptive Usage: A Study and Some Theoretical Explanations," Journal of Marriage and the Family 37 (August 1975): 619-630. 4. A critical review of studies on the effects of education on fertility is Harvey J. Graff, "Literacy, Education, and Fertility, Past and Present: A Critical Review," Population and Development Review 5 (March 1979): 105-140. See also Barbara S. Janowitz, "An Analysis of the Impact of Education on Family Size," Demography 13 (May 1976): 189-198; Susan Hill Cochrane, Fertility and Education: What Do We Really Know? 5. For evidence that education enhances receptivity to the Church's magisterium, see Charles F. Westoff, Robert G. Potter, and Philip C. Sagi, The Third Child: A Study in the Prediction of Fertility; and Raymond H. Potvin, Charles F. Westoff, and Norman B. Ryder, "Factors Affecting Catholic Wives' Conformity to Their Church Magisterium Position on Birth Control," Journal of Marriage and the Family 30 (May 1968): 263-272. 6. See Christopher H. Achen, "Mass Political Attitudes and the Survey Response," American Political Science Review 69 (December 1975): 1218-1231, for a general discussion of this matter. 7. The total incidence of nonresponse is 10 percent (2 percent refusals and 8 percent "don't knows"). Of course, the acid test for judging the magnitude of nonresponse is relative, that is, in comparison to its frequency in other issues. As we show in Table 3.1 and Table 3.2, the incidence of nonresponse on the birth control item is comparatively low. 8. It is difficult to tell precisely how, if at all, differences in wording between the elite and nonelite versions of this question may affect our results. The midpoint for nonelite respondents ("leave things as they are") is virtually identical to that for the elites ("the situation nowadays in Brazil"), and the other alternatives are very similar. In addition, both items are directed at the government's role in family planning, the difference being that the elites were asked about the possibly more generic controle de natalidade and nonelites about governmental activity with regard to the distribution of contraceptives. Conceivably, the elites may have reacted a bit more negatively than they otherwise might to the connotations of birth control. It should be recognized, however, that the nonelite respondents were presented with a very broad range of options, from outright prohibition to free distribution of contraceptives, so that the opportunity to choose a pronatalist option (which the majority of them did not do) was fully present. 9. The very low incidence of nonresponse to the agrarian reform item may seem surprising, since our sample is heavily urban. On inspection of the openended probes to this question, it turns out that many (though by no means all)

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Brazilians understand the issue as involving the necessity to "do something" to guarantee cheap food supplies in urban markets, not necessarily the redistribution of land. In this sense, at least, agrarian reform is a very tangible issue. 10. For evidence that no opinion on political issues is not a disguised refusal to answer sensitive questions, see Appendix II. 11. This tendency is not, of course, uniquely Brazilian. For comparable evidence from a study of five industrialized nations, see Samuel H. Barnes et al., Political Action: Mass Participation in Five Western Democracies. 12. The apparent upswing, from 3 percent to 7 percent of nonopinion on birth control among university-educated Brazilians is statistically insignificant. 13. Public opinion polls conducted in São Paulo between 1967 and 1977, when divorce was finally legalized in the country, show a similar polarization of opinion. See Armando V. Salem and Nirlando Beirão, "E Agora, Divorciamos?" Isto É, April 4, 1977, pp. 10-15. 14. See, for example, Mario Victor de Assis Pacheco, "Os Riscos da Pílula," Isto É, August 3, 1977, pp. 52-53; and "Aí Vem a Massificação da Pílula," Isto É, April 11, 1979, pp. 52-53. An antinatalist view within the medical profession is presented by Walter Rodrigues, "Progress and Problems of Family Planning in Brazil," Demography 5, no. 2 (1968): 800-810. See also Rodrigues' statement to the United States Congress, Select Committee on Population (1978), pp. 355-384. 15. Compare Larry D. Barnett, "U.S. Population Growth as an AbstractlyPerceived Problem," Demography 7 (February 1970): 53-60. 16. Compare Joan M. Nelson, Access to Power: Politics and the Urban Poor in Developing Nations. 17. For a nontechnical, insightful review, see Ronald Freedman, "Theories of Fertility Decline: A Reappraisal," Social Forces 58 (September 1979): 1-17. 18. See Bernard C. Rosen and Alan B. Simmons, "Industrialization, Family, and Fertility," Demography 8 (February 1971): 46-69. Rural-urban migration is a related factor often thought to affect fertility and fertility-related attitudes. For a discussion of the impact of migration on fertility in Brazil, see Thomas W. Merrick, "Interregional Differences in Fertility in Brazil, 1950-1970," Demography 11 (August 1974): 423-440; and Sugiyama Iutaka, B. F. Bloomer, and F. M. Berardo, "Fertility: Natives and Migrants in Metropolitan Latin America," in Internal Migration: The New World and the Third World, ed. Anthony H. Richmond and Daniel Kubat. We found no significant effect of migration on attitudes toward the government's role in family planning. 19. The nature and extent of women's work-force participation in Brazil are discussed by F. R. Madeira and Paul Singer, "Structure of Female Participation and Work in Brazil, 1920-1970," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 17 (November 1975): 490-496. See also Marysa Navarro, "Research on Latin American Women," Signs 5 (Autumn 1979): 111-120. 20. See Valerie K. Oppenheimer, "The Life-Cycle Squeeze: The Interaction of Men's Occupational and Family Life Cycles," Demography 11 (May 1974): 227-245. 21. The fact that ideal family size increases with age even when other confounding factors are controlled for may be in part a post hoc rationalization of

