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.