The Importance of Party, Pork, Performance, Personal Trait and Policy for Voters

• In Event: Looking and Sounding Like a Leader

Abstract

When investigating what drives voting behavior in Brazil, political scientists found that at least five elements matter: policy positions, performance in office, partisanship, personal traits, and direct benefits to voters through pork (Ames, Baker and Renno 2008, Braga and Pimentel Jr 2011). However, it is not a trivial challenge to separate how much voters care about candidates’ performance and policy positions; how much they use partisan cues when electing candidates; and how much they pay more attention particularistic benefits that the voter, who makes the choice, receives from candidates (Kellam 2015, 2017). Many of these factors are correlated and endogenous. To give one example, information about partisanship often influences voters’ policy positions, but voters’ policy preference might also influence their partisanship.

The paper uses conjoint experiments inserted in three different nationally representative surveys in Brazil to disentangle if (and how much) voters (a) use information about candidates specific policy positions, (b) follow cues from political parties, (c) consider particularistic benefits (pork) when making their candidate’s choices, and (d) use information about incumbents’ performance and traits as a decisive criterion. In all the cases, the context presented to respondents were about elections for Congress.

I show how pork, parties, performance and policy matter independently for voters. But because voting is a multidimensional and complex decision, the relevance of each one of these factors depends on the relative importance of each factor compared to every other aspect. It is one thing to ask voters if something matter to them, it is another to evaluate if voters actually use that in their decision. I find that, while the effects of policy issues on voting preferences vary depending on the topic, knowledge and salience, positive and negative partisanship cues consistently matter for a large proportion of Brazilian voters, while short-term, pocketbook gains also have consistent effects to everyone, no matter the level of income or education.

Brazil is a good case to study these alternative explanations for voting behavior. First, as one of the largest third-wave democracies (Huntington 1991), it is a useful test for partisanship and other traditional explanations for voting patterns, normally theorized with developed democracies in mind, mainly the United States and European countries.

The country offers an unique setting for tests about the relative strength of positive and negative partisanship. Brazilian voters are increasingly polarized between supporters and opponents of the strongest party in the country, the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party - PT, see Samuels and Zucco (2018), Samuels, Mello and Zucco (2023)). While these partisans and antipartisans might take cues from parties, still to these days, over one third of the Brazilian electorate are non-partisans who do not polarize between petismo and antipetismo. By considering heterogeneous effects, I am able to separate the importance of partisan cues and performance evaluation for voters who depict positive and negative partisanship from a purely non-partisan “control” group.

Second, in recent years, Brazilian politicians have decided on consequential policies, such as unexpected pension and anti-corruption reforms. In both cases, the public opinion was highly mobilized by organized groups and parties. This allowed me to conduct the experiments at the exactly moment when there were large policy debates in society. I selected the pension and the anti-corruption topic due to their salience at the moment the surveys were conducted, when voters were paying attention to the issues (Downs 1972). I also describe a broader experiment to test how general are the findings.

Third, there is a long line of studies about Brazilian politics arguing that politicians’ ability to deliver constituent service such as pork is one of the most important factors legislative elections - more than parties and policy issues. Every year, pork funnels billions of dollars in direct benefits to voters in Brazil (e.g., paving streets and the construction of sports gym). By showering voters with one-time benefits, politicians might even succeed to hide their bad performance in office (Achen and Bartels 2004). For many observers, this is the case in Brazil. Brazilian parties have been considered to be non-programmatic organizations, who cultivate their reputations solely as providers of narrowly targeted pork or other particularistic benefits for a specific group or region (Kellam 2017). By inserting the pork element in the survey experiment, I am able to investigate how much this particularistic benefits matter to voters, even after controlling for partisanship, policy positions and experience/performance in office.

Author

• Fernando Barros de Mello, Carlos III-Juan March Institute of Social Sciences