Did Brazilians Vote for Jair Bolsonaro Because They Share his Most Controversial Views?

Abstract

The similarity of Jair Bolsonaro's and Donald Trump's divisive views on a variety of controversial issues has led many critics to argue that Brazilians elected a 'Tropical Trump' in 2018. Research on Trump's election shows that authoritarian, racist, and sexist voters were essential to his narrow victory; however, it is an open question whether Trump's pathway to power is the norm or the exception among right-wing nationalists. Even though candidates espousing controversial ideas about democracy and prejudice are gaining much electoral support, we know little about the extent to which their voters hold similar views. This study confirms that many Brazilians share Bolsonaro's ambivalence about democracy as well as his attitudes denigrating women and sexual minorities; however, the degree of congruence between his supporters' and his own views on these topics played a minor role at most in shaping voter choice. As in previous elections, ideology and partisanshipspecifically, attitudes about Brazil's Workers' Party-largely explain whether a voter supported him. This finding largely holds across gender and racial boundaries, although white Brazilians appear to have been modestly more inclined than Afro-Brazilians to vote for Bolsonaro if they shared his divisive views.

Assessing the fourth wave of the populist radical right: Jair Bolsonaro’s voters in comparative perspective

“…Finally, and regarding specific factors to understand Bolsonaro's support, as most of the previous studies have pointed out (Setzler, 2021;Layton et al, 2021), we expect that race (the withes), belonging to the Evangelist religious confession, those more critic with corruption scandals and, above all, those with the highest anti-PT feelings are more likely to cast a vote for Bolsonaro.…”

“…Indeed, the PSL not only won the presidential race, but elected the second largest parliamentary group, replacing the PSDB as the main party of the right in the country. In the following pages we want to address the main reason behind the vote for Bolsonaro, namely, i) negative political identities and the antiestablishment attitudes (Sameuls and Zucco, 2018;Zanotti and Roberts, 2021); ii) the politicization of massive corruption scandals (Rennó, 2020); iii) conservative values, morality and the aversion towards minority groups (Santos and Tanscheit, 2019), and iv) the political participation of neopetencostal evangelical churches (Setzler, 2021).…”

“…Surprisingly, besides the phenomenon of the rise of Bolsonaro being the object of different studies, (see Hunter and Power, 2019;Santos and Tanscheit, 2019;Rennó, 2020;Leyton et. al., 2021;Setzler, 2021), it has not been analyzed in a comparative perspective. This study aims to contribute to fill an important gap in the literature on the determinant of the vote for PRRPs analyzing a non-European case and comparing it with four well-known European PRRPs: Alternative for Germany (AfD), French National Rally (RN), Italian Lega and Austrian Party for Freedom (FPÖ).…”

The Relationship between Ideology and COVID-19 Deaths: What We Know and What We Still Need to Know

“…The Brazilian 2018 election was exceptional (AMARAL, 2020; RENNÓ, 2020). Bolsonaro's election must be understood as the result of a combination of several factors, particularly the political and economic instability, 'antipetismo', and the widespread rejection of traditional political actors -with outsiders and antiestablishment candidates being favored instead (FUKS, RIBEIRO, and BORBA, 2021;HUNTER and POWER, 2019;SETZLER, 2020).…”

Social Networks and Mobile Instant Messaging Services in the Election of Jair Bolsonaro as President of Brazil in 2018

“…This article analyzes the result of the 2018 Brazilian presidential election based on data from the Brazilian Electoral Study (ESEB), a national post-electoral survey carried out directly after the second round. But contrary to studies that have analyzed the reasons behind Bolsonaro's election through survey data, focusing on measuring the effects of conjunctural, structural and ideological variables (Almeida, 2019;Amaral, 2020;Rennó, 2020;Setzler, 2020), our objective is to investigate how social networks and mobile instant messaging services are also important to understand his victory. In other words, we want to determine whether the use of social networks and mobile instant messaging services increased the chances of individuals voting for Bolsonaro in the 2018 Brazilian presidential election and, if so, to what extent.…”