Political Psychology

The Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 / May 25, 2022 by Flavio Azevedo

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The Primacy of Ideology in Explaining Antiscientific Attitudes / July 25, 2021 by Flavio Azevedo

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” (Isaac Asimov, 1980)

On the heels of a global pandemic, Americans have lost an estimated 5.5 million years of life, an average of 14 life years lost per death in 2020. Recently, the U.S. hit 600,000 deaths and 33,000,000 confirmed infections, the world’s highest death toll. The costs of COVID-19 to the economy in the U.S. amount to between $10 and $16 trillion when accounting for lost gross domestic product, premature deaths, and long-term health impairment. Yet, more than a year into the pandemic, conservative Republicans remain far less likely than liberal Democrats to view COVID-19 as a significant threat to public health; feel vulnerable to infection; comply with COVID-19 prevention guidelines; and be willing to vaccinate against the coronavirus. A poll conducted in late May 2021 found that 41% of conservative Republicans –as compared to 4% of liberal Democrats– would refuse COVID-19 shots. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the U.S. COVID-19 vaccination map, as provided by the U.S. Center for Disease Control, bears an eerie resemblance to the 2020 election map, suggesting that political factors such as ideology and partisanship play a major role in what is effectively a life and death decision.

Hesitancy toward COVID-19 vaccines, use of masks, and social distancing are merely the most recent manifestations of a larger pattern of antiscientific views propagated by the political right. While Donald J. Trump made science denialism a linchpin of his policy agenda, he is hardly the first. The 1964 Goldwater presidential campaign, for example, was suffused with anti-intellectualism, criticism of leading U.S. universities, and antiscientific sentiment. This trend has continued, more or less unabated, for over 50 years. Conservative hostility toward science encompasses defunding research on stem cells, barring federal funds for women’s reproductive rights, skepticism –if not downright rejection– of climate science, politicizing scientific research, and denying the detrimental effects of tobacco and sugar on public health (Mooney, 2007; Oreskes & Conway, 2011). It is not only that conservative elites are beholden to corporate interests or the religious right –these are only parts of the story– it is also that some conservatives view science as an obstacle to the free market and to unbridled political power. Historian Matthew Dallek wrote, “in some quarters on the far right, liberty and progress are enemies.” Distrust in science and scientists has become a staple of contemporary conservative politics. As these views seep into the public at large, social scientists are obliged to understand the social and psychological processes that foster antiscientific views.

Of course, some people are more prone to antiscientific thinking than others. Educational attainment and religiosity are predictably associated with distrust toward science. But from the perspective of political psychology, other factors such as one’s ideology and psychology also yield valuable insights. Several studies have found conservatives to be more receptive to conspiratorial ways of thinking and more susceptible to scientific misinformation as well as other epistemic vices (e.g., see Azevedo & Jost, 2021; van der Linden et al., 2021). There is also evidence that social dominance orientation (capturing preferences for group-based dominance and anti-egalitarianism), right-wing authoritarianism (obedience to authority, cultural traditionalism, and aggressiveness and punitiveness directed at deviants and dissenters), and system justification (motivation to defend, bolster, and justify the social, economic, and political systems on which we depend) help to explain left-right (or liberal-conservative) differences in views about science.

My curiosity about the role of political ideology in predicting attitudes about science grew during a Fulbright stay in Professor John Jost’s Social Justice Lab at NYU. While there, I became especially interested in the relative importance of various psychological predictors of antiscientific views, independent of demographic factors such as education and religion. To tackle this research question, we leveraged two large survey datasets, (a) an exploratory, quota-based survey of 1,500 adults that was nationally representative of the U.S. population in terms of age, education, income, and sex; and (b) a confirmatory (replication) convenience sample of 2,119 Americans from the same population. We collected the confirmatory sample to minimize the influence of false positives and to maximize the generalizability and robustness of our results. In both data sets we systematically investigated the effects of 15 different predictor variables on distrust of climate science, skepticism about science (vs. faith) in general, and trust in ordinary people (vs. scientific experts). We conducted a series of regularized regressions –a technique used in social science to avoid model overfitting–to identify a subset of predictors that exhibited the most reliable effects. We cross-validated these analyses using several other Machine Learning techniques to ensure that the results were not attributable to potentially idiosyncratic methodological choices. We also conducted multiverse analyses for each dependent variable and across samples so that we could assess how robust the conclusions were in relation to analytical choices and specifications.

