Ideology, Isolation, and Death. An Analysis of the Effects of Bolsonarism in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Brazil is going through two major simultaneous crises. Parallel to the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic, Brazil faces a political crisis of reasonable proportions with conflicts between the Presidency of the Republic and several institutions of the Brazilian state, both at the federal and the Union level. Throughout this crisis, President Jair Bolsonaro presented a position contrary to the social isolation policies proposed by WHO and adopted by a good part of Brazilian mayors and governors. That said, we intend to analyze the impact of the bolsonarism ideology and effective social isolation in COVID-19 responses, measured in terms of the number of deaths, confirmed cases, and lethality rate, using Bolsonaro's vote in 2018 as an instrumental variable for isolation. We point out the need to identify social isolation through voting in Bolsonaro, as there is a self-select mechanism in the effective isolation rate. The greater the effects of the pandemic, the higher the tendency for authorities to adopt stricter social isolation policies, and a more significant part of the population effectively adopt isolation. We thus tested, using municipal-level data, whether there is a relationship between votes for Bolsonaro in 2018 and less effective social isolation and between less effective social isolation and a higher mortality rate. The results indicate that the highest proportion of votes in Bolsonaro in 2018 is positively associated with a higher number of deaths in Brazilian municipalities, with the transmission channel being operated through a lower rate of effective social isolation.

Keywords: bolsonarism, COVID-19, blame shift, blame avoidance, pandemics, deaths