Mapping Ideological Preferences in Brazilian Elections, 1994-2018: A Municipal-Level Study

This article investigates the electorally expressed ideology of Brazilian voters via ecological analysis at the municipal level between 1994 and 2018. Our purpose is to analyze the main conditioners of aggregated patterns of ideology measured at a high spatial resolution. We test four major explanations for the variation in ideology at the municipal level: the effect of incumbent alignments, social modernization, political pluralism, and social inclusion. We find that although the Brazilian electorate as a whole leans to the right, there has been a ‘gravitational effect’ exerted by preside...