Our results, which were recently published in a special issue of Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, show that most of the 15 predictors – age, education, gender, religiosity, income, symbolic ideology, five measures of operational ideology, political partisanship, right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and system justification – were significantly associated with attitudes about science when looking at only two variables at a time. However, when all of the variables were entered into a simultaneous regression, we saw that distrust of climate science was predicted consistently by lower levels of education and higher levels of religiosity, as expected – and also by higher levels of social dominance orientation and political conservatism. Interestingly, partisanship, that is, identification with the Republican Party, did not ‘survive’ as a robust predictor of distrust of climate science. The most important predictor was political ideology – whether it was measured symbolically in terms of ideological self-placement or operationally in terms of policy preferences. The higher the conservatism scores across ideological measures, the higher the distrust in climate science.

Looking at the results of the multiverse analyses as illustrated in Figure 1 below, when accounting for all possible combinations of variables in the model (see panel A and B), ideology not only explains more variance, it clearly dominates partisanship in models that explain most variance. Conservatism predicted antiscientific attitudes significantly more than 99.99% of the time across all possible model specifications (see Panel C). Thus, ideology was a superior predictor of distrust in climate science compared to partisan identification because it explained more variance, was highly stable and robust across various operationalizations, and exhibited comparatively large effect-sizes – even in models including competing predictors.

We were also interested in determining whether these patterns would generalize to attitudes toward science in general – e.g., skepticism about science (vs. faith) – and attitudes towards epistemic authorities, comparing trust in ordinary people with trust in scientific and other experts. We obtained similar results as above, even after adjusting for distrust of climate science in particular, except that right-wing authoritarianism (rather than social dominance) was associated with skepticism toward science in general. Trust in ordinary people (vs. scientific experts), our third dependent variable, was robustly predicted – in order of their relative importance – by political conservatism, distrust in climate science, right-wing authoritarianism, lower education attainment, Republican partisanship, and system justification. It may be worth noting that the explanatory power of these models was comparatively large, explaining approximately 60% of the variance when predicting distrust in climate science, 50% for skepticism about science (vs. faith), and 30% for trust in ordinary people (vs. scientific experts).

In an op-ed for The Hill, Mellman writes about our research “by three-to-one conservatives agreed, ‘We believe too often in science, and not enough in faith and feelings.’ Liberals disagreed by nearly the same margin. By two-to-one, liberals would rather put their ‘trust in the opinions of experts and intellectuals,’ while by a slightly lesser margin, conservatives repose their trust in “the wisdom of ordinary people.” Another takeaway is that we see a robust connection between psychological dispositions (such as right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and system justification) and social and political behavior, and psychological dispositions explain a great deal of unique variance even after adjusting for demographics, partisanship, and political ideology (see also Azevedo et al., 2017, 2019; Womick et al., 2019). Figure 2 below displays a cross-tabulation of attitudes towards science across ideological groups.

