‘Them’ without ‘us’: negative identities and affective polarization in Brazil

Abstract

High levels of hostility between those on opposing sides of politics have led to a burgeoning literature on the concept of affective polarization. Though a globally widespread phenomenon, extant literature has generated theoretical expectations and empirical findings mostly inspired by the United States and Western Europe. By studying the case of Brazil, I argue and show that traditional explanations do not provide satisfactory accounts of affective polarization in contexts where politics is only weakly structured by ideology or partisan attachments. I argue and show that in such contexts the concept of negative political identities can provide a much better explanation for why politics is so divisive. Using both the 2014 and 2018 waves of the Brazilian Electoral Studies (BES) and independently collected survey data ( N = 1732), I provide robust empirical findings supporting the primacy of negative political identities over traditional explanations. Negative identification with the out-party/leader has a strong effect on dislike towards out-voters even when controlling for instrumental evaluations of political elites. This paper contributes to the comparative research agenda on affective polarization outside Western contexts, as well as to the study of negative political identities.

Affective polarization in Europe

“…In some contexts, such as presidential systems, leader-based scores may be more useful than partybased scores. In Brazil, for example, it was a leader -Jair Bolsonarowho was one basis for broader societal polarization (Areal, 2022). Usually, though, leader affective polarization is lower than party affective polarization (Reiljan et al, 2023).…”

“…Thus, Huddy et al (2015) suggested a battery of items to capture positive partisan identity, and this has been adapted for multi-party systems by Bankert et al (2017) and Huddy et al (2018). An interesting addition to this research is the development of a scale for negative partisan identities (Bankert, 2021;Areal, 2022;Mayer and Russo, 2023). The concept of negative partisanship has been applied to European contexts using simpler measures in Mayer (2017) and Meléndez and Kaltwasser (2021).…”

Dimensiones individual e institucional de la polarización afectiva: una propuesta de marco de análisis

“…From a historical point of view, the concept of AP has been extensively applied to the social and political situation of the United States since the publication of Brody & Page (1973), Tajfel &Turner (1979), andMiller et al (1986). Nevertheless, studies, such as those by Lauka et al (2018), Westwood et al (2018), Reiljan (2020), Gidron et al (2020), Areal (2022), , and Bradley & Chauchard (2022), have recently delved into the rise of social division and animosity in other socio-economic scenarios beyond the United States. Furthermore, relevant efforts have been made in national contexts to offer an updated database to delve into the roots of AP.…”