The most interesting Brazilian presidential poll will remain unseen

Chilean political scientist Carlos Meléndez, from the Diego Portales University, has hired polling institute Ipsos to include some questions of academic interest in a recent presidential poll carried out by the institute. Mr. Meléndez’s questions, as a matter of fact, could be the most revealing ones about Brazilian politics of the current moment. This is because he seeks to evaluate the attitudes of voters’ about politics in general – instead of focusing only on the presidential race.

The results, however, will not be published right away. Instead, they will be compiled and processed by the professor himself. It is hard to forecast how much time that will take – and when, if at all, he will choose to publish the data.

In November, Mr. Meléndez published an interesting study about the role of political identities as the missing link in the study of populism. Here is the abstract of his work:

Political identities are crucial for understanding electoral behavior: individuals who identify with a political...