There are a few big-picture takeaways from this research program. Overall, we found that – contrary to the common assumption that ordinary citizens are ideologically “innocent” or “ignorant” (see Azevedo et al., 2019; Jost, 2006, 2021) – conservatism robustly predicts anti-scientific attitudes and does so much better than affiliation with the Republican Party per se. We also found little support for mainstream view that the role of conservative ideology in shaping attitudes towards science is largely confined to skepticism about climate change – or support for the claim that science skepticism is bipartisan issue. Indeed, our studies find conservatives tend to value faith and feelings over science while liberals put a premium on science over and above distrust in climate science. In an op-ed for The Hill, Mellman writes about our research “by three-to-one conservatives agreed, ‘We believe too often in science, and not enough in faith and feelings.’ Liberals disagreed by nearly the same margin. By two-to-one, liberals would rather put their ‘trust in the opinions of experts and intellectuals,’ while by a slightly lesser margin, conservatives repose their trust in “the wisdom of ordinary people.” Another takeaway is that we see a robust connection between psychological dispositions (such as right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and system justification) and social and political behavior, and psychological dispositions explain a great deal of unique variance even after adjusting for demographics, partisanship, and political ideology (see also Azevedo et al., 2017, 2019; Womick et al., 2019). Figure 2 below displays a cross-tabulation of attitudes towards science across ideological groups.

Today, perhaps more than ever, we observe an exceptional wave of anti-intellectualism and, sometimes, rejection of science on the basis of ideological commitments. These beliefs, however, are not without adverse consequences. The unjustified denial of science –irrespective of whether it regards social distancing and preventive infection measures during a pandemic, hesitancy of vaccination, or supporting candidates impending climate change legislation – is profoundly detrimental to public health, the environment, and the economy. To conclude, the clarity, consistency, robustness, replicability, and generalizability of our results suggest that there are genuine liberal-conservative differences in attitudes toward the scientific community and, by extension, the scientific process. We also hope that research of this type can shed light on the question of which social and psychological processes lead citizens in a democracy to make reasonable, informed decisions about complex scientific questions such as those pertaining to climate change, childhood vaccination, and the handling of pandemic diseases. As the journalist George Pyle teaches us, “the key to having a free society — one that is both really free and truly a society — is for most of us to be pretty good at knowing when we should do as we are told and when we should not.” In our time, it is no exaggeration to suggest that the fate of our democracy is yoked to a socially shared capacity and willingness to understand and trust scientific evidence and expertise, not because they are infallible but because they are vastly superior to the propagandistic alternatives at hand.

This work was published open access in Group Processes and Intergroup Relations. Please also check out our online repository hosting the reproducible reports of all analyses reported in the article (for both individual datasets and taken together, as well as the reproducible reports of the multiverse analyses).

This is the first draft on my published op-ed at Psychology Today, which unfortunately did not feature all figures or links (in addition to edits), hence I reproduce it in full as intended here.

Primary References

Asimov, I. (1980, January 21). A Cult of Ignorance. Newsweek. https://aphelis.net/cult-ignorance-isaac-asimov-1980

Azevedo, F., Jost, J. T., Rothmund, T., & Sterling, J. (2019). Neoliberal ideology and the justification of inequality in capitalist societies: Why social and economic dimensions of ideology are intertwined. Journal of Social Issues, 75(1), 49-88. https://doi.org/10.1111/josi.12310

Azevedo, F., & Jost, J. T. (2021). The ideological basis of antiscientific attitudes: Effects of authoritarianism, conservatism, religiosity, social dominance, and system justification. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 24(4), 518-549. https://doi.org/10.1177/1368430221990104

Buckley, W. F. (1986). God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. Regnery Publishing.

Jost, J. T. (2006). The end of the end of ideology. American Psychologist, 61(7), 651.

Jost, J. T. (2021). Left & right: The psychological significance of a political distinction. New York: Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/left-and-right-9780190858339?cc=us&lang=en&#

Mooney, C. (2007). The Republican war on science. Hachette UK.

Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2011). Merchants of doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming. Bloomsbury Publishing USA.

