Cesar Zucco

Lotteries could be a just and cost-effective procedure to distribute government benefits in contexts of oversubscription, with the added benefit of allowing assessments of the impact of government programs. However, little is known about whether there is public support for employing lotteries in this context. We examine support for a lottery that selects recipients of new government-built housing units in Brazil and find that neither lotteries participants nor the general public supports their use. We arrive at this result by employing a three-pronged multi-method approach. Quasi-experimental analysis of an original survey of lottery participants reveals that support not only is tepid, but substantially higher among winners than non-winners. In-depth interviews suggest that applicants believe lotteries miss the most deserving beneficiaries. A general population survey experiment reveals that lotteries are not perceived as just or efficient when compared to alternative beneficiary selection methods. While sometimes normatively desirable, the use of lotteries for government programs enjoys limited popular support.

This research note contributes updated and extended point estimates of the ideological positions of Brazilian political parties and novel estimates of the positions of all presidents since redemocratization in 1985. Presidents and parties are jointly responsible for the operability of Brazil’s version of coalitional presidentialism. Locating these key political actors in a unidimensional left–right space over time reveals rising challenges to the institutional matrix, particularly since 2013. Ideological polarization among parties has sharply increased, presidents have become more distant from Congress, and the political center has become increasingly vacated. Coalitional presidentialism is being subjected to unprecedented ideological stress as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva begins his third term in office.

This paper examines the origins and evolution of the direita envergonhada (“embarrassed right”) phenomenon, a pattern of ideological obfuscation by right-of-center politicians that was originally identified and documented in post-authoritarian Brazil. Conservative politicians refused to identify themselves as right-wing, defining themselves instead as centrists and placing themselves ideologically to the left of their own political parties. We find that this phenomenon is not restricted to Brazil, but is widespread across Latin America’s Third Wave of democratization. We also find that politicians personally connected to the defunct authoritarian regime were more likely to engage in obfuscation and that, contrary to previous hypotheses, obfuscation has faded in recent times.

Brazilian voters are deeply polarized between supporters and opponents of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party -- PT). Although such polarization began to emerge before the PT rose to power in 2003, we suggest that support or opposition to policies that PT governments have enacted since then to ameliorate Brazil’s racial, gender, and socio-economic inequalities shape the divide that exists today. These policies, beyond just producing actual winners and losers, have triggered perceptions of status gains and losses. Using an original nationally representative survey tailored to probe status perceptions, we show that Brazilians who perceive status gains for themselves as well as for “people like them” are more likely to be PT partisans, while those who perceive status losses are more likely to oppose the party. We further tie status perceptions to polarization by showing that positive and negative partisanship are tightly linked to attitudes about welfare deservingness, racial resentment, and gender hostility, which reflect approval of or hostility towards perceived winners and losers of PT policies. Our findings provide novel insight into the importance of perceptions of status gain as well as loss as sources of partisan polarization in the Brazilian case, and contribute to our general understanding of the politics of resentment.

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.

This research note contributes updated and extended point estimates of the ideological positions of Brazilian political parties and novel estimates of the positions of all presidents since redemocratization in 1985. Presidents and parties are jointly responsible for the operability of Brazil’s version of coalitional presidentialism. Locating these key political actors in a unidimensional left-right space over time reveals rising challenges to the institutional setup, particularly since 2013. Ideological polarization among parties has sharply increased, presidents have become more distant from Congress, and the political center has become increasingly vacated. Coalitional presidentialism is being subjected to unprecedented ideological stress as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva begins his third term in office.

We investigated both the direct and indirect political dividends of public policies by examiningMinha Casa,Minha Vida, a housing programme in Brazil that selects its beneficiaries by lottery. We surveyed the lottery participants and found that the winners were not more likely to support the incumbent politicians. Non-beneficiaries, a much larger group, were aware of the programme and thought well of it while the beneficiaries' responses to the programme were sometimes underwhelming. However, politicians considered the programme to be an electoral asset, and a difference-in-differences analysis of electoral results leveraging the roll-out of the programme across municipalities found that presidential and mayoral incumbent candidates performed better in localities that had implemented MCMV. Overall, when the beneficiaries formed a relatively small group, the benefits were conspicuous and the programme's objectives were widely supported. Government programmes can create electoral payoffs independently of how programmes are perceived or experienced by beneficiaries.

We know little about how coalitional strategy affects the electoral fates of political parties in presidential democracy. The literature on coalitions in parliamentary systems shows a negative impact of entering government, while the coattail effects literature on presidential systems suggests some benefits. Combining elements from both approaches, we argue that there is a conditional electoral effect of joining the cabinet under coalitional presidentialism. Even considering presidentialism’s heightened attribution of responsibility to a unipersonal executive, we find that coalition parties do indeed place a meaningful electoral wager whenever they choose to enter the president’s cabinet as identifiable allies. Leveraging data on Brazilian elections held at national and local levels over 24 years and employing an innovative measure of portfolio salience, we show that the payoff of this wager is contingent on control of the most highly-valued cabinet positions and on the popular approval of the president.