Data and Estimates: Estimating Ideology of Brazilian Legislative Parties, 1990--2005: A Research Communication

We present a new dataset on the left-right placement of major Brazilian political parties serving in the first five legislatures under democracy. Based on survey responses of more than 850 federal legislators from 1990 to 2005, we generate party placements on an ideological scale where 1 equals left and 10 equals right. The data are rescaled to account for idiosyncracies in responses as well as variation in use of the survey scale across time. We discuss both the validity and reliability of our new measures by comparing them to other datasets. We further discuss three substantive issues revealed by these data. First, ideological polarization has moderated over time. Second, the median legislator has shifted noticeably to the left, and now stands equidistant from the influential PT and PSDB, the parties that have anchored recent presidential elections. Third, Brazilian political elites continue to shun self-identifications associated with political conservatism or with neoliberalism.