Van der Linden, S., Panagopoulos, C., Azevedo, F., & Jost, J. T. (2021). The paranoid style in American politics revisited: An ideological asymmetry in conspiratorial thinking. Political Psychology, 42(1), 23-51. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12681

Womick, J., Rothmund, T., Azevedo, F., King, L. A., & Jost, J. T. (2019). Group-based dominance and authoritarian aggression predict support for Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(5), 643-652. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550618778290

Measuring populist attitudes – identifying a core / September 9, 2020 by Flavio Azevedo

A central question in contemporary populism research is to what extent people hold so-called populist attitudes. In light of this question, various scales have been proposed to measure populist attitudes (see here or Chapters 6 and 7 here for an overview). While the scales differ in various aspects, what they have in common is that, in one way or another, they draw on trailblazing measurement studies that were conducted in the USA or the Netherlands using a similar battery of survey items assumed to measure populist attitudes (see first six items in Table 1, below). At the moment of writing, the scale devised in the Dutch study remains perhaps the most influential battery of items to measure populist attitudes and examine relationships between populism and broader political behaviour. And while such studies are insightful and enrich the discipline, the integrity of their results depends on having an appropriate measurement of populist attitudes.

Survey items of the populist attitudes scale:

populism_1 | The politicians in Congress need to follow the will of the people.
populism_2 | The people, not the politicians, should make our most important policy decisions.
populism_3 | The political differences between the people and the elite are larger than the differences among the people.
populism_4 | I would rather be represented by an ordinary citizen than an experienced politician.
populism_5 | Politicians (elected officials) talk too much and take too little action.
populism_6 | What people call “compromise” in politics is really just selling out on one’s principles.
populism_7 | The particular interests of the political class negatively affect the welfare of the people
populism_8 | Politicians always end up agreeing when it comes to protecting their privileges.

itemsQuestion wordingpopulism_1The politicians in Congress need to follow the will of the people.populism_2The people, not the politicians, should make our most important policy decisions.populism_3The political differences between the people and the elite are larger than the differences among the people.populism_4I would rather be represented by an ordinary citizen than an experienced politician.populism_5Politicians (elected officials) talk too much and take too little action.populism_6What people call “compromise” in politics is really just selling out on one’s principles.populism_7The particular interests of the political class negatively affect the welfare of the peoplepopulism_8Politicians always end up agreeing when it comes to protecting their privileges.

In a recent article in Politics, we argue that the measurement and empirical evaluation of both the individual items in particular and the scale as a whole have yet to receive sufficient attention despite some efforts being made in other studies. With that crucial caveat in mind, we use a cross-national sample (9 countries, n = 18,368) and apply Item Response Theory (IRT) to the most commonly used populism scale in order to evaluate whether that scale (1) accurately extracts people’s populist attitudes from self-reported answers, and (2) provides a pan-European measurement for the European context. This exercise allows us to make three crucial observations that are relevant for (populism) scholars and beyond.

First, the IRT analysis of the traditional 6-item scale shows that all six items have difficulties in capturing high and extreme values of an aggregate populist attitudes instrument. Some of these items, like the ‘elite-procrastination’ item (item 5 in Table 1), perform notably better than others. While the brilliant study by Castanho Silva et al. (2019) confirms this is not uncommon across a wide variety of populism scales and samples, this observation presents a challenge for the findings and measurement of populist attitudes to the extent that most research in this area focuses precisely on the most -and least- populist. Hence, suggesting further scale development is required for accurate inferences.

With that in mind, we propose two additional items to formulate an 8-item scale (items 7 and 8 in Table 1). While our analysis shows the new items clearly outperform some of the traditional items, the addition of these new items gauging the perceived conflict between ‘the people’ and ‘the elite’ does not expand the extent to which we accurately capture the full range of the latent populist construct. For that reason, in a final step, we set out to fit a more parsimonious measurement through the refinement of the 8-item scale that can serve as the basis for future studies. By combining Occam’s razor and psychometric principles, we deduce a core measure comprised of 3 high-performing items covering the hypothesised theoretical concept and consisting of one item from the traditional 6-item scale (item 1 in Table 1) and the two novel items (items 7 and 8 in Table 1).