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completed family size. A more detailed discussion is found in John E. Laing, "The Relationship between Attitudes and Behavior: The Case of Family Planning," in Further Sociological Contributions to Family Planning Research, ed. Donald J. Bogue; and Sara B. Kiesler, "Post Hoc Justification of Family Size," Sociometry 40 (January 1977): 59-67. 22. See, among others, Roger Bastide, "Religion and the Church in Brazil," in Brazil: Portrait of a Half-Continent, ed. T. Lynn Smith and Alexander Marchant. Fausto Cupertino, As Muitas Religiões do Brasileiro, presents evidence on the stagnant number of baptisms, religious marriages, and confirmations performed by the Catholic Church throughout the past decades of rapid population growth. 23. In contrast to the Catholic Church, the influence of Protestantism, and of Pentecostalism in particular, has grown spectacularly in the recent years. See Emilio Willems, Followers of the New Faith; Iêda Siqueira Wiarda and Howard J. Wiarda, "The Churches and Rapid Social Change: Observations on the Differences and Similarities between Protestants and Catholics in Brazil," Journal of Church and State 12 (Winter 1970): 13-39; and Waldo A. Cesar, Para uma Sociologia do Protestantismo Brasileiro, and "Urbanização e Religiosidade Popular: Um Estudo da Doutrina Pentecostal na Sociedade Urbana," Vozes 68 (September 1974): 19-28. 24. For a discussion of the Afro-Catholic cults and the Spiritism of Allan Kardec, see Candido Procópio F. Camargo, Kardecismo e Umbanda; Emilio Willems, "Religious Mass Movements and Social Change in Brazil," in New Perspectives on Brazil, ed. Eric Baklanoff; and Roger Bastide, The African Religions of Brazil: Toward a Sociology of the Interpenetration of Civilizations. 25. Family-size preferences are routinely used as an approximation of, or as a substitute for, completed family size for the analysis of differential fertility beyond the current period. The measure performs exceedingly well at the aggregate level in that the average ideal family size of birth cohorts is a very accurate predictor of the average number of children born to women over periods as long as twenty years. See Charles F. Westoff, Elliot G. Mishler, and E. Lowell Kelly, "Preferences in Size of Family and Eventual Fertility Twenty Years After," American Journal of Sociology 62 (March 1957): 491-497; Larry Bumpass and Charles F. Westoff, "The Prediction of Completed Fertility," Demography 6 (November 1969): 445-454; Judith Blake, "Can We Believe Data on Birth Expectations in the United States?" Demography 11 (February 1974): 25-43; Charles F. Westoff and Norman B. Ryder, "The Predictive Validity of Reproductive Intentions," Demography 14 (November 1977): 431-453. A virtually zero net error at the aggregate level, however, results from a series of cancelling errors at the level of individual couples, resulting from contraception failure or unavailability or from unanticipated infecundity. Although the predictive validity of family-size preferences at the individual level increases substantially at certain points in the life cycle of families, there remain a number of doubts as to the intrinsic meaning of these ideals. See, among others, W Parker Mauldin, "Fertility Studies: Knowledge, Attitude, and Practice," Studies in Family Planning 7 (June 1965): 1-10; John E. Laing, "The Relationship between Attitudes and Behavior: The Case of Family Planning," in Fur-

