The grammars of anti-PT sentiment: a typology of Brazilian negative partisanship

Abstract

Negative partisanship has been treated in contemporary literature as a continuous attitude of rejection toward a political party—analogous, in its structure, to positive party identification. This article proposes a shift in this approach by conceiving it as an aggregative category: a mechanism that brings individuals together around the rejection of the same party label, but based on deeply distinct affective, moral, and political grammars. Taking Brazil as a case study, the research investigates the internal diversity of anti-PT sentiment using an integrative multimethod design that combines cluster analysis and focus groups conducted across all regions of the country. The results indicate the existence of four main grammars of rejection toward the PT: a partisan one, anchored in positive ties to political parties; a moral one, structured by values and normative conceptions; an economic one, guided by instrumental criteria of political evaluation; and a form of critical disengagement, marked by distance from institutional politics. Taken together, these findings suggest that negative partisanship can operate as an effective mechanism of electoral coordination without producing substantive cohesion among the individuals who mobilize it, highlighting its limits as an organizing principle of political action.