Social security reform, solidarity, information and behavior

Abstract

Normally, when governments announce the need to approve social security reforms with restrictive content, the mechanisms of communication demarcate the content of the discussion around basically two antagonistic aspects: economic and legal. Although the polarization of the discourse from the legal-economic point of view give rise to many academic texts of excellent quality, it is a limited approach. Without any pretension of thematic exhaustion, this essay proposes to discuss social security reform from three different perspectives: spontaneous solidarity, the social impact of news replication, and social-political behavior. That is to say, unlike the traditional Manichean approach, of presenting conflicting points of view attacking (deficit) and defending (dignity) the proposed reform, it is intended to identify the reactions and the behaviors concerning the new rules. Regarding spontaneous solidarity, it has been inferred that it is only a strategy of maximizing individual results that only exists within homogeneous groups. The second research aspect examined concerns the importance of replicating the news for the approval of reforms. It has been shown that the widespread dissemination of the idea of public deficit characterizes an efficient persuasion strategy used by governments. The last approach is the analysis of political and social behavior. It was verified that the Brazilian tradition of elected governments presenting structural reform proposals at the beginning of their mandates with aggressive texts is justified in heuristics associated with behavioral processes. The methodology used in this article is qualitative, based on the analysis of documents, data available in public consultation sites and in specialized bibliography.