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ther Sociological Contributions to Family Planning Research, ed. Donald J. Bogue; John Knodel and Visid Prachuabmoh, "Desired Family Size in Thailand: Are the Responses Meaningful?" Demography 10 (November 1973): 619-637; and Sara B. Kiesler, "Post Hoc Justification of Family Size," Sociometry 40 (January 1977): 59-67. 26. The prevalence of the three-children ideal is supported by the findings of Miró, "Some Misconceptions Disproved"; Joseph A. Kahl, "Modern Values and Fertility Ideals in Brazil and Mexico," Journal of Social Issues 23 (October 1967): 99-114; and Elza S. Berquó et al., "Levels and Variations in Fertility in São Paulo," Milbank Memorial Quarterly 46 (July 1968): 167-185. 27. John Knodel and Visid Prachuabmoh, "Desired Family Size in Thailand," Demography 10 (November 1973): 619-637, report essentially similar findings for Thailand. For Peru, see Stycos, "Social Class and Preferred Family Size," pp. 651-658. 28. Discussions of the impact of Catholicism on family-size ideals are found in Judith Blake, "The Americanization of Catholic Reproductive Ideals," Population Studies 20 (July 1966): 27-43; Stycos, "Contraception and Catholicism," pp. 115-133; Jones and Nortman, "Roman Catholic Fertility," pp. 1-27; and Charles F. Westoff and Elise F. Jones, "The End of 'Catholic' Fertility," Demography 16 (May 1979): 209-217. Evidence that the Latin American clergy favors large families is presented in Luis Lenero Otero, ed., Población, Iglesia y Cultura: Sistemas en Conflicto. A related investigation of the definition of sex and family roles in a major Catholic magazine in Brazil is found in J. Reginaldo Prandi, Catolicismo e Família: Transformação de uma Ideologia. 29. Place of residence (rural or urban) and women's work-force participation are omitted from the predictors in the analysis shown here because they have no direct or indirect effects on attitudes toward birth control or divorce, once the effects of the other independent variables are taken into account. 30. An essentially similar association between ideal family size and opposition to abortion laws in the United States is reported by Mario Renzi, "Ideal Family Size as an Intervening Variable between Religion and Attitudes toward Abortion," Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 14 (March 1975): 23-28; and Donald Granberg, "Pro-Life or Reflection of Conservative Ideology? An Analysis of Opposition to Legalized Abortion," Sociology and Social Research 62 (April 1978): 414-429. 31. The path coefficients and error terms are deliberately omitted from Figure 3.2 for two reasons. First, they add little information beyond what is shown in Table 3.10. Second, particularly when only cross-sectional data are available, this brand of causal analysis often leaves a spurious impression of precision when in fact it is more realistic to picture the results as orders of magnitude. In the present case, Figure 3.2 helps anchor the verbal discussion; Table 3.10 provides the hard data. 32. The impact of family structure and decision making on fertility is discussed by Kurt W. Back and Paula H. Hass, "Family Structure and Fertility Control," in Psychological Perspectives on Population, ed. James T. Fawcett; and Caldwell, "A Theory of Fertility," Population and Development Review 4 (December

