Nationalism and Public Policies of Sports in Brazil

Abstract

At the end of the twentieth century, a series of social changes came to influence the relationship between politics and sports in Brazilian society. With the end of the military dictatorship, a set of political and institutional reforms was included in the country’s political agenda, culminating in the formulation of a new Federal Constitution in 1988. In this new constitution sports were included as a “right of everyone,” to be guaranteed by the state (Brasil, 2011). This was not the first time Brazilian legislation adopted a principle of expansion of access to sports practices. The military regime had made a move in this direction, with the development of the legal concept of “mass sport.” The 1988 Constitution, however, restructured this idea by presenting sports as a right for everyone, as a social good to be democratized through Brazilian public policies of sport.