Since at least the mid-1990s the concept of antipartisanship has been studied as a component of political dynamics ( POGUNTKE, 1996 ; POGUNTKE and SCARROW, 1996 ). As a result, in the last twenty years, studies on electoral behavior have consolidated the view that parties are not only the axes of attraction for voters but also the objects of their rejection.

The literature is divided between the culturalist approach focusing on anti-system attitudes, their causes and consequences ( POGUNTKE, 1996 ; POGUNTKE and SCARROW, 1996 ; TORCAL et al., 2002 ), and the study of partisanship, more specifically negative partisanship (ABRAMOWITZ and McKOY, 2019; ABRAMOWITZ and WEBSTER, 2016 ; MAYER, 2017 ; McGREGOR et al., 2015 ; MEDEIROS and NOËL, 2014).

The first approach considers the target of antipartisanship to be either the main parties that make up the current party system or the political parties per se ( POGUNTKE, 1996 ). As a consequence, antipartisanship, especially that which rejects party associations in any circumstance, can contribute to the emergence of neopopulism, to a decline in support for a democratic regime and to patterns of anti-establishment behavior ( MUDDE, 1996 ; SCHEDLER, 1996 ), especially in contexts characterized by the historical fragility of political parties, as is the case in Latin American countries (YERBA, 1998).

The second approach falls within the scope of studies of party identification and focuses on aversion to the party opposed to the party that the individual identifies with. In other words, identification with a party is complemented by the rejection of the party(ies) against which it competes ( McGREGOR et al., 2015 ; MASON, 2018 ). A recent study by Abramowitz and Webster (2016) points out that negative partisanship is perhaps the most consistent political attitude of the American electorate today. An attitude held regardless of which party is identified or the strength of its identification, “American voters in the 21st century are much more likely to hold strongly negative views of the opposing party than in the past” ( ABRAMOWITZ and WEBSTER, 2016 , p. 21).

According to this view, the behavioral expression of negative partisanship is to not vote for the party that is the target of disaffection. Unsurprisingly, the principle method for measuring this phenomenon is by questioning interviewees about the party for which they would never vote ( GARRY, 2007 ; MEDEIROS and NOEL, 2014; ROSE and MISHLER, 1998 ).

In Brazil, the topic of negative partisanship ¹ first went under the microscope in the studies carried out by Carreirão and Kinzo (2004) and Carreirão and Barbetta (2004) , Carreirão (2008 ; 2007a; 2007b), Samuels (2008 , 2006 ), Ribeiro, Carreirão and Borba (2016; 2011) and Neves (2012) . These studies describe the negative feelings of Brazilians towards political parties as being of no lesser importance than their positive feelings, especially in the structuring of the vote.

When framing Brazilian negative partisanship within the scope of the international literature on antipartisanship, Samuels and Zucco (2018) concluded that the Workers’ Party (PT) was the focus of almost all Brazilian voters’ party sentiments, be they positive or negative. For Samuels and Zucco (2018) , Brazilian antipartisanship is practically synonymous with antipetismo. As evidence of this, they cite the fact that in 2014, “[...] 40% of voters were petistas [i.e. supporters of the PT] or antipetistas” and “[...] three quarters of antipartisans were antipetistas”. ( SAMUELS and ZUCCO, 2018 , pp. 27-28).

Is antipartisanship in Brazil exclusively focused on the PT? In other words, is it synonymous with antipetismo? What Samuels and Zucco (2018) did not consider was the fact that a sizeable proportion of antipetistas also reject the other main political parties. And, contrary to the argument of Samuels and Zucco, widespread antipartisanship has, at least in the case of 2018, “very precise implications” ( SAMUELS and ZUCCO, 2018 , p. 144) in terms of electoral choice.

We also argue that in addition to its scope, we must consider the intensity of antipartisanship. This intensity is higher when rejection of political parties is accompanied by political intolerance ( POGUNTKE and SCARROW, 1996 ); that is, when the negative attitude is not restricted to disaffection, but also includes the desire to prevent parties from exercising their political activities.

