of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, in 2016 as the mainstream Brazilian political parties formed an alliance to withstand the ‘voice of the street’, herewith inducing anti-elitist sentiments (Enstanque, 2015) and opening up space for the entry of new parties. In the end, the vote for the Partido Social Liberal was not only a vote against the Partido dos Trabalhadores, but also a protest vote against the current social contract.

Ideally, in our analysis, we would like to link the decline in SWB to the decline in support for the social contract and the switch in voter support from one end of the political spectrum to the other in the 2018 general elections. Unfortunately, we do not have data from the GWP to answer this question because the Poll does not include questions on voting behavior. However, using information from the Brazilian Electoral Study - a post-electoral national survey that is carried out by the Center for Studies for Public Opinion - we explore whether the incumbent party was indeed punished for the economic and leadership crisis associated with the decline in SWB in the second half of the 2010s.

# _5.1. Demographic characteristics of Bolsonaro supporters_

Our analysis builds on the studies of Amaral (2020) and Rennó (2020) and utilizes a survey collected for the Brazilian Electoral Study (Meneguello, 2019), which is part of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Project (CSES), coordinated by the University of Michigan. This survey is nationally representative and provides data on the voting behavior and other characteristics of 1,734 Brazilians. Specifically, we obtain information on whether (1) respondents voted for the presidential candidate of the Partido Social Liberal during the two rounds of the presidential election and whether (2) respondents voted during the 2014 elections for the candidate of the incumbent Partido dos Trabalhadores.<sup>24</sup> For brevity, definitions of variables included in our analyses can be found in Appendix E. We use a logistic regression to test which factors were associated with voting for the Partido Social Liberal and switching from supporting the Partido dos Trabalhadores in the 2014 election to supporting the Partido Social Liberal in the 2018 election. We are interested in vote switching because it can be seen as a punishment of the incumbent ruling party and an erosion of the social contract.

If dissatisfaction with life matters for voting behavior, we should see a higher propensity to vote for the Partido Social Liberal among men and the old (those older than 30). Table 7 (column 1) shows the demographic characteristics associated with the likelihood to have voted for the Partido Social Liberal during the second, final round of the 2018 election. Results confirm that age was a weakly significant predictor of the probability to vote for the Partido Social Liberal. _Compared to young people, people between 45 and 60 were 1.3 times more likely to vote for the Partido Social Liberal_ . However, the differences between young people and the other age categories are much less pronounced and insignificant. Gender was also found to be a significant predictor. _Men were over 1.5 times more likely to vote for the Partido Social Liberal. These results provide some evidence that groups that experienced larger declines in SWB were more likely to vote for the Partido Social Liberal._ We do not find any evidence that people with tertiary education were less likely to vote for the Partido Social Liberal compared to people with elementary and secondary education despite this group’s relatively small declines in SWB. Support for the Partido Social Liberal was stronger outside the Northeast, despite the fact that the region experienced a similar decline in SWB as other regions. This result is expected given the relatively strong support for the Partido dos Trabalhadores in the region, which has benefited from the redistributive policies of the party during the Golden Decade (Amaral, 2020).<sup>25</sup> In addition, we find that religious denomination and ethnicity – not available in the Gallup World Poll – are strong predictors of a vote for the Partido

> 24 Although the party was no longer officially the incumbent party in 2018, it was treated as such.

> 25 In this regard, Pereira and Melo (2015) also show for the Brazilian state of Pernambuco that the negative effect of corruption disappears when public expenditures in a particular area increase.

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