introduction

Chapter 2 revealed that for a large proportion of Brazilian voters, one or both sides of the partisanship coin has mattered. At times more than half of Brazilians have expressed positive and/or negative partisan attitudes – and most of this sentiment has appeared as support for or opposition to the PT.

It is one thing to note that many Brazilians call themselves partisans or antipartisans.Yet how would we know whether such attitudes are “real?” It is possible that self-expressed partisan attitudes could be superficial and thus politically inconsequential. Social Identity Theory suggests that partisan attitudes – whether positive or negative – matter if they are relatively consistent over time and if they shape voters’ opinions and voting behavior.

To assess the temporal consistency of partisanship in Brazil, we consider its “boundedness” – the extent to which voters affirm an allegiance to a particular party over time – as assessed through responses in panel surveys. We find that petismo is bounded similarly to partisanship for major parties in other countries, while partisanship for the PSDB and PMDB is more weakly bounded.

We then explore two ways in which positive and negative partisanship shape voters’ attitudes. For example, if petismo and antipetismo are in fact powerful psychological attachments, then Brazilians who affirm one or the other attitude should be well primed to either agree or disagree with everything associated with the PT. We leverage two forms of empirical evidence – observational and experimental – to put this notion to the test. We show that motivated reasoning affects petistas, antipetistas, and tucanos similarly: it drives petistas to blindly support their party during good times and bad, just as it corners members of the latter two groups into holding contradictory views about the PT. However, we find that PMDB partisanship only weakly predicts political opinions.

We then explore results of a survey experiment designed to test whether partisans’ attitudes about public policies change when they are shown that “their” or “the other” party supports or opposes those policies. The results confirm that petismo and antipetismo have consistent and powerful effects on voter attitudes, while identification with the PSDB has weaker effects.1 In any case, taken as a whole, the evidence strongly supports the notion that partisan attitudes in Brazil are “real.”