Sincere or Opportunistic? Understanding Election Fraud Beliefs in Brazil

• In Event: Assessing Democratic Brazil: Institutions, Traditional Politics and New Issues

Abstract

Elections are a defining ingredient of representative democracy and serve as the main channel by which citizens’ influence their governments. Free and fair elections ensure accountability, responsiveness, and representation, leading to higher levels of support for the political system (Dahl, 2008; Anderson et al., 2005). Recently, perceptions of electoral integrity received revived attention, as prominent political leaders in democracies across the globe openly endorsed election fraud narratives and brought them to the center stage of their political campaigns. While election fraud beliefs are largely perceived as undesirable and consequential for politics, surprisingly little attention has been paid to understanding what election fraud beliefs, as they are measured in public opinion surveys, really mean. This paper accomplishes two goals. First, we employ novel data to offer a comprehensive description of electoral fraud claims and beliefs in Brazil before and after the 2022 presidential elections, when these beliefs were particularly salient and consequential. Second, we investigate whether the partisan gap we observe in election fraud beliefs reflects a real disagreement on facts related to the functioning of elections, or, alternatively, are simply partisan cheerleading. We rely on a two-wave panel conducted before and after the runoff that pit incumbent president Jair Bolsonaro against former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva. Both waves of the panel contained experiments aimed at eliciting truthful opinions about elections. We find a clear partisan gap in election fraud beliefs. Bolsonaristas have lower levels of belief in the integrity of the vote count, and Lulistas have higher levels of belief in the integrity of the vote count. These differences widen post-election. Nonpartisan voters are more inclined than partisan voters to believe in the integrity of the vote count. This suggests that election fraud claims by political elites influence the opinions of co-partisans and also of out partisans, indicating that these claims can be far reaching. The effectiveness of the honesty encouragement treatment was different before and after the election. In the pre-election period, the honesty nudge increased beliefs in the integrity of the vote count, whereas it failed to do so in the post-election period. This change in effectiveness of the honesty encouragement largely comes from nonpartisans. Finally, results from a list experiment embedded in both waves of the survey suggest that the differences in election fraud beliefs we observe are not a function of changes in norms about the social desirability of views about electoral integrity. This paper offers important insights into the nature of polarization over an issue that is key to the well functioning of democracy in Brazil and in other parts of the world. It also informs efforts to limit the harms of election-related disinformation promoted by political elites.

Authors

• Nara Pavão, UFPE

• Frederico Batista Pereira, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

• Natalia Salgado Bueno, Emory University

• Felipe Nunes, UFMG

• Valerie Wirtschafter, University of California, Los Angeles