Manifestos and ideology: methodological issues and applications to Latin America

In this paper we compare the recent dataset of Latin American country party manifestos as coded by the Manifest Project database to other estimations of position on the left-right scale and to another coding of the same documents, discussing their limits and potentialities. The differences found between results offer an interesting opportunity to discuss the method, its reliability, and the validity of the coding scheme and the scales. Our findings suggest that the fragile reliability of the hand-coded content analysis could be circumvented by employing intercoder reliability tests and that users must be cautious when basing conclusions on this project’s results.

Colombian people's positions regarding physician-assisted suicide

The views on the acceptability of physician-assisted suicide of lay people in a Latin American country, Colombia, have been examined. In July 2019–January 2020, 134 lay people in Bogota judged the acceptability of physician-assisted suicide in 48 realistic scenarios composed of all combinations of four factors: (a) the patient's age, (b) the level of incurability of the illness, (c) the type of suffering, and (d) the patient's request for physician-assisted suicide. In all scenarios, the patients were women receiving the best possible care. The ratings were subjected to cluster analysis and analyses of variance. Three qualitatively different positions were found: Never Acceptable (13% of the sample), Depends on the Patient's Request (77%), and Always Acceptable (10%). The only important factor in increasing acceptability among people not systematically opposed was the patient's request to have her life ended. The young age of some patients did not affect participants’ positions. These empirical findings suggest that most Colombian lay people are not categorically for or against physician-assisted suicide, but judge its degree of acceptability as a function of patients’ requests and other circumstances.

The Effect of Sense of Movement in Audiovisual Media: A Study on Kineticism as a Formant of Expression in Globo News’ Institutional Motion Sequence Intolerância

This article analyzes the Brazilian cable television channel Globo News’ institutional motion sequence Intolerância. Israeli designer, Noma Bar, illustrated and directed Intolerância, which reveals in its discursive structures how the gaze of a Latin American country hegemonic media on the identity conflicts between West and East is aligned with Western powers. In the wake of Floch’s theoretical developments in plastic semiotics and Bergson’s postulations on the mechanism of the philosophy-centered filmmaking movement, this study aims to consider kineticism as a constitutive formant of visuality in audiovisual texts. The analyzed motion sequence is a notably exemplary object of establishing such hypothesis.