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Territorial Polarization in Brazil's2014 Presidential ElectionsHelder Ferreira Do Valea

a Graduate School of International and Area Studies,Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Republicof KoreaPublished online: 28 Jul 2015.

To cite this article: Helder Ferreira Do Vale (2015): Territorial Polarization in Brazil's2014 Presidential Elections, Regional & Federal Studies

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2015.1060964

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REPORT

Territorial Polarization in Brazil’s2014 Presidential Elections

HELDER FERREIRA DO VALE

Graduate School of International and Area Studies, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul,

Republic of Korea

ABSTRACT The 2014 presidential elections showed a growing political polarization based onregional differences in Brazil. Against this backdrop, President Dilma Rousseff was re-electedby the slimmest margin ever obtained by a Brazilian president. Rousseff’s Workers’ Party(PT) has held the presidency for the past 12 years, gaining widespread support for reducingsocial inequality and maintaining macroeconomic stability in the country. However, as thelatest presidential elections show, this support for the PT and its presidential candidate haseroded. This article argues that as a result of fiercer competition for votes, a more politicallypolarized discourse was used in the presidential campaign to mobilize voters around Brazil’sregional divide between the richer south and the poorer north. In the analysis, the articleattempts to elucidate possible causes of territorial patterns of voting in Brazil’s 2014presidential elections.

KEY Words: Brazilian presidential elections, regional polarization, re-democratization, federaldynamics, electoral politics

Introduction

The 2014 Brazilian presidential election marks a turning point in the recent democratic

history of Brazil as being one of the most contested election campaigns. President

Dilma Rousseff of the leftist Workers’ Party (PT) was re-elected for her second presi-

dential mandate with only a 3% margin from her opponent, Aecio Neves, the centrist

candidate of the Party of Brazilian Social Democracy (PSDB). The narrow victory of

Rousseff, who defeated Neves by approximately 3 million votes in a country of 142

million voters, signals that she will most likely lack strong popular support to

govern the country until 2018. The lack of a sizeable popular support makes Rousseff’s

government the weakest in the past 30 years of democracy in Brazil.

Correspondence Address: Helder Ferreira Do Vale, Graduate School of International and Area Studies,

Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, #802, Faculty Building II, HUFS, 107 Imun-ro, Dongdaemun-gu,

Seoul 130–791, Republic of Korea. Email: helderdovale@gmail.com

# 2015 Taylor & Francis

Regional and Federal Studies, 2015

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13597566.2015.1060964

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Under the argument that electoral competition in Brazil was polarized in the 2014

presidential election, this article explores how territorial dynamics are contributing to

this political polarization. In this task, the article adopts a notion of polarization that

perceives it as a phenomenon characterized by diverting people’s attention to specific

issue for a short duration of time. Baldassarri and Bearman (2007) call this type of

polarized issue a “takeoff issue” as it is temporarily ignited and leads to high polariz-

ation, thus giving the impression that the macrostructures are equally polarized. Fol-

lowing this rationale, polarization on territorial issues in the Brazilian case occurs

when in times of competitive election campaigns, such as the 2014 presidential elec-

tions, the already existing socio-economic regional divide is used to further sharpen

political positions and preferences. This transformation of territorial divide into a

takeoff issue is done through discourse, which has the potential to galvanize and

mobilize voters (Hawkins, 2010: 55).1

In the case of Brazil, this territorial division has its roots in the socio-economic

differences between the five Brazilian geographic regions, and it will be referred to

in this article as the ‘regional divide’.2 This divide is based on important human devel-

opment differences that make the states from the South, Southeast, and Central-West

regions more developed than the states from the North and Northeast. In terms of elec-

toral weight, the Southeast is the most important region given that it is home to 43% of

Brazilian voters, followed by the Northeast with 27% of voters.

