The identification of political parties' ideological position is relevant for a variety of research applications. But in Brazil it has not yet been sufficiently discussed. This article starts by discussing the concepts of left and right in order to identify categories that can be used in an ideological scale to classify the Brazilian political parties. We compare several methodological alternatives present in the literature and apply the technique of content analysis to analyze the parties' programmatic documents. The specificities of the left and right in Brazil are punctuated both to indicate the inadequacy of scales applied in other contexts and to propose an alternative scale adapted to the ideological left and right content. The results indicate that regarding the programmatic doc uments, Brazilian parties differ less among each other than current ratings (developed mainly from analysis of parliamentary behavior) seem to suggest. The analysis identified differences between the results of the application of the scale and the usual classifications of Brazilian parties. These differences reflect the different objects of measurement and reveal their validity limitations. Brazilian political parties have been classified by analysts according to their performance in the legislature and in the Government, while the classification by issue saliency takes their programs into account. This analysis contributes to the literature by discussing: the validity of classifications based mainly on behavior, the systematization of classifications based on different approaches and the proposal of an ideological scale measured through programmatic emphases.Keywords: STF; CNJ; institutional design; decision-making process.
manifests; ideology; saliency; political parties
