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AbstractThis article examines key ideological, economic, and institutional preferences of the Brazilian political elite in the first 25 years of the country's present democratic regime. Introducing the unified dataset of the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, it examines several crucial dimensions of politicians' attitudes, including elite placement on a traditional left-right scale, preferences concerning the fundamental economic model, direct comparisons of the recent Cardoso and Lula governments, and orientations toward Brazil's global and regional projection. On many of the central issues, attitudes have remained stable, but on the dimensions that have seen notable change, nearly all the change has been in the direction of decreasing polarization. In contrast to the experience of some neighboring countries, the Brazilian case demonstrates that the sustained practice of democracy can lead to attitudinal convergence and macro-political stability, even when the initial political and socioeconomic conditions appear daunting.

Ideal point estimators hold the promise of identifying multiple dimensions of political disagreement as they are manifested in legislative voting. However, standard ideal point estimates do not distinguish between ideological motivations and voting inducements from parties, coalitions, or the executive. In this article we describe a general approach for hierarchically identifying an ideological dimension using an auxiliary source of data. In the case we consider, we use an anonymous survey of Brazilian legislators to identify party positions on a left-right ideology dimension. We then use this data to distinguish ideological motivations from other determinants of roll-call behavior for eight presidential-legislative periods covering more than 20 years of Brazilian politics. We find that there exists an important nonideological government-opposition dimension, with the entrance and exit of political parties from the governing coalition appearing as distinct shifts in ideal point on this second dimension. We conjecture that the Brazilian president's control over politically important resources is the source of this dimension of conflict, which has recently become far more important in explaining roll-call voting than the ideological dimension. Adapted from the source document.

ABSTRACT
In recent decades, Brazilian voters have grown polarized between supporters of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' Party, PT), known as petistas, and its opponents, known as antipetistas. What explains this animosity? One potential source of polarization is partisan stereotyping, a tendency for partisans to misperceive the social composition of both their own side's bases of support as well as their opponents'. We show that most Brazilians overestimate the extent to which petistas and antipetistas belong to party-stereotypical groups such as Afro-Brazilians, evangelical Christians, or poor or rich people. We then show that stereotyping is associated with polarization: the greater the bias in perceived partisan group composition, the greater the perceptions of partisan political extremism and feelings of social distance toward the partisan out-group.