The electoral behavior of Paulistas and Brazilians in the 2002 and 2014 elections

Abstract

The hypothesis presented in this work is that there are distinctions in electoral behavior between São Paulo’s electorate and the general Brazilian electorate. This was noted when comparing socio-demographic aspects to identity and pragmatic ones. This comparison showed that socio-demographic aspects have a lower influence over the behavior of Paulista voters than over Brazilians in general. In short, the Paulistas would tend to consider social and economic aspects less and identity and pragmatic aspects more. In our analysis, we applied a binary logistic regression model on the votes for president and for governor of São Paulo in the first round of the elections in 2002 and 2014. In order to select the predictive variables for this study, we took into consideration not only some variables that were already and/or are still usually indicated by many national studies, but also other variables divided into three groups: 1) social and demographic variables (monthly family income, schooling, age, sex, and religion); 2) identity (interest in politics and ideological positioning); and pragmatic (partisan rejection, Bolsa Família beneficiary, evaluation and relation to government, economy, and democracy). Finally, we believe that this analysis, as a preliminary study, can contribute to identifying aspects and sets of variables that explain possible changes and trends in the political behavior of the Paulista and Brazilian electorates.

political behavior; São Paulo electorate; Eseb