Measuring Brazilian science diplomacy: what do international students think of Brazil?

Abstract

Most of the scholarship programs come from developed countries. However, more recently the literature has analyzed international scholarship programs in developing countries, such as the case of Brazil’s PEC-PG and PEC-G. In this paper we aim at answering a simple yet important question: how have PEC-PG and PEC-G been affecting international students and researchers’ perception about Brazil? Therefore, the main objective of this research is to verify the impact of PEC-PG and PEC-G (independent variable) on the perception of foreign students (dependent variable). We conducted a survey by sending an invitation to the e-mail to 65,493 students and professors through SurveyMonkey. We aim at contributing to the literature by measuring how effective these programs have been in boosting Brazil’s image abroad. Taking into account that PECs are a consistent Brazilian program dating back to 1960’s, we expected to find international students’ positive views regarding Brazil. Students and researchers’ positive views would be the expected result of a successful scientific diplomacy policy. We consider that international scholarship programs are scientific diplomacy’s tools, in other words, ways of exercising power through the influence on perception. Our results, however, showed that the majority of respondents have a negative image of Brazil.