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 J. Power (University of Oxford), investigates the behavior of right-wing politicians in Latin America’s recent democracies, with a particular focus on the so-called “ashamed right.”
The term refers to the tendency of conservative legislators to avoid identifying themselves as right-wing, instead placing themselves ideologically closer to the center or even to the left of their own parties. This strategy emerged in post-authoritarian contexts, where links to former military regimes were perceived as damaging to politicians’ public images.
To examine this phenomenon, the authors draw on data from dozens of elite surveys conducted with Latin American legislators. The analysis combines information from the Proyecto de Élites Parlamentarias de América Latina (PELA), 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 the authors to assess both the cross-national prevalence of ideological obfuscation—the act of obscuring, confusing, or concealing one’s true ideological position—and its evolution over time, with particular attention to differences between legislators from right- and left-wing parties.
The findings show that ideological obfuscation was a common behavior among legislators from right-wing parties in the post-authoritarian period and was not limited to the Brazilian case. The tendency to position oneself to the left of one’s own party was especially strong among politicians with personal ties to former military regimes.
The data indicate, however, that this practice has declined in recent decades. The reduction in ideological obfuscation is associated with generational change: right-wing legislators who began their political careers after the end of authoritarian regimes are less likely to conceal their ideological positions.
The analysis suggests that this transformation results both from the gradual exit of politicians linked to authoritarian regimes and from the emergence of a new generation of legislators more willing to openly identify with the right. These new actors operate in a more polarized political environment, in which conservative discourses have become more visible and more common.
Although the study does not explore the normative effects of this process, the authors note that greater ideological transparency on the right may contribute to a more polarized political landscape, albeit one that is more closely aligned with democratic representation.
By documenting the evolution of the “ashamed right” across different Latin American countries, Zucco and Power’s study contributes to our understanding of how authoritarian legacies continue to shape elite behavior decades after redemocratization. Their findings offer a comparative and historical perspective on the ideological positioning strategies adopted by conservative legislators and show how these strategies change over time, particularly in response to generational shifts and more recent political dynamics.
Author Profiles
Cesar Zucco is Associate Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration (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 Director of the Division of Social Sciences 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
Year of Publication: 2024
Journal: Party Politics, Vol. 31, No. 2
