Education, perceived discrimination, and identity voting: evidence from Brazil’s 2018 election

ABSTRACT

Brazil’s electoral arena has long been characterized as devoid of identity politics. Recent analyses, however, have uncovered shifting racial subjectivities and effects of race and gender on electoral preferences. This paper leverages Brazil’s 2018 election to reassess conventional wisdom and test whether recent findings derived from racial groups extend to other subordinate social groups in this context, namely women and sexual minorities. I test two hypotheses: (1) that higher levels of education correlate with greater perceptions of group-based discrimination, and (2) that perceptions of group-based discrimination explain within-group variation in support for Bolsonaro. Analysis of national survey data show that education correlates with group consciousness among subordinate groups, and that these individuals are more likely to oppose the far-right populist candidate. This article provides a more complete understanding of the electoral salience of identity in the Brazilian context, and provides evidence that insights derived from one marginalized group can extend to others.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity
• race
• gender
• sexuality
• Brazil
• voting
• Bolsonaro
• group consciousness

Acknowledgements

I would especially like to thank Peter Johannessen and the three anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For a recent example of the scholarly tendency to elevate cleavages over identities, see Samuels and Zucco (2018, chap. 2).

2 Important exceptions include Madrid’s (2012) and Morales’s (2015) studies of ethnic and class voting in Latin America, and Norris’s and Inglehart (2003) and Morgan’s (2015) studies of the gender gap.

3 Also see Frasure-Yokley, Masuoka, and Barreto (2019), Junn and Masuoka (2008), Masuoka (2006), Sanchez (2006), and Sanchez and Masuoka (2010). For a counterpoint, see Gay, Hochschild, and White (2016) who find similar levels of linked fate across social groupings.

4 These findings are highlighted in a special issue of Politics, Groups, and Identities (Frasure-Yokley, Masuoka, and Barreto 2019). Additionally, though Gay, Hochschild, and White (2016) argue discrimination’s relationship to linked fate is weak, their analysis shows it is a robust and significant correlate. Also see Berry, Cepuran, and Garcia-Rios (2022).

5 See Appendix Table A7 and Figure A1 for replication with alternative coding.