Populism and COVID-19

More than a virus, COVID-19 has affected the world in many ways: it changed how the world is connected, increased inequalities, and fostered many political changes. The pandemic also reshaped geopolitical relationships in the global system, leading to a more precarious international equilibrium [12]. The complex health response to the virus had to be complemented by various political measures. Blaming a specific group of people for the disease, or explaining it as a measure to constrain freedom, is part of a wide range of illusions seen during the pandemic [13]. Most of these illusions reduced the multidimensional reasons for the pandemic, such as climate change, global agribusiness, and very complex political process, for a more straightforward narrative. In general, something that was far from home and quickly explained to the masses [14].

Furthermore, the pandemic had multidimensional effects on national political systems. It affected voter turnout both positively and negatively, favored the rise in political relevance of extreme right-wing radical parties, as in the case of Romania, as well as undermining the political prospects of right-wing populist leaders like Donald Trump in the United States and Boris Johnson in the UK [15–18].

Political factors also play a role in response to the pandemic, as politics has been studied as one of the main factors explaining government responses to COVID-19 and health outcomes [19]. Radical right-wing parties in Europe are related to worse healthcare policies driven by “welfare chauvinism" [20]. Furthermore, lower trust in political institutions and science is essential to foster conspiracy beliefs, regardless of ideological stance [21].

When looking at the features of other types of populism, such as medical populism, there are four features: simplification, dramatization, forging divisions and invoking false knowledge claims [2]. For example, in the US, Fox News viewership negatively correlates with compliance with social isolation and underestimates COVID-19’s danger [22, 23]. The literature highlights how the anti-elitist bias of populism movements and lack of trust in scientific and political institutions influences the pandemic. It favors increased suspicion of international and scientific institutions that are vital in policy responses to the sanitary crisis [24, 25].

Research has indicated the importance of political parties in dealing with COVID-19. For some, different partisan lines had an essential impact on social distancing [23, 26]. Meanwhile, others have shown that internet searches for COVID-19 and unemployment information decreased strongly among voters for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election [22]. Finally, some findings also claim that populism is correlated with conspiracy beliefs about COVID-19, above and beyond partisanship [27].

In the Brazilian case, however, party connections are less relevant, as the president was not a member of any party throughout the first and second waves of the pandemic. The relevant issue is the direct connection between the populist leader and his followers.

Compliance with social distancing measures in pro-government municipalities weakened after Bolsonaro initiated a vigorous campaign against social isolation measures enforced by local governments [28]. In short, the Brazilian president disseminated the idea that COVID-19 was just a “little flu” and that combating the economic crisis was more important [29].

Features of the Brazilian context highlight what some studies emphasized [30]. Understanding new populism requires analyzing how parties enter and navigate the electoral and party systems and the content of their rhetorical appeals to the public. Bolsonaro’s behavior relates to a style of politics based on bad manners, which focuses on delivering performance against political correctness [31].

As extensively demonstrated in the conceptual literature on populism, even if there is an ideological aspect in its constitution, it is also necessary to understand the dichotomy between the elite and the masses as a political strategy [4, 32]. This discourse, or even logic of action, is less dependent on the leader and more associated with representational deficits [33–35].

Recent research has highlighted the correlation between the municipal share of voting for Bolsonaro and COVID-19 results [36]. However, they all relied on second-round election data and did not use placebo tests for other respiratory diseases to leverage the regression results powerfully. Without controlling for the effects of traditional right-wing votes and using first-round election data, those studies cannot separate the effects of Bolsonaro’s political pressure to reduce compliance with social distancing measures from the ecological correlation between right-wing votes and worse COVID-19 results. We expect that the effects of populism could be stronger for municipalities in the first round of the elections. In the second round, electors decide more based on the rejection of the other candidate than on the voters’ adherence to the chosen one’s principles and values.

As the president did not affiliate with any party, theoretical party connection should be used with caution when analyzing the effects of right-wing populism in Brazil. Hence, our methodological approach separating the effects of Bolsonarism from other ideological currents in Brazilian politics is more reliable than data mining methods.

Besides party affiliation, the Brazilian case is also interesting because of its experience with the xenophobic radical right in Latin America. Even though Brazil does not have a migration problem, only a specific issue in the state of Roraima due to the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis, the immigration problem is routinely mobilized by the populist right-wing leadership [37]. The Latin American continent has been a region with a strong affinity for leftist populist governments, with the Bolivarian and Kirchnerist experiences being the most recent demonstrations [38]. The Bolsonarist experience, in turn, is more in tune with the emergence of North Atlantic populist movements that reject globalization more in its political than economic aspects, even reverberating the notions of cruelty as a political strategy [10].

In this way, Brazil shares with Central and Eastern European countries long history of racism. In Europe, racial stigma against Roma people has deep historical roots. Stigmatization remains in the collective mentality despite efforts for integration. However, Bolsonaro’s vote aligns not with racial lines but with class and regional cleavages. That indicates the emergence of a new kind of right within more fluid xenophobic lines, revigorating the long Brazilian tradition of huge racial inequalities as a direct consequence of late slavery. Collective identities aid in the establishment of essential directions around whether groups are accepted or rejected. As a result, survey evidence and aggregate data eventually indicate that the core of Bolsonarism is not composed of voters among the poorest but among the middle classes and socioeconomic elites [39–41].

