POLITICAL TOLERANCE IN RECENT BRAZIL: evolution of indicators and conditioning factors

Combining public contestation with political participation, democracy is equally dependent on an environment of political tolerance. A quality democracy could not exist in an environment marked by strong intolerance, in which people do not have the opportunity to express their opinions and debate their ideals. This conditionality imposes difficulties for the process of improving Brazilian democracy, especially considering the troubled past years. The current political crisis, which began with the protests that culminated in the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff and has not yet ended, has been marked by strong contentiousness and manifestations of intolerance by the different parties involved in the dispute. Given this scenario, this article presents a framework of political tolerance in recent Brazil. Using the Latin American Public Opinion Project’s (LAPOP) historical data series, we analyze the evolution of different indicators of politically tolerant attitudes and, beyond these general contours, explore possible socio-demographic, attitudinal and behavioral determinants. The data indicate that in all indicators, the opinion of Brazilians tends to be mostly tolerant for the set of measures adopted, however, there was a decline in all of them when observing the 2014 survey. Regarding the determinants of tolerance, we found evidence that such attitudes are related to higher levels of voter cognitive mobilization.

Political tolerance; Brazil; Political behavior