This article examines the impact of party policies on the Brazilian electorate. An important indicator of the consolidation of the party system is the conception of image and party binding among voters. As the party system tends to stabilize, we suppose that voters start fixing the profiles of parties and express party preference or loyalty. It meant that electoral volatility, high in the beginning, would tend to decrease along the time and that, the main parties at least, would constitute their identity, working as "shortcuts" to obtain information on the various different candidacies and for the electoral decision. The main preoccupation of this analysis is to verify at what level such knowledge and party identity construction process have occurred in Brazil, taking as empirical basis a research conducted in the São Paulo city metro area during the pre-electoral period on 2002.
Parties and party system in Brazil; Electoral volatility; Party identification; Political knowledge; Electoral System