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1978): 553-577. The Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento is presently investigating the effect of community and work-place family norms on fertility in Brazil. 33. It is worth setting this part of the Brazilian findings in comparative perspective. Using closely comparable indicators in analyzing data from a nationaf sample of Spaniards conducted in 1978, Peter McDonough and Antonio López Pina, "Popular Moralism in Spain," unpublished manuscript, 1979, replicated one pattern encountered in Brazil and discovered an important deviation from the Brazilian pattern. As in Brazil, it is easier to predict attitudes toward the more sharply polarized issues of divorce (and abortion) than toward the government's role in family planning (the legalization of the sale of contraceptives). Contrary to the Brazilian case, however, in Spain the impact of gender role in accounting for attitudes toward family planning vanishes, being overwhelmed by the effect of religiosity. The institutional hold of the Church on Spanish society has been and continues to be great, relative to the lack of penetration of the Church in Brazil. 4. Elite Perceptions 1. M.-Françoise Hall, "Population Growth: U.S. and Latin American Views: An Interpretation of the Response of the United States and Latin America to Latin American Population Growth," Population Studies 27 (November 1973): 415-429, gives a fascinating discussion of the consequences of interelite misperception with specific reference to population policy; the elites, in this instance, are Latin American and U.S. opinion leaders. 2. In retrospect, it is regrettable that we did not ask the elites to estimate the opinions of their own groups, since these data would have provided an interesting complement to the cross-group perceptions. The main reason for not doing so was practical: to avoid respondent fatigue. It should also be noted that the use of 100point scales, rather than the more common five-point or seven-point format, was prompted by similar reasons. The finer scales probably do not increase the accuracy of measurement in technical terms; but pretesting indicated that the elites found them less objectionable than the usual "public opinion poll" items. In short, the 100-point scales to measure both preferences and perceptions were designed to maintain rapport. 3. The model of perception developed here draws on many sources, especially assimilation-contrast theory, originated by Muzafer Sherif and Carl Hovland, Social Judgment: Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Communication and Attitude Change. For an updating and critique of the approach, see Chester A. Insko, Theories of Attitude Change. For applications in political science, see Donald Granberg and Richard Jenks, "Assimilation and Contrast Effects in the 1972 Election," Human Relations 30 (July 1977): 623-640; Donald R. Kinder, "Political Person Perception: The Asymmetrical Influence of Sentiment and Choice on Perceptions of Presidential Candidates," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36 (August 1978): 859-871; and Michael King, "Assimilation and Contrast of Presidential Candidates' Issue Positions, 1972," Public Opinion Quarterly 41 (Winter 1977— 78): 515-522. 4. For a more detailed discussion of "inadvertent accuracy" on less-polarized

156 • NOTES TO PAGES 97-120

issues, see Peter McDonough, Accommodation and Confrontation among Brazilian Elites. 5. To set this pattern in context, recall that the total number of mutual perceptions (and, hence, of preference-perception correlations) for a single issue is thirty-six. On such a truly conflictive issue as government-labor relations, the incidence of positive correlations between preferences and perceptions goes down to four. Apparently, as issues become increasingly polarized, the elites do not assume that the opinions of others resemble their own. If they did, the number of positive correlations would be greater. 6. The fact that the elites' own opinions and their perceptions of others' opinions tend to be correlated (through projection) presents a technical obstacle to discovering misperception. The detection of discrepancies between avowed and attributed opinions is confounded by the lack of independence between the two measures. The acid test of such discrepancies is the statistical significance of the differences between the mean preferences of an elite sector and the mean position attributed to it by another. The correlations between avowed and attributed opinions violate the assumption of independence on which difference-of-means tests are based, and serial comparisons of means are therefore inappropriate. Briefly, we circumvent this problem by using Hotelling's T 2 statistic instead of the conventional t. For details, see Donald F. Morrison, Multivariate Statistical Methods, pp. 128-169. For an application of an analogous procedure to the same problem, see David A. Wilder, "Perceiving Persons as a Group: Effects of Attribution of Causality and Beliefs," Social Psychology 41 (March 1978): 13-23. 7. Several factors that might affect the accuracy of elite estimates of public opinion are discussed in de Souza, "The Nature of Corporatist Representation: Leaders and Members of Organized Labor in Brazil," Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1978. 8. Essentially the same exaggerated discrepancy between elite and mass opinion on the question of family planning policy was found in Massachusetts by Richard D. Tabors and Maris A. Vinovskis, "Preferences for Municipal Services of Citizens and Political Leaders: Somerville, Massachusetts, 1971," in Population Policymaking in the American States, ed. Elihu Bergman et al. Compare Paul Robertson, "Mass and Elite Roles in the Process of Development: A Model Arising from the Jamaican Case," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1974. 5. Summing Up 1. In this respect, the changes promulgated in population policy by the Brazilian government have been less sweeping than those adopted in Mexico. See Terry L. McCoy, "A Paradigmatic Analysis of Mexican Population Policy," in The Dynamics of Population Policy in Latin America, ed. Terry L. McCoy; and John S. Nagel, "Mexico's Population Policy Turnaround," Population Bulletin 33 (December 1978): 3-39. 2. For an interesting attempt along these lines, with special reference to Hungary, see Stephen P. Coelen and Robert J. Mclntyre, "An Econometric Model of Pronatalist and Abortion Policies," Journal of Political Economy 86 (December 1978): 1077-1101.