Overall, the intention of this exercise is not necessarily to provide a ‘minimal’ populist instrument that comprises no more than three items. Rather, we wish to highlight some of the areas for improvement of existing measures and propose a foundation (at least in a pan-European context) that researchers can build on and use as a baseline for further advancement of this field.

Text originally published at Politics Online. Drafted by Steven M. Van Hauwaert, Christian H. Schimpf and Flavio Azevedo and published on 12th July, 2019. Reproduced here for (self)-archiving purposes.

Gun Control [Replication] / August 8, 2019 by Flavio Azevedo

Gun Control / August 8, 2019 by Flavio Azevedo

Following in the steps of Big Brother? How Brazil’s rightward shift is similar and dissimilar to that of the U.S. in 2016 / November 19, 2018 by Flavio Azevedo

Flávio Azevedo, University of Cologne, Germany,
Daniel Mucciolo, Universidade do Contestado, Brazil,
Da'Quallon D. Smith, Columbia University, USA

Brazil is a country of superlatives. It is the world’s 5th largest and most populous country in the world, extremely rich in natural resources, and Latin America’s most powerful economy. Brazil is also the primary home of the Amazon Forest,the earth's lungs, which absorbs ¼ of the world’s carbon dioxide. In an ever-interconnected global economy and environment, Brazil’s election results matter well beyond its borders. On the last Sunday of October, as the country’s constitution mandates, a run-off election pitted Fernando Haddad, who took over Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s Workers Party, against a candidate pundits have been calling the “Trump of the Tropics." But appearances can be deceiving. While parallels can indeed be drawn between Donald Trump and Brazil's President-elect Jair Bolsonaro, differences between the two countries' circumstances and the candidates' ideological characteristics are palpable.

Think of the disparate backgrounds wherein the two contests took place. Contrary to the U.S. in 2016, Brazil's latest election took place while the country was reeling from the worst economic crisis in its history, with sky-high unemployment and record-shattering murder rates. As if things were not bad enough, Brazil is still embroiled in an ongoing 4-year long corruption investigation that has shaken the nation to its core, incriminating politicians across all parties and ideological proclivities. Dubbed operation car wash, it has said to have uncovered the largest corruption scheme in the world, and one that has sent Brazil's favourite son, Lula, to prison.

Against the backdrop of a seemingly never-ending political corruption scandal, it is no surprise that only 13% of Brazilians are satisfied with democracy, only 11% think the country is going in the right direction, and the legislative and executive branches are among the country’s most distrusted institutions. In a country in which voting is mandatory, 42.1 million people chose not to select a candidate in the runoff - that is one in every three Brazilian adults. What these numbers show is a generalized disillusionment – or political alienation, if you will – with the political establishment. But perhaps the most telling contextual factor that differentiates Brazil’s shift to the (far)-right from that in other countries is that the Worker’s Party (PT) had won the last 4 Presidential elections. And while PT oversaw the most prosperous times Brazilians have ever seen, recent political, public security, and economic crises dissolved popular support for PT as well as trust in the entirety of Brazil’s political class. Not only will the lower house have 30 different parties (a record), but almost all of the major political parties had their representations in Congress severely reduced. Indeed, the erosion of traditional parties – particularly on the mainstream right – created a vacuum so large that many Brazilians thought of this election as a referendum on the status quo: a choice between “more of the same” and anything else. Enter Jair Bolsonaro, a retired Army captain and longtime congressman from Rio de Janeiro who – prior to Operation Car Wash and Rousseff’s impeachment – received some notoriety for defending what was once seen as inconceivable rhetoric. For example, during Rousseff’s impeachment proceedings, Bolsonaro drew national condemnation for dedicating his in-favor vote to the memory of Colonel Ustra, a convicted human rights violator and torturer of the military dictatorship – and who personally tortured Rousseff in 1970.

