Visions of democracy of the Brazilian Parliamentary Elite (2017-2021)

Abstract

The purpose of this research is to verify whether there is any pattern in the views of the Brazilian parliamentary political elite on democracy, as well as to identify which democratic model the actors most identify with. This quantitative study is based on data from the Brazilian Legislative Survey (PLB), carried out by FGV and Oxford, which tracked the perceptions of Brazilian parliamentarians in the years 2017 (pre-election) and 2021 (post-election). The data will be analyzed descriptively using R software. The comparison between 2017 and 2021 provides us with indicators of the stability of these views even after the federal elections. The hypotheses of this work are that (H1) visions of democracy are often opposed, given that a significant portion of the elite adopt illiberal or anti-democratic visions; nevertheless, (H2) the liberal vision is predominant. The first hypothesis was confirmed, while the second was rejected, given that proportionally there are very similar numbers of parliamentarians endorsing both liberal and anti-democratic views. In addition, we used binary logistic regression to check which control variables could be predictors of each view. We verified the significance of ideology, in which being left-wing is a strong predictor of liberal, social and direct views, while being right-wing is very explanatory of anti-democratic views.