Knowing the void: ideological congruence and political parties in Brazil

Abstract

Brazilian political parties are periodically reclassified regarding their ideological colours in order to depict changes and trends. However, most scholars only use the major parties instead of entire party system. This choice hinders Brazil’s political representation understanding, insofar as party fragmentation gets higher and small parties became relevant actors making themselves into major parties’ position. Thus, our aim is to validate the ideological measure of a set of political parties usually ignored by literature. Therefore, we chose eight less graded political parties on left-right axis. Left-right classification was made through a web-based survey within Brazilianist and Brazilian political science community. In order to validate, we associate the output from experts’ survey with previous classifications and with parties’ manifestos. Our hypothesis states lack of grading is due to low programmatic levels in theses eight parties and latent ideological positions of them, instead of salient. Results points out to an agreement with main hypothesis, even if contextual and systemic issues may hamper the scientific corpus capacity to ideologically rank our political parties.