Economic Shocks and Authoritarian Attitudes in Brazil

• In Event: Poster Session: Political Economy

Abstract

Where do economic threats are translated into authoritarian and conservative attitudes and how? Which groups of citizens are most affected by such threats? The Great Recession has prompted renewed interest in these questions. In fact, the body of literature on the effects of economic insecurity on voting behavior and political attitudes has increased notably in the last decade. However, this body of literature focuses almost exclusively on advanced democracies and rarely considers the effect of economic shocks on party systems as a whole. Rather, it tends to focus either on a specific party family or on support for the incumbent.

I bring novel evidence to this debate by analyzing how an exogenous downturn in commodity prices influenced the 2018 presidential election in Brazil. What makes this case interesting is not only the fact that it marked a clear re-organization of the party system in the country and brought Jair Bolsonaro - a previously unknown extreme-right populist politician to power. More importantly, this case shows how economic insecurity plays out in a new democracy with a fluid party system where party ideology matters much less than in most advanced democracies.

My identification strategy is inspired by previous research that compute the exposure of subnational regions to import shocks from China. More specifically, I propose a new type of Bartik instrument which measures the exposure of subnational regions to changes of commodity prices. The commodity shock of each subnational region is defined by the share of formal employees working in sectors highly dependent on commodities and the price variation of these commodities.

I find that in subnational regions more exposed to the shock, far-right parties had an advantage, while left-wing parties lost support. These results are robust to a number of specifications and unlikely to be explained by anti-incumbency and anti-establishment voting. Moreover, I use survey data to show that the commodity shock has an effect on attitudes towards minority groups as well as how this effect varies by gender, age and income groups. I conclude that negative economic shocks can increase support for far-right and authoritarian candidates and attitudes even in a new democracy where the party system is fluid and party ideology is less important than in most advanced democracies where the same effect has been identified in previous research.

Author

• Paula Rettl, Bocconi University