Are there populist parties in Brazil? Despite the common perception of personalistic electoral connections, the literature suggests that parties play a crucial role in legislation and voting choice. However, Brazilian parties are overlooked in …
While, in theory, the populist radical right ideology is hostile to international cooperation and sees International Relations as a zero-sum game, leaders from this camp have supported each other and adopted common elements in their …
What is Bolsonaro’s effect on Brazilian democratic backsliding? What if he was not elected? This chapter uses the synthetic control method to show that despite being a symptom and continuer of Brazilian democratic erosion, Bolsonaro is not the baseline of the episode. Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment has a previous and greater causal effect in undermining democratic institutions in the country, proving that when misused, impeachment can harm democracy.
Recent studies have warned about the close relationship between populism and nationalism. This article offers an empirical contribution to the examination of this relation- ship by analysing the presence of populist and nationalist elements in the …
This paper assesses populism in the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections, focusing on candidates' tweets. It employs supervised machine learning and active learning to fine-tune the BERTimbau algorithm. We train a model with two classifiers, one for people-centrism and another for anti-elitism. After an iterative improvement process by annotating high entropy observations, we run the model in a sample of ~10K tweets. Results indicate that while candidates tweet more frequently during campaigns, their populist rhetoric is more pronounced in the pre-campaign phase, with a notable moderation during the campaign and a sharp decline post-runoff.
In Brazil’s highly fragmented party system, the Workers’ Party (PT) is the country’s largest and most institutionalized party. Following its origins in São Paulo’s 1980s union movement, the PT has won five of the last six presidential elections. The PT has also been uniquely successful in creating attachments with voters. In fact, on average, one in ten Brazilian adults sympathized with the party from 2008 to 2018. This article uses six AmericasBarometer to explore the individual-level determinants of partisanship with the PT and other parties before and after President Dilma Rousseff’s 2016 impeachment. We test three hypotheses that associate partisanship with the PT to leftwing ideological identification, grassroots organizations, and conditional cash transfers. Our findings reveal that the determinants of partisanship are strikingly similar to those of other parties, supporting the claim made elsewhere that the PT is an institutionalized party without roots in society.
Populism is not a new subject in Brazilian politics and society. The well-known three waves of populism in Latin America have flooded Brazil in all versions (De La Torre 2000; Hawkins and Kaltwasser 2017, 2019). From the 1940s to the 1960s, the first wave enclosed the democratic period between 1946 and 1964. As labeled by some scholars, this period is known as a populist democracy (Ianni, 1968). Despite significant efforts to make sense of these years and administrations, the notion of populism shared by scholars of the time and their essayistic writing style leads us to question whether Brazilian presidents from 1946 to 1964 were indeed populist (Weffort 1978; Ianni 1968; Ferreira 2001). Therefore, this paper analyzes speeches from six presidents from the period, building our sample following the criteria suggested by Hawkins et al. (2019). We follow the ideational approach to conceptualize populism. From this perspective, populism is a set of ideas that morally divides society and politics into two antagonistic groups - 'the people' and 'the elite' - in a Manichean way. Following a rubric, we use holistic grading to classify the speeches as (1) non-populist, (2) somewhat populist, (3) populist, and (4) very populist, using a continuous index that goes from 0 to 2. Results show that populism was overestimated by Brazilian scholars who analyzed these political leaders and that only two of them could be labeled as somewhat populist: Getúlio Vargas and João Goulart.