Traditional political tolerance studies are restricted to radical groups. Influenced by the context of McCarthyism, Samuel Stouffer’s pioneering study, ‘Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties’ (1992 [1956]) explored attitudes of hostility and intolerance towards communists, atheists and socialists. The main source of longitudinal data on political tolerance in the USA, the ‘General Social Survey’, has, since the 1980s, included other groups that, according to the standards accepted by the majority of the population, behave in a deviant way, such as atheists, homosexuals, militarists and racists. While it has highlighted the increased number of targets of intolerance ( GIBSON, 2008 ; SULLIVAN, PIERESON and MARCUS, 1982), recent literature has tended to maintain the focus on groups defending political positions perceived by the majority in society as extreme. This literature, therefore, does not take into account the fact that contexts of political crisis combined with political polarization may lead to intolerance of conventional groups as well, especially political parties ² . This applies to Brazil today: the main parties of the Brazilian political system for 25 years (PT, PSDB and MDB), all of them conventional and moderate, have become the main targets of Brazilians’ political intolerance (FUKS, RIBEIRO and BORBA, 2018).

In this article, we follow the same course as the studies by PAIVA, KRAUSE and LAMEIRÃO (2016) and FUKS, RIBEIRO and BORBA (2018), who argue that the rejection of other parties (besides the PT) has reached a level that obliges us to include it in any more careful analysis of Brazilians’ partisan sentiments. Our argument is that while antipetismo continues to explain the vote in 2018, overall rejection of the main political parties has become an equally relevant phenomenon.

Thus, considering the theoretical debate and the political context presented above, we believe that it is necessary to expand the discussion on theories and typologies capable of explaining the various expressions of antipartisanship in Brazil. Studies that take a more culturalist line divide antipartisans between those who reject existing parties and those who adopt a general antipartisan stance, according to which parties are evil in themselves. In the tradition of studies on party identification, the pattern is to oppose two types of partisanship: positive and negative. In other words, in this second approach, there is no distinction between types of antipartisanship. Even models that intend to go beyond the binary typology do not escape this duality. In this tradition, Rose and Mishler (1998) present a more general typology of partisanship, but the negative partisan still boils down to one type: the voter who has no party identity and who would not, under any circumstances, vote for a particular party. The difference between the negative and positive partisan is that supporters identify themselves with a party whether or not they have negative identification with another party.

In order to fill the gaps, Fuks, Ribeiro and Borba (2018) constructed a typology that is based on the idea that antipartisanship is a bidimensional phenomenon and that, therefore, is only properly understood if we capture its variations in terms of disaffection to parties and of political tolerance.

The two variants of our typology, following the study mentioned above, distinguish voters according to the scope and intensity of their attitudes towards political parties, as can be seen in Table 01 and 02 .

Table 01

Scope Intensity	Restricted	Generalized
Tolerant	Tolerant antipetista	Generalized and tolerant antipartisan
Intolerant	Intolerant antipetista	Generalized and intolerant antipartisan

Source: Elaborated by the authors.

Table 02

Scope Intensity	Restricted	Generalized
Tolerant	Tolerant restricted antipartisan	Generalized and tolerant antipartisan
Intolerant	Intolerant restricted antipartisan	Generalized and intolerant antipartisan

Source: Elaborated by the authors

In both cases, the typology divides up antipartisans according to intensity (tolerant or intolerant). The difference lies in the target and the extent of their rejection of the parties. In the first, disaffection and intolerance have two possible targets: the PT (restricted) and the three parties together (generalized). Thus, we have four profiles of antipartisan voters: the tolerant antipetista, the intolerant antipetista, the tolerant generalized antipartisan and the intolerant generalized antipartisan. The second variant of the typology does not target a specific party for disaffection. In this case, the factor that determines its scope is the number of parties: whether the target is one or two parties (restricted) or covers the three parties (generalized). So, again, we have four profiles of antipartisan voters: the tolerant restricted, the intolerant restricted, the tolerant generalized and the intolerant generalized.

Our expectation is that antipetismo and generalized antipartisanship, especially the intolerant types, are more likely to vote for the ‘anti-establishment’ candidate Jair Bolsonaro than non-antipartisans (reference group). From this general proposition, we derive our two hypotheses:

H1: Antipetismo had an effect on the Bolsonaro vote in the 2018 elections, and that effect is even greater when accompanied by political intolerance.

H2: The rejection of all parties (generalized antipartisanship) had an effect on the vote for Bolsonaro, and this effect is even greater when accompanied by political intolerance.

Our hypotheses are based on the idea that, in an electoral context with a high rejection of the main political parties and with a candidacy that presents itself as an alternative to the conventional parties, both antipetismo and more general antipartisanship are important predictors of vote. In addition, this same context stimulates the more general and more intense types of antipartisanship, both of which have been given scant treatment in the Brazilian literature and both of which are important for helping explain the vote for Bolsonaro.

By combining analysis of negative party feelings and political tolerance our study seeks to articulate, based on a typology, the scope and intensity of the rejection of parties by Brazilian voters.

