Reason and emotion: Reactions to the state of the economy and federal government approval

Abstract

The article analyzes the effects of cognitive judgments and emotional reactions to the state of the economy and the personal finances of respondents in two surveys on the approval of the Brazilian federal government. Based on the theory of affective intelligence, the work measures and compares the influence of these two perspectives on Brazilian public opinion in two different contexts. In November 2014, President Dilma Rousseff had recently been re-elected and the prevailing perception of the state of the economy was quite good. As early as April 2015, the government announced harsh measures of fiscal adjustment and increased public prices, completely reshaping the opinion of Brazilians on the economy. Our results confirm the expectation that reason and emotion act in a complementary way in forming public opinion about the federal government and that, in times of crisis, the relative influence of emotions is greater.