Appearances can be Deceptive: Political Polarization, Agrarian Policy, and Coalitional Presidentialism in Brazil

Abstract

What can we infer about the effect of polarized politics on the Brazilian policy-making process?We attempt to answer this question by analyzing the country's political landscape and focusing on one specific policy issue concerning agrarian policies, an area that is exposed to much ideological conflict for both the left and right wing. We show how the mechanism has worked in this case to mitigate the polarization effects. Two political groups monopolized national elections over the past two decades sharing very different positions concerning ideological preferences. In this article, we recognize polarization between the two leading parties, but argue that the Brazilian political system features the dynamics of coalitional presidentialism that mitigates party preferences. We analyze funding data for small farmers and rural settlements for the period 1995-2016, arriving at the conclusion that the agrarian policy of the competing parties resembled one another, despite political polarization.

Political Psychology in the Digital (mis)Information age: A Model of News Belief and Sharing

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“…We can see that there was not even a repetition of the result that occurred in presidential contests between PSDB and PT for the entire period of 1994–2014. The national polarization (Zimerman & Pinheiro, 2020) was not replicated at the state level.…”

Translating politics into policy implementation: welfare frontline workers in polarised Brazil

“…Institutional arrangements that have shaped governing coalitions in Brazil in the last three decades have tended to guaranteed policy continuity, despite shifts in governing parties (Zimerman and Pinheiro, 2020). Since 2016, however, new administrations – Temer in 2016 and Bolsonaro in 2019 – have used the relative independence that the executive branch retains in Brazilian democracy to break from this tendency, especially when it comes to policies that have little political consensus, notably social policies (da Costa, 2019).…”