In light of the 2014 Brazilian presidential elections, this article will analyse how the

north–south regional divide contributed to political polarization. This analysis will

take into account several political changes that have taken place in the Brazilian pol-

itical system in recent years. More specifically, the article will take into account new

trends such as the reduction of electoral volatility (Santos, 2008; Bohn and Paiva,

2009), harmonization of programmes among political parties (Hagopian et al.,

2009), and higher party discipline imposed on politicians (Figueiredo and Limongi,

2006).

The argument that the regional polarization was strategically constructed in the

2014 elections is based on some assumptions. Firstly, the 2014 presidential elections

were more politically polarized than the previous elections. Secondly, the regional

question was used as an electoral strategy to gain votes. And thirdly, there is a shift

in the territorial dynamics as the PT is gaining ground in places where the traditional

political elites were hegemonic.

These three assumptions are interconnected in the following manner. During the

presidential campaign the growing political polarization between the PT and the

PSDB, the only two parties that have won the Brazilian presidency since 1995, led

to the political utilization of the regional divide. This divide was particularly useful

to mobilize voters in the poorer Northeast, where the PT is gaining more political influ-

ence and where most of the beneficiaries of federal social programmes live. This strat-

egy was particularly important because for the past three presidential elections the PT

has been losing votes in the biggest states in the southern regions.

The 2014 elections are considered to have had a more ideologically polarized cam-

paign than previous electoral campaigns. Although this assertion is mainly based on

the perception of pundits, there is evidence that this strategy of polarizing the elections

is activated only during an electoral campaign. As already mentioned, the mechanism

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of polarization was that of discourse, which was mainly used in the PT campaign.

Although the discourse dimension is critical, this article attempts to identify the

sources of polarization. The decreasing likelihood that the PT could guarantee its re-

election can be seen as a contextual factor that contributed to polarization as the scan-

dals of corruption involving the PT, the weakening of the PT-led governing coalition,

and growing popular dissatisfaction threatened the possibility of Rousseff being re-

elected.

In recent years, the PT has been involved in several corruption scandals. In

addition, the party has been employing political practices that are deemed nepotistic

(Boas et al., 2014). Yet several politicians from the PT have been re-elected even

after systematic corruption schemes revealed their involvement in corrupt practices

in past years (Balan, 2014). In view of an apparent deterioration of the PT’s reputation,

the regional divide was explored, since the left–right ideological divide does not

mobilize voters in Brazil (Ames and Smith, 2010). Furthermore, the voters from the

Northeast have been decisive in the past two presidential elections, and consequently,

the PT has increased its local organizational capabilities in the region (Van Dyck,

2014) and has been distributing more social benefits to the region (Hunter and

Power, 2007; Zucco, 2008; Fenwich, 2009).

The 2014 elections represent a critical moment in the electoral history of demo-

cratic Brazil because the country finds itself at a crossroads. Politically, most Brazi-

lians have been demanding changes recently.3 These demands threatened the

continuity of the presidency of the PT, which has held the incumbency for several

years and has been responsible for numerous political changes in the Brazilian political

landscape. Economically, a shift in the way the monetary and fiscal policies are being

designed is expected since over the past years Brazil has been a Latin American

laggard due to its low economic growth. The massive popular protest in 2013 shows

the mounting popular disapproval of several policies and dissatisfaction with public

institutions, and as such there were expectations that the 2014 elections would be a

turning point in the democratic history of the country. The 2014 elections brought

some changes in the political landscape despite the re-election of Rousseff and the con-

tinuity of the PT in the presidency of the country.

Several analysts have pointed out the importance of the regional differences across

Brazil as a relevant element behind the re-election of Rousseff. The regional issue,

which has been sidelined in most of the analyses of previous election campaigns,

emerged with full force in 2014. Considering this is an important dimension of the

2014 Brazilian elections, this article will focus on it. In attempting to unveil the

regional divide and its impact on the electoral results, the next section will provide

an overview of the 2014 election campaign. Then the article will identify the important

political dynamics in federal Brazil with the aim of tracing the motives behind polar-

ization on territorial issues. In the fourth section, the article discusses how the regional

divide became politically relevant. The final section concludes.