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3. Compare Jerry L. Weaver, "The Politics of Latin American Family Planning Policy," paper presented at the conference on Latin America since Bucharest, Los Angeles, Calif., University of California, May 13-14, 1976. 4. It is worth noting that there are diverse opinions about the government's family planning policies among the women's groups that have emerged in Brazil since the decay of strict authoritarianism. The left, for example, is reluctant to endorse the distribution of contraceptives outside of an ample program of maternal and child health care, at the same time that legalization of abortion is posed as a fundamental demand. See "Programa da Sociedade Brasil Mulher," Mimeo. (Rio de Janeiro, n.d. [1979?]) 5. See Nick Eberstadt, "Recent Declines in Fertility in Less Developed Countries, and What 'Population Planners' May Learn from Them," World Development 8 (January 1980): 37-60. 6. Compare Thomas E. Smith, ed., The Politics of Family Planning in the Third World. 7. An extremely suggestive conceptualization of the political effects of the history of religious institutionalization, with ample references to Brazil and Spain, is elaborated by David Martin, A General Theory of Secularization. 8. See, for example, Robert R. Alford, Health Care Politics: Ideological and Interest Group Barriers to Reform; and Howard M. Leichter, The Comparative Study of Public Policy: Health Care Policy in Four Nations. Appendix I. The Elite Sample 1. The primary sources for the sample of civil servants (as well as that of politicians) are Autoridades Brasileiras, an annual mimeographed publication of the Agência Nacional, Serviço de Documentação, Rio de Janeiro, and Perfil da Administração Federal, an annual special number published by Visão in São Paulo. The first publication is official; the Agência Nacional is attached to the president's office. The second publication, however, is in some respects more useful. For example, it gives organization charts for the ministries and basic biographical information about major figures. 2. The populations are the top five hundred industrial corporations and the top two hundred banks. The main sources are Conjuntura Econômica, published by the Fundação Getúlio Vargas, and Quem é Quem na Economia Brasileira, an annual special number of Visão. There are slight discrepancies between the figures released by these sources, but when considered as orders of magnitude the correlation between the rankings is very high. Other sources were used to check the sample of businessmen: for example, As Grandes Companias, an annual publication of Editora Banas in São Paulo. This publication is helpful because it gives the composition of the boards of directors for the major companies. We also consulted a number of specialized publications, most of them special annual numbers released by Visão in São Paulo. Os Agentes do Desenvolvimento, part of the Perfil series of the Visão group also proved useful. Another useful publication was the monthly Dirigente Industrial, which often contains special features on particular branches of Brazilian industry. Brazil Report, an annual publication in English directed at the

158 • NOTES TO PAGES 121-136

foreign investment community, has a fairly detailed ranking of major industrial and commercial enterprises. 3. Syndicates are nested within federations and federations within confederations. For our purposes, the determining figure is the membership totals in the areas of metropolitan Rio and São Paulo. As of 1972, there were eighty-five labor syndicates in Rio and ninety in São Paulo. Variation in size is extreme. In Rio, the range was between 121 and over 36,000 members; in São Paulo, between 68 and nearly 160,000. The distribution of syndicate members, like the size of industrial companies and banks, is quite skewed. In Rio, the mean and median membership figures were 3,835 and 1,551: in São Paulo, 5,686 and 1,834. Our cutoff for sampling was a minimum membership of 5,000. 4. Certain details are left deliberately vague throughout this section, to protect the anonymity of the respondents. We cannot cite the names of the labor syndicates, name the states that the politicians represent, or break the sample of civil servants down by ministry. 5. It is difficult to establish a standard against which to judge the response rate for a study of this sort. The success rate is low in comparison to interview surveys of general populations and in line with the results of mailed questionnaire surveys. Neither of these provides a standard for the special population under study here. Sampling procedures and results for an elite study similar to our own are reported by Allen H. Barton and R. Wayne Parsons, "Consensus and Conflict among American Leaders," Public Opinion Quarterly 38 (Winter 1974-75): 509-528. 6. At the time the study was conducted, the Brazilian senate had 66 members, three for each unit of the federation. Of these, 59 senators belonged to the ARENA and 7 to the MDB. In the chamber of deputies, 221 were from ARENA and 87 from MDB out of a total of 308. All told, there were 374 directly elected national politicians. Over both houses, ARENA dominated MDB by a ratio of 2.98 to 1. In our sample, the ratio is 2.36 to 1. 7. The study was conducted in 1968-69 by Eli Diniz Ciqueira and Carlos Hasenbalg of the Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro. Appendix II. The Sample of Southeast Brazil 1. See Leslie Kish, "A Procedure for Objective Respondent Selection within the Household," Journal of the American Statistical Association 44 (1949): 380-387, for a description of the procedure used for respondent selection within the household. 2. An extensive analysis of nonresponse rates may be found in Amaury de Souza, "The Nature of Corporatist Representation: Leaders and Members of Organized Labor in Brazil," Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1978. 3. See Youssef Cohen, "Popular Support for Authoritarian Regimes: Brazil under Medici," Ph.D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1979.

