Left and Right in the Brazilian party system: content analysis of programmatic documents

Abstract

This article measures the ideology of Brazilian political parties, recurrently cited as inconsistent. The method applied is the content analysis of party programs, using an alternative scale, proposed to capture Brazilian specificities, usually neglected in the international comparative literature. The party positions are calculated for the main seven Brazilian parties in the left-right dimension and in the conservative-liberal dimension, which are then crossed in a two-dimensional plane. The results are compared to other classifications found in the literature about Brazil and indicate the relevance of mobilizing the ideological position of parties as independent variable to the understanding of several aspects of the Brazilian party system.