by PublicABCP
Translated and reviewed by Matheus Lucas Hebling
The article It’s My Party and I’ll Lie If I Want To: Elite Ideological Obfuscation in Post-Authoritarian Settings, by Cesar Zucco (FGV) and Timothy Power (University of Oxford), examines the behavior of right-wing politicians in recent Latin American democracies, with particular attention to the phenomenon known as the “embarrassed right.”
The term describes the tendency of conservative legislators to avoid identifying themselves as right-wing, instead positioning themselves ideologically closer to the center—or even to the left—of their own parties. This strategy emerged in post-authoritarian contexts, where visible links to former military regimes were seen as damaging to politicians’ public image.
To investigate this phenomenon, the authors draw on data from dozens of public opinion surveys conducted with legislators across Latin America. Their analysis combines information from the Parliamentary Elites of Latin America (PELA) project, which covers ten countries in the region, with nine waves of the Brazilian Legislative Survey (PLB) carried out between 1990 and 2021. This approach allows them to assess the presence of ideological obfuscation—the act of obscuring, confusing, or concealing one’s true ideological position—in multiple countries and to track its evolution over time, paying particular attention to differences between legislators from right-wing and left-wing parties.
The results show that ideological obfuscation was a common behavior among legislators from right-wing parties throughout the post-authoritarian period, and not only in Brazil. The tendency to position oneself to the left of one’s party was especially strong among politicians with personal ties to military regimes.
However, the data indicate that this practice has weakened in recent decades. The decline in obfuscation is associated with generational change: right-wing legislators who began their political careers after the end of authoritarian rule show less inclination to conceal their ideological position.
The authors argue that this transformation results both from the gradual exit of politicians linked to authoritarian regimes and from the rise of a new generation of right-wing legislators more willing to identify openly with the right. These new actors operate in a more polarized political environment, where conservative discourse has become increasingly visible and mainstream.
Although the study does not explore the normative effects of this process, the authors note that increased ideological transparency among right-wing politicians may contribute to a more polarized political landscape, even if it strengthens democratic representation by making ideological cues clearer.
By documenting the evolution of the “embarrassed right” across Latin America, Zucco and Power’s study offers insight into how authoritarian legacies continue to shape elite political behavior even decades after redemocratization. Their findings provide a comparative and historical perspective on ideological positioning strategies among conservative legislators and illustrate how these strategies shift over time, especially in the face of generational turnover and recent political dynamics.
Author Profiles
Cesar Zucco is an Associate Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration, Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV-EBAPE). He is coauthor of The Volatility Curse (2020) and Partisans, Antipartisans, and Nonpartisans (2018), both published by Cambridge University Press.
Timothy J. Power is Head of the Social Sciences Division at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of St Antony’s College. His most recent book, coauthored with Paul Chaisty and Nic Cheeseman, is Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective: Minority Presidents in Multiparty Systems (Oxford University Press, 2018).
Technical Information
Title: It’s My Party and I’ll Lie If I Want To: Elite Ideological Obfuscation in Post-Authoritarian Settings
Authors: Cesar Zucco and Timothy J. Power
Publication Year: 2024
Published in: Party Politics, Vol. 31, No. 2