We understand populism as a worldview separating politics into two homogenous and antagonistic camps. On one side, the pure masses and the corrupt elite, and, on the other, as a personalistic political strategy [4]. We propose that these two facets of populism are not easily untangled. The populist leader puts himself as the best interpreter of the people’s interests, values, and anxieties. In this way, the head of a populist movement will behave strategically, bypassing mediated and institutionalized mechanisms to freely communicate with his followers and promote his self-interested interpretation of the people’s will. This interpretation is supposedly against the interests and values promoted by international political and scientific institutions, all biased by the elites, with the latter being a critical hotspot during a health crisis.

Mistrust of the ’mainstream’ political class and growing trust in religious leaders have grown globally [16]. For instance, Hungary and Poland are cases where the extreme right took power. Meanwhile, Romania, Portugal, France, and Spain also witnessed the emergence of right-wing parties. In most countries, however, right-wing parties rise to power through parties. In Brazil, the right-wing president had no party. He also won elections before the pandemic, so his strategy to face the health emergency cannot be considered a way to rise to power. Once in charge of the presidency, he aimed to consolidate power and decrease resistance at the subnational level.

We highlight that populism should be regarded as a ’thin’ ideology that, although of limited analytical use on its terms, nevertheless conveys a distinct set of ideas about the political system which interacts with the established ideational traditions of entire ideologies [4, 42].

Data and methods

We drew on an original dataset covering Brazil’s 5,570 municipalities to evaluate the connection between right-wing extremism and the spread of the pandemic. Our data represents one of the most extensive balanced datasets in the world, aligning key political aspects, economic infrastructure, social distancing, and health capacity with deaths and cases at a local level. As we are dealing with a count date, where the unconditional mean of the outcome is much different from its variance, we estimate negative binomial models for panel and cross-sectional data [43, 44]. We control the spatial dimension using the distance between the state capital and the Brazilian federal capital and dummies for regions. Negative binomial models are adequate to handle count data as deaths and COVID-19 cases. In the S1 Appendix, as a further robustness analysis, we tested the model with cases and deaths per capita as the dependent variables, even considering that all our models control for population size.

Data of cases and deaths caused by COVID-19 were collected by BRASIL- IO(2020), which compiles all the official data produced by every Brazilian local and state government in a single database on a daily bases. Our data collection starts on February 19^th and goes until December 31^st, 2020, a total of 45 weeks for almost all 5570 Brazilian municipalities. We employ weekly data to smooth data variation during business days and weekends. All municipalities enter the sample on February 19^th. In total, we have a balanced municipal-week dataset. Our time frame concerns only 2020 since a massive vaccination campaign started in January 2021, despite the difficulties created by the federal government for a broad vaccination of the Brazilian population. Consequently, the Covid response involves more strategies than NPIs. Future studies should analyze the implications.

We use the vote for Bolsonaro in the 2018 first-round elections in each Brazilian municipality as a proxy for commitment to right-wing populism. We test its relation with COVID-19 responses using cross-section and panel data models on Brazilian municipalities. The local share of votes for the most competitive right-wing candidate during the 2014 elections is used as a placebo test that allows us to separate the effect of the presidency’s interventions against NPI measures from the potential effects of the Brazilian political right itself.

Geo-located data from cellphones by municipalities measure social isolation compliance by Inloco^®. We present details about data collection in the S1 Appendix.

As robustness checks for the effect of populism, we tested the impact of the moderate right-wing vote, using data from the 2014 election and data for other severe respiratory diseases in 2018 as a placebo test for overall respiratory diseases unrelated to COVID-19. Data on Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) was initially collected in Brazil as a response to the Zika virus pandemic. We collected data on SARS from 2018 in all Brazilian municipalities on the Health Ministry database. We assume that there are no changes concerning SARS transmission in Brazil between 2018 and 2020 regarding socioeconomic and epidemiological variables, except for the political context and the surge of COVID-19, which makes it a valuable placebo.

Finally, we used the moderator-mediator variable distinction approach and other methods of exploring causality to explore the possible mechanism: the populist effect on social isolation compliance [45, 46].

Lastly, we obtained control variables from the Brazilian Bureau of Statistics and the Ministry of Education. Table 1 shows descriptive statistics. Fig 1 depicts the distribution of Covid cases and deaths in Brazil. It also shows the cases of respiratory diseases in 2018. Fig 2 presents the distribution of the share of right-wing vote in the country in the 2014 and 2018 elections.

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Fig 1. Respiratory diseases in Brazil.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269349.g001

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Fig 2. The right-wing vote in Brazil.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269349.g002

Download:

• PNG
  larger image
• TIFF
  original image

Table 1. Descriptive statistics.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269349.t001

We show details on variables and complete results in the S1 Appendix.

Limitations of the study

Our analysis relies on ecological data. We have the leverage to estimate the effect of right-wing populism on COVID-19 results due to denialism and political pressures from the Brazilian president. However, further research should test the micro-foundations of our hypothesis using individual-level data. A preliminary analysis of Brazilian data corroborates our findings [52].

Although our placebo strategy helps shed light on the relationship between COVID-19 results and political variables, our estimation does not rely on exogenous variation to estimate Bolsonarism’s effect on deaths and cases. Hence, we are confident that we can capture the structure of the relations. However, more research should be done to estimate the actual effects of Bolsonaro’s politics on the number of cases and deaths caused by COVID-19 in Brazil.

A further line of inquiry is to identify how socioeconomic status modulates the effect of Bolsonarism, as the right-wing populist movement in Brazil is associated with middle- and high-income individuals.