As far as the political campaign goes, there are some striking similarities between Trump and his Brazilian counterpart. Both were widely discredited by political and cultural elites; both uttered racist, sexist, and homophobic slurs without serious consequences (electoral or otherwise); they lauded themselves as incorruptible, promised to drain the swamp, invested heavily in social media, and circulated misinformation on too-big-to-notice-until-it's-too-late platforms such as Facebook, Twitter & WhatsApp; and despite calling the news media “fake” – or perhaps because of it - dominated national media coverage.
In addition, Trump and Bolsonaro share two ideological appendices to their conservative politics: populism and authoritarianism. In 2004, Mudde synthesized the core elements of populist political actors and defined populism as “a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people” (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017). Similarly, Hawkins (2009) argues that populism is “a Manichean discourse that identifies Good with a unified will of the people and the Evil with a conspiring elite.” Both scholars, and the literature in general, tend to agree that central to populism is (a) framing of political divisions as the clash of two opposed and monolithic forces, (b) which is characterized by the assignment of a moral dimension via the juxtaposition of totalizing qualifiers such as good vs. evil, us vs. them, pure vs. corrupt (van Hauwaert, Schimpf, Azevedo, 2018). It is this moralization and covert in-grouping and out-grouping that predisposes and links populist views to both authoritarian and conservative views. Moreover, it is why, in practice, this partnership take hold almost exclusively on the social and cultural dimension of political orientation. In this sense, populist authoritarianism goes beyond the belief in an ordered society wherein transgressions should be punished severely – also known as law and order, a longstanding staple of authoritarian conservatism – to also include the identification, derogation, and targeting of “deviants.” Indeed, it has been shown that belligerence towards minority groups and the endorsement of the establishing and maintaining group-based hierarchies is a stable and robust predictor differentiating preference for mainstream conservative vs. populist authoritarian candidates (Womick, Rothmund, Azevedo, King, & Jost, 2018). Populist authoritarians seek to perpetuate societal inequalities – if not expand them – which they see as natural and legitimate (Azevedo, Jost, & Rothmund, 2017; Mudde, 2007; p. 23).

When fused, authoritarian populism is seen as a social pathology imbued by a paranoid style of politics which ultimately threatens liberal democratic values. The argument is that democratic rule is built upon the integration of pluralism in the political system, which is institutionalized by fair and free elections, separation of powers, the rule of law, and the equal protection rights and liberties for all people. Indeed, democracies’ checks and balances exist to limit the power of the executive branch and protect citizens from abuse. Populists, however, while claiming to speak for the people, conceive democratic procedure and its institutions as unnecessary obstacles to defending the Nation, as an impediment to their conception of popular will (Müller, 2017). Often through the exploitation of economic grievances, populists advocate for a return to nationalism, encourage prejudice and foment distrust toward globalization, international alliances and trade pacts. When in power, populists tend to reject pluralism and minority rights, clash against the free media, and decrease the extent to which civil liberties and political rights are upheld. Unsurprisingly, for most of the last decade, intellectuals, news media, and politicians have echoed voices of concern against the rise of populism, which is now a major player in politics around the globe.

However, while Bolsonaro and Trump share a populist authoritarian ideology, Bolsonaro’s rhetoric differs from Trump’s in at least two important ways: ambivalence towards democracy and overt, unapologetic generalized prejudice. We focus on the former first. Contrary to mainstream conservatives, who operate within the boundaries of democratic institutions, the members of the far-right display a varying degree of undemocratic proclivities (Golder, 2016). In a nutshell, the far-right is composed of two groups: the populist radical right and the extreme right. While the populist radical right is critical of democratic institutions – particularly those designed to preclude unchecked majority rule and ensure separation of powers – it is still supportive of elections and democratic rule. The discourse of members of the extreme right, on the other hand, not only shows contempt for democracy and its institutions but often encourages the transfer of governing power and legitimacy away from the Nation’s people. In a 1999 televised interview, Bolsonaro affirmed his support for military intervention, closing the Congress, and said these words about democracy: “You will never change anything in this country through voting. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Unfortunately, things will only change when a civil war kicks off and we do the work the [military] regime did not. Killing some 30.000, killing them! If a couple of innocents die, that’s OK.” Bolsonaro is also a staunch defender of the murderous legacy of Brazil’s dictatorship. In 2016, while being interviewed on radio, Bolsonaro said this about the practice of torturing captured dissidents: “the mistake was not to torture, it was not to kill them.” Even during the Presidential campaign in 2018, Bolsonaro suggested to a crowd of supporters that they would shoot down PT supporters and send them to Venezuela where they would be forced to eat grass. So, in comparing Trump’s with Bolsonaro’s rhetoric, there is a qualitative difference in support for democracy. Even if the American President tries – and sometimes succeeds – to blur the lines separating the three branches of government, Trump never publicly suggested that autocratic forms of government were preferable to democracy.