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Index Abortion attitudes toward legalization of, 14, 33, 50 bishops oppose legalization of, 33-34 as cross-cutting cleavage, 40 MDB liberalism toward, 35 professionals support legalization of, 49 Age and attitudes toward divorce, 78 as determinant of ideal family size, 91 as determinant of policy preferences, 58 family planning and, 75, 78-79 Antinatalism businessmen and civil servants as favoring, 36 government role in, 33 as majority preference, 96 mass opinion more favorable to, 68-69 mass responses in favor of, 70-73 population planning and, 36-37, 53-56 as reflection of developmentalism, 44 Area of residence, as predictor of attitudes, 74 ARENA and government policies toward birth control, 53 interelite misperceptions of, 105

and liberalization of birth control policy, 35 low priority of, for family planning, 109 moral conservatism of, toward divorce, 35 moral conservatism of, toward legalization of abortion, 36 perceptions of, of popular preferences, 112 Authoritarianism and Brazilian political system, 7 economic success and, 53 effect of, on population policy, 12-13 elites in an authoritarian society, 98 politics of public health under, 124 regressive taxation of, 13 Birth control. See also Population policy age and, 75 ARENA attitude toward, 35 bankers' perceptual accuracy on, 113 bishops' perceptual accuracy on, 113 bishops' position on, 100 Church elites and, 34, 102 as cross-cutting cleavage, 40 economic costs and benefits of, 120 elite attitudes toward, 18-19, 40-43,99-101

175

elite perceptions of popular preference for, 110, 113 elite perceptual uncertainty about, 102 government role in, 67 importance of, to elites, 30-31, 100, 102, 107-108 labor leaders favorable to, 48 mass attitudes toward, 18-19 mass salience of, 63-64 MDB attitude toward, 35 popular importance of, 109 private needs and public demands concerning, 58, 73 religiosity and attitudes toward, 75, 93 women's attitudes toward, 11-12 Bishops. See Church Businessmen attitudes of, toward population planning, 31, 32 and civil servants as antinatalists, 36, 105-106 nonsalience of, of birth control issue, 100 Church ability of, to impose sanctions, 58 attitude of, toward divorce, 60 bishops' support for population policies of, 48-50 elite stereotyping of bishops, 105 government and, 9 Humanae Vitae, 7 impact of, on fertility rates, 8 influence of, on family planning, 59-60, 119 and moral significance of population planning, 31 penetration of society by, 60, 79 political power of, 8 - 9 , 119, 122 pronatalism of, 8, 40 and sacredness of family, 97 Civil servants and businessmen as antinatalists, 36, 105-106 Contraceptive information

