The determinants of evaluation of the economy in the 2014 presidential election in Brazil

Abstract

This paper analyzes the determinants of retrospective sociotropic economic evaluation in the 2014 presidential race in Brazil, based on: a) the knowledge that the voter has from objective information of the economy; b) the knowledge that the voter has from their lived experience/feeling of social mobility; c) their party affectivity; d) their ideological identity. Our contribution consists of showing that: a) having knowledge of/objective information about the economy has no impact on one’s assessment of the economy; b) knowledge through lived experience, identified here as a sense of social mobility, has no impact on one’s assessment of the economy in the expected direction—the greater the rise, the more positive the evaluation of the economy; c) party affectivity, in turn, has a strong impact on evaluations of the economy. The article uses data from CSES/Eseb – Brazilian Electoral Study.

determinants of economic evaluation; Brazil's presidential election in 2014; economic voting in Brazil; CSES- Eseb–2014