This article analyzes the effects of antipartisanship in explaining the Bolsonaro vote in the 2018 presidential elections. The expansion of the anti-Workers’ Party sentiment known in Portuguese as ‘antipetismo’ into an antipartisanship that accommodates a wider range of targets and a growing association between antipartisanship and political intolerance provide the context for and underscore the relevance of our tests. Our expectation is that the vote for Bolsonaro was strong related to both antipetismo and negative attitudes towards mainstream political parties, […]

The 2018 elections surprised most analysts and political scientists in Brazil and abroad. The competitive dynamic that opposed the PT and the PSDB in presidential elections since 1994 has been disrupted, resulting in a novelty for the Brazilian party system. The purpose of this research article is to identify the determinants of votes for Jair Bolsonaro in the two rounds of the 2018 presidential election from data collected by the Brazilian Electoral Study. By means of multivariate analyses of the […]

We explore an electoral quasi-experiment where a woman nearly won or lost to a man in a mayoral election. Our data combines municipal Brazilian election results, which occur every four years, with municipal level votes for female and male candidates in state and federal deputy elections, whose districts are larger than the municipalities. Our results show that when voters are exposed to a female leader, the relative number of votes given to female candidates increases. This result depends on the […]