Abstract
The political and economic crises that ravaged Brazil in the last years of Dilma Rousseff’s government resulted in a substantial drop in voters’ trust in the central government (57.10% in 2013 to 13.35% in 2018). This article investigates the impact of this phenomenon on voters’ attitude toward the distribution of power across government levels in Brazil. Based on two original nationally representative surveys, we show that the reduction of voters’ trust in the central government did not lead to an increase in decentralist attitudes, which is counter-intuitive and different from the trends observed in the United States. However, the trust crisis which worsened along these years significantly changed the importance of trust as a predictor of centralist attitudes. These results show that the public opinion about the federation does not oppose the current level of centralization in Brazil and alert to the importance of trust shocks to understand its role in the formation of opinions about centralist attitudes.
Federation; preference formation; centralization; trust; authority allocation