Our primary source is the Barometer of the Americas 2018-2019, produced by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), based at Vanderbilt University ³ . Additionally, in an effort to develop a longitudinal perspective, we drew on the 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014 waves of the Brazilian Electoral Study (ESEB), based at the Public Opinion Research Center of the University of Campinas (CESOP-UNICAMP) ⁴ .

The 2019 edition of LAPOP asked questions about disaffection and political tolerance vis-à-vis the three main national parties. A first set of questions was designed to measure affection for these institutions and is worded as follows: “Speaking of political parties, how much do you like or dislike the following parties: (PT or PSDB or PMDB)? How much do you like or dislike them? (10 point response scale, with 01 meaning ‘I don’t like it at all’ and 10 ‘I like it a lot’)”. The second set of questions adapts the traditional approach in studies on political tolerance ( STOUFFER 1992 ; SULLIVAN, PIERESON and MARCUS, 1982; GIBSON, 2008 ) to radical groups to measure the interviewee’s views regarding the right of parties to participate in elections. The LAPOP question is as follows: ‘To what extent do you approve the right of (PT or PSDB or PMDB) to compete in the elections for president of Brazil? (10 point response scale, with 01 meaning ‘totally disapprove’ and 10 ‘totally approve’)’.

From these two batteries of questions, we created eight disaffection profiles and eight tolerance profiles ⁵ . In the final stage, these profiles were combined into two variants of a typology that considers both the scope (disaffection) and the intensity (intolerance) of antipartisanship. In the first variant, the emphasis was on antipetismo, generating five groups: non-antipartisan, tolerant antipetista, tolerant generalized antipartisan, intolerant antipetista and intolerant generalized antipartisan. The second variant, which does not take into account which party is the target of rejection, resulted in the following profiles: tolerant restricted antipartisan, tolerant generalized antipartisan, intolerant restricted antipartisan and intolerant generalized antipartisan.

To better characterize party disaffection in Brazil and its evolution over time, we use data from the 2002, 2006, 2010 and 2014 waves of the Brazilian Electoral Study (ESEB) and reproduced the same classification as that above.

For the empirical test of the effects of antipartisan types on voting in the 2018 presidential elections, we built two logistic regression models using Bolsonaro as a dependent variable. In both, the dependent variable is the vote for president, measured from the following question from LAPOP 2019 : ‘Who did you vote for to be president in the first round of the last election of 2018?’

The option to vote for Bolsonaro was tabulated as 1, and all other options as 0. As independent variables, we use variant 1 of the antipartisan typology in the first model and, in the second model, variant 02 of the typology. The reference category in both is ‘non-antipartisan’. In addition, we include as controls variables commonly used in studies on voting decision in Brazil ( CARREIRÃO and RENNÓ, 2018 ), such as age, education, ethnicity, religion, ideological positioning and sociotropic assessment of the economy, in addition to two others that refer to topics that acquired particular relevance in the 2018 electoral debate: approval of same-sex marriage and support for gun control deregulation. Details on these variables can be found in Annex A at the end of the article.

What differentiates the models, therefore, is the focus: 01. in the first model, the focus is on antipetismo, compared to the rejection of all parties; 02. in the second model, the focus falls on antipartisanship regardless of specific parties. All other independent variables are identical.

As we saw in the introduction, the 2018 elections took place in a context of profound political and economic crisis, with a general discontent weighing on the political class, parties and other democratic institutions. The effects of Operation Lava Jato and the fact that they intensified an economic recession had a devastating effect on the party system that had been taking shape since 1988 ( DUQUE and SMITH, 2019 ; NICOLAU, 2017 ).

As had happened in other parts of the world, one of the candidates employed a discourse that criticized traditional representative institutions and thereby won over a portion of the electorate dissatisfied with the status quo. The parties identified during the campaign as the main operators of an ‘old politics’ became the primary targets for attacks, reactivating and potentiating strong rejection and, in some segments, intolerance towards the PT and other traditional Brazilian political parties.

The results that we present throughout this article show that antipartisanship, in its various manifestations, is a relevant phenomenon that had a major role in defining the electoral choices of 2018. Focusing simultaneously on the extent and intensity of these negative feelings, through an unprecedented combination of agendas on partisanship and political tolerance, we demonstrate through two variants of our typology that the breadth and strength of antipartisanship today is considerable and goes beyond one-dimensional rejection of a specific party.

In addition, it remains to be seen whether, in Brazil, antipartisanship has an impact only on electoral behavior or whether it is related to a broader and more articulated set of political behaviors and attitudes.