Both voters who voted for () and those who voted in () in recent presidential presidential have a flexible view of democratic principles, depending on those in power, supports a new study of the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR).
Starting from the principle that A, but a complex arrangement open to different interpretations, two researchers from the University’s Democratic Legitimacy Group (Inct Redem) decided to analyze the issue from the prism of polarization.
For this, they used a cut of six questions from an extensive research on democratic satisfaction done in partnership with the Ipsos-Ipec Institute in February this year. The survey interviewed 1,504 Brazilians in person, with a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points in general and 3 points for each of the groups.
More than 60% of Lula and Bolsonaro’s voters in the first round (therefore more convinced), for example, said they totally or partially agreed that the president should ignore the National Congress “if he disrupts government work” and also “legal decisions considered politically biased”.
“The results disassemble the idea of a clear ideological division between ‘democrats’ and ‘authoritarian’ in the country. Supporting the rules of the democratic game is more situational than ideological,” researchers Adriano Codato and Felipe Calabrez conclude, citing the concept of “situational authoritarianism.”
Two facts surprised them. First, the differences between voters on both sides in all the answers analyzed were smaller than expected. Secondly, Lula’s voters indicated to be even more favorable to the concentration of presidential power than Bolsonaro’s.
“What we find is that there is no ideological crystallization of opposite values,” Codato tells Sheet. “It seems that there is a preference for the president itself, not for democratic values. People see that when the president in which they voted is cornered, he must concentrate more power.”
Total agreement with the idea that Congress should be ignored “gets in the way of the government” is 46% among Bolsonaro supporters and reaches 56% among Lula’s – that in recent weeks, he saw once again around the IOF (Financial Operations Tax).
Already the view that the president must disregard legal decisions “considered biased” records a less pronounced difference, but is also higher among the petista voters (49%) than among scholarships (42%) – even with the frequent clashes of the group with the (Supreme Court).
At the same time, 7 out of 10 respondents on both sides defend judicial control over the executive, saying that “in a democracy, courts must be able to prevent the government from acting beyond their authority, practicing illegalities.”
The study then draws attention to the contradictions of public opinion. Although most Brazilians defend abstract democratic principles, they are also willing to relativize them in specific contexts.
This ambivalence also appears in another block of questions, which sought to understand how people see another fundamental tension of democracy: protecting minorities versus giving power to the majority.
On the one hand, 83% said it was very important to protect minority groups (87% of Lula voters and 77% of Bolsonaro). On the other hand, 47% also find it very important that most prevail even restricting minority rights (49% of Lulistas, 44% of pockets).
Finally, the researchers warn of: “When rulers realize that their electoral base tolerates or supports the flexibility of democratic norms in the name of effectiveness or ‘popular will’, they feel allowed to push the limits of the constitutional game,” they write.
This kind of acting of the rulers (known as “hardball”), added to “situational authoritarianism” among voters, can function as the gear of a process of “democratic erosion inside”, they argue, evoking a concept of the famous book “how democracies die” (2018) by two Harvard teachers.
In the article, the authors considered that the data reflect a specific moment, post-elections of 2022, and emphasize the importance of accompanying their evolution in the face of changes in the political context, as well as conducting qualitative interviews to better understand the results.
