Electoral Behavior

Vote concentration and spatial dynamics

This research project aims to fulfill a gap in electoral studies. With the use of electoral geography and spatial statistics, my objective is to find a pattern that could connect vote concentration with other contexts relating to the national and particularly the local level. Considering the daily relations that voters have and the strategies of political parties, my intent is to better understand the electoral dynamics and its consequence in terms of legislative behavior, elucidating, thus, the ways in which electoral strategies are affected and affect the relationship between politicians and voters.

From Graziele C. Silotto.

Vote concentration and spatial dynamics

 

This research project aims to fulfill a gap in electoral studies. With the use of electoral geography and spatial statistics, my objective is to find a pattern that could connect vote concentration with other contexts relating to the national and particularly the local level. Considering the daily relations that voters have and the strategies of political parties, my intent is to better understand the electoral dynamics and its consequence in terms of legislative behavior, elucidating, thus, the ways in which electoral strategies are affected and affect the relationship between politicians and voters.

From Graziele C. Silotto.

Politics and electoral behavior

Considering that electoral politics substantially influence the supply of public policies, this project investigates voting behavior in a metropolitan region. Previous results of investigations undertaken by the Center for Metropolitan Studies showed that voting behavior is highly predictable and related to socio-economic factors. These results, however, were based only on data for the city of São Paulo. This study is one of a kind in the Brazilian literature in terms of methods and data used. Instead of information from surveys, we work with the lowest possible unit of aggregation for election results, namely, the ballot box. Previous findings refer only to São Paulo, the most developed state in the country, where the two major national political parties in the country have deep roots. Thus, one of the objectives is to test if similar results are found in other states. For this reason, the project is expanding the spatial coverage of the investigation by including as many new states as possible. The project continues to employ Gary King’s methodology to identify the electoral base of parties and candidates, which combines electoral data with socio-economic variables. Efforts in this direction have already been made with respect to the pattern of vote distribution in the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro and comparing the results with the ones obtained for the city of São Paulo. Data organization regarding the study of intra-urban electoral behavior has been already completed. Besides differences in the level of wealth, the political history of the Metropolitan Region of Rio de Janeiro and its role in national politics are also a contrast to São Paulo. A further objective of the research is to understand the mechanisms that explain the observed voting patterns by applying an empirical test of theoretically oriented hypotheses.

 

Researchers involved

 

Graziele C. Silotto

Mini CV:

Silotto is an undergraduate student in Social Sciences of the Faculty of Philosophy, Languages and Human Sciences, University of São Paulo. She currently has an undergraduate research scholarship at  NECI (Center for Comparative and International Studies), collaborating in the research “Electoral Behavior and Party Dynamics”, coordinated by Prof. Dr. Fernando Limongi.
 

Lattes Curriculum
Researches