176 • INDEX

elite support for, 48 professionals' support for, 49 Divorce age and attitudes toward, 78 ARENA attitude toward, 35 attitudes toward legalization of, 33, 92 bishops' opposition to legalization of, 33-34 Church's attitude toward, 60 as cross-cutting cleavage, 40 education and legalization of, 89 education as predictor of attitudes toward, 85, 92 MDB attitude toward, 35 as polarized issue among masses, 67 religiosity as predictor of attitudes toward, 75, 85-86 Economic development antinatalism and, 44 elite perceptions of family planning and, 119 growth of economy and, 3, 28 mass perceptions of family planning and, 68, 70 underpopulation as threat to, 28 Education as determinant of policy preferences, 58-59, 78-79 issue awareness and, 64-66 and legalization of divorce, 89 as predictor of ideal family size, 83-87 as proxy of politicization, 61 and religiosity, 97 as secularizing agent, 78-79 Elites in authoritarian society, 98 and coercive government policy, 29, 56, 118, 123-124 coherent ideologies of, 38, 51, 118 importance of population policy to, 10-11,46-50 interelite perceptions, 99-102

issue priorities of, 107, 118 lack of consensus of, 33, 53, 98 and legalization of abortion, 51 opinions of, about population policy, 1 7 , 2 0 , 2 6 - 2 7 , 3 1 - 3 3 , 40-43, 53 perceptions of, linking population policy and economic growth, 27-30, 119 perceptions of, of mass opinions, 21 response rate for, 127-129 sample selection of, 22-23, 125-126 stereotyping of bishops by, 105 Family planning. See Birth control Family size congruence between ideal and actual, 81 education as determinant of, 28, 78 as predictor of policy preferences, 91 and preference for smaller families, 57 and religiosity, 80, 83, 91 Gender role and attitudes toward family planning, 87, 89, 91 and attitudes toward government policy, 93 Income redistribution elite perceptions of public opinion on, 115 importance of, to elites, 107-108 interelite misperceptions about, 104 as left-right controversy, 104 popular importance of, 109 private opinions and public positions on, 106 Labor leaders attitudes of, toward population policy, 48 misperceptions of, of income redistribution issue, 110

perceptions of bishops by, 104 Liberation theology, 9 MDB attitude of, toward abortion, 35 attitude of, toward divorce, 35 attitude of, toward liberalization of birth control policy, 35 interelite misperceptions of, 105 misperception of, of popular priorities, 109, 112 overrepresented in the sample, 127 Médici, Gen. Emílio Garrastazú, 16, 49, 53, 109, 127 Military, elite perceptions of, 99, 102 Pentecostals, 79 Population dispersion of, as government policy, 49 growth of, in Brazil, 3, 5-6, 123 underpopulation, 3, 28 Population policy. See also Birth control among Church elites, 34, 105 elite opinions about, 10-11, 26-27, 31-33 family size as predictor of policy preferences on, 91 as ideological issue, 10, 20, 32, 35-36, 4 4 - 4 6 , 5 5 , 100, 118 incremental nature of, 55-56, 119 mass salience of, 6 0 - 6 1 , 96, 117 as nationalistic issue, 32 as personal problem, 15 public opinion and, 16, 117 women's attitudes toward, 11-12 —government policy and, 5-6 differentiation of, between national and local, collective and individual, 29 and family planning, 62-63, 66-67, 106 and foreign interests, 10 indirect nature of, 29 as laissez-faire, 10, 106, 121

177

and position of Church, 6, 14 weakness of, 122 and preventive health care, 13-14 Roman Catholic church. See Church and subsidizing distribution of contraceptives, 49 Sex. See Gender role Professionals and population planning, Sex education, elite support for, 48 Spain 31 Pronatalism Church as institution in, 122 Church as favoring, 8 legalization of contraceptives in, 123 perception of government role in, 33 . Spiritualists, 79-80 population planning as issue of, State managers and population plan36-37,53-56 ning, 33 Protestants, 79 Public opinion Tax incentives, as population policy, and birth control as private matter, 46-49 62 elite opinion and, 68-69, 98, 106, Underpopulation, as threat to eco109 nomic growth, 28 elite perceptions of, 98, 107 and government role in family planWomen ning, 62-63, 106 attitudes of, toward birth control, and issue priorities, 107 11-12,57,91,93 and population policy, 16 attitudes of, toward family size, 57, response rate of, 135-138 82-83,91 sample selection of, 132-135 contraceptives and health of, 72 and control over fertility behavior, Religion. See Church 91,93,97, 121 Religiosity and control over sexual life, 91 and education, 97 elite perceptions of, 115 and family-size ideals, 83, 93 and governmental assistance, 93, 97 as measure of commitment and acworking and nonworking, 74-75 tivism, 79 World Population Conference as predictor of fertility-related pref(Bucharest, 1974), 4, 16, 50, 56, erences, 80 105-106, 116

178 • INDEX