Right-Wing Authoritarianism between Different Religions and Its Negative Effect on Attitudes and Behaviors toward COVID-19 Policies in Brazil

The phenomenon of politicizing the COVID-19 pandemic was not exclusively American (Filsinger and Freitag 2022). In Brazil, a country governed by an extreme right-wing authoritarian president at the height of the health crisis, conflicts with health authorities were frequent. Those who contested these measures sought arguments of a religious or conservative nature to disregard protective measures. Considering that politically conservative citizens tend to disobey sanitary measures and challenge mandatory vaccinations (Cowan, Mark, and Reich 2021), there is evidence that the identification with right-wing authoritarian traits is not only associated with the denial of scientific evidence (Sinclair, Stanley, and Seli 2020) but also tends to follow the directives of authoritarian leaders unthinkingly (Bilewicz and Soral 2022). Furthermore, there was alignment between the denialist discourse of the right-wing authoritarian government and evangelical religious leaders in confronting pandemic control measures (Rutjens et al. 2021). However, despite the convergence between such leaderships, the ideological orientation of authoritarian individuals is not limited to religious identification.

Through an online survey conducted across all regions with 1,461 Brazilians, we estimated the effect of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) on attitudes toward public policies combating COVID-19 and health behaviors. In addition to controlling for the impact of belief in science, demographics, risk, and propensity to maintain social isolation factors, we reproduced the analyses among different religions. Details about data collection procedures, measure definitions, codes, and model estimation are available in the supplemental material.

As displayed in Figure 1, the higher the degree of RWA, the more negative the attitudes toward public policies combating (left) COVID-19 and (right) health prevention behaviors. The data indicate that the effect of RWA remained significant for attitudes among religions. In terms of behaviors, the effect was only nonsignificant among Catholics. In Brazil, specifically, there was an intense campaign by the Catholic Church through the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil to advocate for pandemic control measures, publicly opposing the authoritarian government, which may explain the absence of an effect.

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Figure 1.

Linear effects of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) on attitudes toward COVID-19 policies and health behaviors between different religions (ordinary least squares regression models).

The coefficients of the ordinary least squares models also indicate that the effect size of RWA on attitudes and behaviors is significantly greater among self-declared spiritist and atheist participants than among Catholics. The effect of RWA on COVID-19 toward COVID-19 policies among evangelicals does not show a significant difference from Catholics. However, the effect of RWA on the health behavior of evangelicals is significantly worse. The data also show spiritists and atheists are less authoritarian than other groups (see Figure 3 in the supplemenal material). Therefore, part of the effect of RWA is absorbed by the affinity that Catholic groups, especially evangelicals, have with conservative agendas, which is reflected in the lower slope of the lines in the graph.

Our study suggests that the politicization of the pandemic is a phenomenon that extends across different countries around the world, where alignment with extreme right-wing authoritarian governments is associated with the denial of science and the effectiveness of public health policies (Janning et al. 2021). Because authoritarian traits are internalized into citizens’ belief systems, the issue of denying public health measures continues after the pandemic, potentially impacting the success of any vaccination campaign and epidemic control efforts.