Poor voters vs. poor places: persisting patterns and recent changes in Brazilian electoral patterns

Despite much attention paid recently to changes in Lula’s historical electoral patterns, much less attention has gone into putting these results into perspective. Even before the Bolsa Familia, the reduction in poverty, and good economic performance, incumbent party candidates performed proportionally better in poorer places than they did in richer places. In this sense despite being a change for Lula, the new voting patterns are more a continuation than a rupture with historical trends. The changes that did happen, however, are found in the least likely of places. Inspection of electoral results suggest that incumbent party candidates before Lula had a specially hard time wining the votes of the poorer voters in the richer municipalities, a group of voters which is larger, in absolute terms, than the poor voters in the poorest municipalities. Hence, paradoxically, the electoral effects of the Bolsa Familia might have been more influential in changing electoral patterns in the more developed, as opposed to the least developed places in the country. ∗This is work in progress and results are still tentative. Prepared for the Center for Metropolitan Studies Seminar “Metropolis and Inequalities”, Sao Paulo, March 24–26, 2010. Zucco: Poor places. Draft: March 9, 2010 The 2006 presidential elections in Brazil marked a dramatic shift in Lula’s traditional voting base away from the more developed regions of the country and into its poorest areas. Incumbent president Lula obtained a sweeping majority of the votes in the less developed areas of the country, reversing a two decade personal and party history of performing significantly better in more developed regions. However one looks at it, these elections represented a significant change in Lula’s electorate (Zucco Jr. 2008, Nicolau & Peixoto 2007, Hunter & Power 2007). Higher socioeconomic level had been shown to be a historically strong predictor of party identification with the PT (Samuels 2006), and until very recently the party was all but absent from the most backward regions of the country. How could such a radical shift happen in such a short time-span? An already sprawling literature has focused on the possible effects of social policy, and specifically on the Bolsa Familia (Hunter & Power 2007, Nicolau & Peixoto 2007, Zucco Jr. 2008), and it has also been said that the economy had a particular pro-poor economic growth (Carraro, Araujo Jr, Dame, Monasterio & Shikida 2007). In related work, I have examined the issue in detail and found that even after controlling for economic growth, the BF program had a considerable effect is winning over votes for Lula (Zucco Jr. 2010). However, there is evidence that at least part of the shift in Lula’s voting base would have happened even if BF had not come about. There is more to it, and an interesting incumbency effect seems to be part of the story (Zucco Jr. 2008, Canedo-Pinheiro 2009). To be clear from the outset, this is not a paper about Bolsa Familia per se. It is about what is possibly a broader empirical regularity, that, to my knowledge, has not been properly explored. This paper is a first attempt at a more systematic study of a possible pro-government bias in poorer places in the country1 It is a very tentative empirical exploration, combined with conjectures about the mechanisms causing it and about its possible implications for democracy and public policy. The paper is built on the assumption that electoral patterns come about in response to government actions. This is an assumption, and as such is not empirically verified, though I later provide a brief justification for it. The core of the paper shows that though poorer places tend to support incumbents at higher rates than richer places, the behavior of poor voters, broadly considered, does not necessarily follow this aggregate movement. In particular, it is This could also be read as an anti-government bias in the richer places, a not so trivial difference. This point was made by Eduardo Leoni.