Political Ideology as Historically Situated Motivated Social Cognition: Understanding Right‐Wing Conservatism in Brazil

ABSTRACT Right‐wing conservatism in Brazil has deep historical roots, shaped by the social dominance of colonialism, ideological justification of the slave system, and a series of authoritarian regimes. Under the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil offered a geopolitical context in which these historical legacies were reactivated through three motivated social psychological processes—right‐wing authoritarianism (RWA), social dominance orientation (SDO), and generalized system justification (GSJ). These processes likely fueled a reactionary backlash against egalitarian policies and an embrace of far‐right ideology. The Brazilian context therefore provides a valuable opportunity to test, for the first time, the full mediational model of political ideology as motivated social cognition (MSC), while examining previously unexplored ways in which these psychological processes are shaped by historically entrenched social structures. We hypothesized and found in an online survey of Brazilian adults in August 2022 ( N = 1481) that RWA, SDO, and GSJ mediated the associations between epistemic motives (e.g., dogmatism, need for cognition), existential motives (e.g., perceptions of a dangerous world, death anxiety), and relational motives (e.g., national identification, conformity), on one hand, and left‐right ideological preferences, on the other. We also hypothesized and found that historical, macro‐level indicators of structural enslavement and White privilege dating back to the 19th century moderated several of the micro‐level mediational pathways specified by the theory of motivated social cognition. To our knowledge, these findings are among the first to demonstrate that longstanding historical legacies of domination and exploitation contribute to the maintenance of right‐wing conservatism, illustrating that ideological preferences are not only psychologically motivated but also deeply embedded within much broader geopolitical structures.