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Social Policy and Vote in Brazil: Bolsa Família and the Shifts in Lula's Electoral Base

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2022

Simone R. Bohn
Simone R. Bohn*
Affiliation:
York University
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Abstract

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The electoral implications of conditional cash-transfer programs have been widely debated in recent years. In the particular case of Brazil analysts have argued that the social policies that President Lula da Silva's first government implemented enabled the Workers' Party to broaden its electoral clientele from middle-class and highly educated voters to low-income and poorly educated individuals from the Northeast. The conditional cash-transfer program known as Bolsa Família (BF) is said to have played a key role in this shift of electoral support and to have worked as a powerful clientelistic tool for Lula. Using survey data, this article challenges this view by showing that, despite changes in the profile of Lula's supporters, the BF program cannot account for them. Poor voters vote differently across regions; BF recipients were already Lula voters in 2002 and cast ballots for him during his reelection at the same rate as nonrecipients.

As implicações eleitorais dos programas de transferência condicionada de renda têm sido intensamente debatidas nos últimos anos. No caso do Brasil em particular, os analistas argumentam que as políticas sociais implementadas pela primeira administração do Presidente Lula propiciaram ao Partido dos Trabalhadores ampliar sua clientela eleitoral para além da classe média e de eleitores com elevado grau de escolarização, passando a abarcar também os eleitores de baixa renda e baixo nível educacional, sobretudo os do Nordeste. A literatura postula que o programa de transferência condicionada de renda conhecido como Bolsa Família (BF) assumiu um papel central na mudança do apoio eleitoral de Lula e que funcionou como uma ferramenta clientelística. Através do uso de surveys, este artigo questiona essa visão e mostra que, a despeito de mudanças no perfil dos eleitores de Lula, o programa BF não se revela capaz de explicar essas diferenças. Primeiro, os eleitores pobres votam de maneira diferenciada nas distintas regiões do país. Segundo, os beneficiários do BF já eram eleitores de Lula em 2002. Terceiro, não houve diferenças na probabilidade de beneficiários e nãobeneficiários votarem em Lula durante sua reeleição.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 46 , Issue 1 , 2011 , pp. 54 - 79
Copyright
Copyright ©2011 by the Latin American Studies Association

Footnotes

I acknowledge the support of a Brazilian National Council for Research (CNPq) grant that partially covered the costs of the 2007 Latin American Public Opinion Project survey in Brazil. I also thank Mitchell Seligson and David Samuels, whose support was essential to making the survey financially viable. I am also grateful to all the participants of a panel at the 2009 meeting of the Latin American Studies Association, where I first presented this article, the three anonymous LARR reviewers for excellent feedback, and especially Liisa North for detailed comments.

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