Stability in change: families of parties and the hypothesis of ‘freezing party system’ in Brazil (1982-2018)

Abstract

In this article I intend to study the dynamics of the Brazilian party system based on the “"freezing”" hypothesis of the party system of Lipset and Rokkan (1967). When we group the parties into families we see that between the 1990s and the end of the first decade of the 21st century, the Brazilian party system seems as “"frozen”" as the European system. After 2010, as in Europe, small right-wing parties gain strength, but the support of the large “"left”" and “"right” families remains relatively constant. I also find some stability when grouping the parties according to their genealogy. This dynamic is similar to that of European party systems. The contribution of the article is to be the first to explicitly test the application of the Lipset and Rokkan’s hypothesis of the freezing of the party system to the Brazilian case, as well as the first to suggest the construction of party families in a systematic way using the suggestions of Mair and Mudde (1998).

Keywords

• sistema partidário
• volatilidade
• família de partidos