Partisan Stereotyping and Polarization in Brazil

Abstract

In recent decades, Brazilian voters have grown polarized between supporters of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT), known as petistas, and its opponents, known as antipetistas. What explains this animosity? One potential source of polarization is partisan stereotyping, a tendency for partisans to misperceive the social composition of both their own side’s bases of support as well as their opponents’. We show that most Brazilians overestimate the extent to which petistas and antipetistas belong to party-stereotypical groups such as Afro-Brazilians, evangelical Christians, or poor or rich people. We then show that stereotyping is associated with polarization: the greater the bias in perceived partisan group composition, the greater the perceptions of partisan political extremism and feelings of social distance toward the partisan out-group.

Populist Storytelling and Negative Affective Polarization: Social Media Evidence from Mexico

“…The concept of affective polarization is derived from the classic notion of social distance (Bogardus 1947), and it "requires not only positive sentiment for one's own group, but also negative sentiment toward those identifying with opposing groups" (Iyengar et al 2012, 406). Particularly, this work is concerned with what we call "negative affective polarization"-following Samuels and Zucco's (2018) idea on "negative partisanship" in their analysis of the polarizing opposition to the Workers' Party (PT) in Brazil (see also Samuels et al 2023). In this vein, we define negative affective polarization as the extent to which partisans or rival sociopolitical camps view each other as a disliked out-group (e.g., Iyengar et al 2019).…”