Crafting Negative Partisanship in Brazil and the Rise of Bolsonaro

• In Event: Negative Partisanship, Affective Polarization, and Political Divisions

Abstract

The present study intends to assess the impact of three different events that made negative partisanship significant to understand the rise of far-right populist, Jair Bolsonaro: the religious demographic transition driven by Pentecostal evangelicals; the political activism of the Brazilian justice system and its mutualistic relationship with legacy media outlets; and the rise of social media platforms as a performatic space for political communication, exacerbated by automated disinformation devices. In order to estimate the effects of those transformations on voting, two econometric strategies were deployed: beta regression and quantile regression based on aggregated data by municipalities. Additionally, a set of variables based on CETIC microdata were mobilized to correlate the probability of sharing messages through social media and the stratified impacts of disinformation campaigns. The results, obtained through a logit model, compose a parallel analysis to reinforce the results obtained by the estimates of the models for vote proportion.

Authors

• Carlos Henrique Vieira Santana, Federal University of Latin America Integration, UNILA

• Marcela Nogueira Ferrario, UNILA