“Our findings suggest that conditions may be ripe for an outburst of protest in many of the region’s countries where rising education rates and sustained economic growth combine with low quality political institutions and inferior and sporadic public service provision,” write Mason Moseley and Matthew Layton, graduate research political science students at Vanderbilt, in the report “Prosperity and Protest in Brazil: The Wave of the Future for Latin America?”

The protests in Brazil this year are unprecedented in the recent history of that nation.