The second difference relates to the presence of covert vs. overt unapologetic prejudice. In all likelihood, Bolsonaro and Trump share the same prejudices (and levels thereof), but when it comes to public political discourse and decorum, there is a qualitative difference. In 2011, Bolsonaro outright stated that his children would never have relations with a person of color because they had been well educated and doing so would constitute promiscuity. He is also on record saying that he would be incapable of loving a homosexual son, and would prefer his death than have him “show up with some bloke with a mustache.” In 2017, Bolsonaro referred to the gender of his daughter – after four male sons – as “a moment of weakness,” not only implying his masculinity or effort affected the sex of his children, but also passing judgment on which sex is superior. We could go on. The take-home message is Bolsonaro’s rhetoric bears the hallmarks of the extreme right and thus conflating it with Trump’s is a grave solecism.

But why should we care about the electoral consequences of a country thousands of miles away?
First, Bolsonaro is against environmental regulations and plans to merge the ministries of Agriculture and Environment, in support of agroindustry, which effectively means the invasion of Indigenous people’s lands and unrestrained deforestation of the Amazon. Fewer trees will contribute to global warming, which affects us all. Second, Brazil is a regional geopolitical leader integrating all of its South American neighbors physically, economically and politically. Its stability plays a strategic role in ensuring local shocks don’t travel across the region. Recently, Brazil’s democratic institutions have shown uncanny resilience in the face of three concomitant crises. The military never intervened, court decisions were respected (despite popular upheaval) and constitutional processes were followed. However, as Bolsonaro has promised to crack down on dissidents, the media, and even the electoral court Brazil’s democracy could fall and cause a domino effect across the entire region. Third, Bolsonaro’s unapologetic prejudice against women, homosexuals, blacks and natives, promises to bolster fringe and extreme groups, increase domestic violence and hate crimes – just like it has in the U.S. as Trump repeatedly fails to denounce far-right groups – leading to the death of innocent human beings and human rights violations. Fourth, Bolsonaro has promised to embolden police officers and promote shot-to-kill public policies. In a country with already staggering amounts of police violence and extra-judicial killings, the institutional backing will only increase police impunity and violence – particularly against the poor and racial minorities. Innocent people will suffer for no other reason than authoritarian-fueled ideology. And the conditions of the incarcerated – Brazil has the third largest prison population in the world, who already live in subhuman conditions – have been predicted to substantially deteriorate. Fifth, and least important of all, we may be witnessing the death of conservatism as we know it. Despite a few overlaps with populist and authoritarian views, and the ease with which they constructed alliances in the northern and southern hemisphere, these differ considerably in terms of aspirations and modus operandi. Populist Authoritarianism is brash and passionate while conservatism is modest and cautious. Conservatives tend to respect hierarchy, favor continuity and revere traditional values (Freeden, 1996) while authoritarian populists embody anti-elitism, exacerbation of societal differences, and unmitigated prejudice. Yet, that conservatism’s worldwide drifts into populist authoritarianism does not seem to set off alarm bells. Indeed, conservatives seem oblivious to realize their cultured and traditional precepts have been hijacked before their eyes.

Published at the ISPP Blog & Newsletter.

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