Can non-professional political actors engender affective polarization? To answer this question, we implement two vignette experiments in Brazil, a country with a multiparty system, weakly institutionalized parties, and influential non-professional politicians. In the first study, we use real political news highlighting polarizing discourse against current President Lula from both political elites and evangelical leaders. The second study introduces a purely hypothetical context, adding a non-political actor's profile, specifically a football player. We propose the following hypotheses: (i) Exposure to polarizing discourse by political elites, professional or not, increases mass affective polarization; and (ii) Exposure to non-professional political elite's polarizing discourse increases mass affective polarization to a greater extent than exposure to political elite's polarizing discourse. Our findings contribute to two key areas of affective polarization research: first, by shifting focus from highly industrialized and advanced democracies to a non-consolidated one, and second, by investigating the role of non-professional political actors in affective polarization, thereby broadening the understanding of these actors’ impact on polarization processes.
