In this chapter, we define a communication strategy for the 2022 Brazilian presidential election using public opinion inputs. We ask a simple question – what is the winning message?

To do this, we deploy polling results from three 2,000 interview face-to-face polls and a battery of focus groups. These are what we call a benchmark, designed to identify key message themes and other public opinion inputs. To assess the campaign in course, we will analyze about 40,900 interviews conducted during 152 days of tracking. Note that we did not work for any campaign in Brazil. But we polled for private sector clients who wanted to understand and predict the election. In that capacity, we used our polling to mimic campaign dynamics in order to assess their relative effectiveness.

Latin America differs from our other cases in crucial ways. It did not suffer as badly from the Great Recession as did many other regions, although it experienced its own crisis when the boom in commodity prices burst. And historically, cultural issues over race and ethnicity had not been as politicized as in Europe and North America. Nevertheless, we see a similar causal process in this region as in our other cases. As regional economies suffered, antagonism towards politics as usual increased. The nature of discontent, however, differed radically depending on the details of the dominant political order it opposed. In Brazil, discontent came to resemble Trumpism, with a focus on cultural issues that had been addressed by the formerly dominant Workers’ Party, while also addressing rampant corruption. In Chile, discontent centered on the elitism of Chile’s democracy, and the institutions that reinforced it, placed insurmountable barriers in the path of political outsiders and insurgent parties; as a result, discontent in Chile manifested as mass contention. This chapter uses analysis of existing datasets (including LAPOP and national election studies) to show how economic concerns, exacerbated by democratic deficits, drove discontent over cultural discontent, corruption, and elitism.

This chapter investigates affinities between Bolsonarismo (the discourse of groups supporting Jair Bolsonaro’s government and ideas) and Lavajatismo (the discourse of groups supporting the Lava Jato investigation) both online and offline from 2015 to 2019. The analysis shows the links between the denial of rights, the push for accountability through the courts, and the far right, combining two original data sources. First, semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of the so-called verde e amarelos (“green and yellow”) during mass anti-corruption demonstrations in 2015 and 2017. Participants at these rallies were characterized by the use of the Brazilian yellow jersey as a symbol of nationalism, “anti-communism,” and anti-corruption. Second, the results are presented of a lexical analysis of 13,800 posts on Facebook pages supporting Lava Jato, between April 2016 to February 2019. This period included former President Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, former President Luiz Inácio “Lula” Da Silva’s imprisonment, and Jair Bolsonaro’s rise to power.

The institutional complementarities of that marked Brazil’s political economy between 1985 and 2018 period were placed under considerable strain by the recession, fiscal crisis, corruption investigations, and political upheaval that culminated in the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro. An open question was whether the multiple and overlapping crises of the 2010s would destabilize the institutional equilibrium that had prevailed over the previous generation. To evaluate this question, this chapter summarizes the contributions of this manuscript to our understanding of Brazil’s political economy under democracy. It then describes how past reform efforts failed to move the political economy away from the status quo equilibrium, and the ways in which institutional complementarities shaped the pace and scope of change. It concludes with an evaluation of the “stress test” posed by the Bolsonaro administration, pointing to the importance of changes in the political realm for resolving Brazil’s long-term economic developmental challenge.