7 - Is Prosecutorial Zeal What Partisans Make of It?

Summary

The chapter shows that Brazilians’ attitudes towards Lava Jato became increasingly divided and more negative over time. Attitudes towards the crusade are sensitive to partisan preferences, especially affect for the Workers’ Party. Results thus point to the precarity of optimism and the importance of voters’ priors in assessing prosecutorial zeal. The chapter also relies on an experiment to investigate whether putting crusades at the forefront of narratives of Brazilian corruption elicits optimism, compared to narratives that focus exclusively on corruption. The results show that when voters fixate on the crimes they are more likely to experience negative emotions and more likely to be dissatisfied with democracy. However,the crime-oriented narrative also increases respondents’ external efficacy, whereas the investigation-oriented one has the opposite effect. This suggests that the attitudinal impact of Lava Jato is far from being uniformly in line with the optimistic story. Under certain conditions, pessimists might be right in warning that crusaders’ anti-political message does more harm than good to the view that politics is redeemable.