Indiferenciação e alienação partidária no Brasil

Abstract

In recent years, several studies have identified a decline in party identification in different regions of the world. The literature has sought to understand whether voters who depart parties take this decision by a rational and well-informed decision, characterized by autonomy and independence from the parties (non-differentiation), or if the motive would be an attitude of disenchantment and withdrawal from the system partisan or even of the regime as a whole (alienation).In this article, we investigate this issue applied to the Brazilian case. For this we use data from the Brazilian Electoral Study (2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014). The results show that the percentage of indifferent and alienated voters vary together, especially at critical junctures in which the government gets involved in corruption scandals. This variation is partly explained by the low score given by the indifferent voters, making all parties are also seen “bad”. We also found that indifferent and alienated share the same determinants and that both are absent factors linked to cognitive mobilization, such as education and political interest. Throughout the article we argue that these results have important consequences for Brazilian democracy.

Keywords:
Partisanship; Political Culture; Democratic legitimacy; Brazil