Presidential Influence and Public Opinion During Crises: The Case of COVID-19 in Brazil

Can presidential messages influence public opinion? The scholarship shows that common features in developed democracies such as fragmented audiences and partisan reasoning tend to limit the persuasive effects of the bully pulpit. In this article, we argue that the effectiveness of the presidential rhetoric is context dependent. Presidents will be the most likely to persuade public opinion when they seek to break consensus by using messages that activate defection among their supporters. To examine this framework, we focus on the setting of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, where the outbreak was initially a valence issue, but quickly it became a divisive matter among the public. We use a survey experiment conducted days before the President Bolsonaro's national televised address to show that cueing subjects with one of his earlier denialist remarks about the outbreak polarized opinions. We then use Bayesian change-point models to demonstrate how his major televised speeches affected daily trends in online searches related to the pandemic during the first and the most crucial weeks of the outbreak. The findings shed light on the circumstances in which presidential influence can not only be most powerful, but also most harmful.