The objective of this article is to analyze whether socioeconomic, political, spatial and government income transfer programs interactions determined the outcome of elections in the municipalities of the state of Bahia, to the post of governor in 2006. This election marked the interruption of political control by a party coalition and political group also known in the political science literature as “carlismo”, from the victory of the candidate of the Workers Party (PT). The literature about the economy of political cycles was used as a theoretical basis. A database on electoral outcomes and socioeconomic variables was drawn from the database from the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), the Regional Electoral Court of the State of Bahia (TRE-BA), the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the Federation of Industries of the State of Rio de Janeiro (FIRJAN) and the Ministry of Social Development (MDS). Based on this database, methods of Spatial Statistics and Spatial Econometrics associated with data spatialization and georeferencing procedures were applied. The results of exploratory spatial data analysis indicate that PT vote in elections in the state of Bahia, 2006, were partially correlated in space. With econometric modeling, it was shown that the spatial lags of the PT votes are statically significant considering the p-value of ρ and λ lags in the models adopted. The econometric estimations showed that socioeconomic variables had little effect on the results in the municipalities. The success of PT elections for governor of the state of Bahia in 2006 was strongly structured in prior electoral base and the local association of votes for President, called in the paper of “Lula effect”. As for the Bolsa Família Program, it presented a direct causal effect on the PT vote for President, but not on the results of the election for governor, which does not rule out the fact that the effect of the program has been important in the aggregate of the electorate. In summary, the results pointed that the purely local determinants may not have been sufficient to determine the victory of the PT for the office of governor and their defeat over “carlismo” in the 2006 elections. Moreover, the spatial interaction among the municipalities had effect on the determination of the election results in cities, giving rise to clusters of electoral bases politically structured. The research might be extended to analyze the electoral process in Brazil and the different levels of local socioeconomic development. Furthermore, it also might be extended analysis using more “fine” spatial subdivisions in urban areas, for example.
state of Bahia; political cycles; electoral outcomes; spatial econometrics; Bolsa Família Program