The 2014 Election Campaign

The 2014 presidential election had two rounds. In the first round, president-elect

Rousseff won with 41.6% of the votes against Neves, who finished in second place

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with 33.6% of the votes. Since Rousseff failed to win more than half of the total votes,

she had to face a runoff, from which she emerged as a winner with 51% of the votes. In

this section, the article explains the electoral dynamics behind these results.

The re-election of Rousseff came four years after she was elected in 2010 to give

continuity to the popular social policies of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva (2003–

2010). Like Lula, Rousseff enlarged the scope of social policies to alleviate poverty.

However, Rousseff failed to maintain the high level of growth achieved during

Lula’s government, a period in which the Brazilian economy grew on average by

4% per year. The economic stagnation of Rousseff’s first term in power halted the

steady improvement in the quality of life of most Brazilians. This led to social discon-

tent, culminating in mass protests in June 2013, when a multitude of citizens took to the

streets in order to demand better quality public services.

In a context of growing political dissatisfaction with the government of Rousseff,

Neves, who is a senator in the National Congress and former governor of the state of

Minas Gerais, ran for election with promises to reduce state intervention in the

economy and improve the delivery of public services. During the campaign, he was

able to capitalize on the corruption scandal involving the state-owned oil company Pet-

robras that pointed to the direct involvement of government ministers and Rousseff’s

close aides.4 Neves was often associated with his grandfather, Tancredo Neves, a key

politician in Brazilian democratization, and former President Fernando Henrique

Cardoso (1995–2002), who designed and implemented an ambitious macroeconomic

stabilization plan that successfully reduced hyperinflation in Brazil in the 1990s.5

Neves ran his campaign mainly on economic issues promising to restore confidence

in the economy by reducing inflation and reducing public spending.

In this acrimonious campaign’s early stages, Rousseff strategically alleged that the

opposition would put an end to the social achievements of the PT over the 12 years that

they had been in power by eliminating the federal welfare programmes. Ironically, this

strategy reduced the voters’ support for the candidate, Marina Silva, a former environ-

mental minister in President Lula’s government, who ran for president as the candidate

of the leftist Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB). Although Silva was the main threat to

Rousseff’s re-election, being only second in the voters’ intention throughout the first

round of the campaign, she finished in third place with 21.3% of the vote.

Amid accusations of nepotism and incompetence between the two main

candidates, voters were divided into two different visions of Brazil. One vision

sought to put an end to the PT’s political dominance in the federal government

and to reduce state interventionism in the economy. The other vision desired an

enlargement of social policies currently in place and the maintenance of heavy-

handed state intervention in the economy. This divide reflected the bitter tone of

the 2014 presidential campaign.

The regional divide also became part of the campaign. Although in all the presiden-

tial elections since 2002 the PT has persistently shown stronger results in the Northeast,

only in 2014 was this divide referred to explicitly. In her victory speech in the first

round, Rousseff explained her large electoral support in the Northeast saying that “tra-

ditionally [the region] has been undermined by an elitist vision of Brazil”. With these

words, Rousseff was giving emphasis to the regional question through a familiar div-

ision in Brazil between rich and poor.

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In the final week of the second round of the election, opinion polls indicated that

the two candidates held a similar percentage of voter intention, although Rousseff

was slightly ahead in most opinion polls and leading by a large margin in the Northeast.

Towards the end of the campaign, Neves’ rejection rate increased as he embraced a

more aggressive tone against Rousseff in the televised presidential debates. Unlike

her contender, Rousseff’s rejection rate among voters did not increase, and the percep-

tion of the performance of her government improved towards the end of the campaign.

The vote behaviour across the country varied, and it is possible to identify different

voting patterns by region. Figure 1 shows the distribution of vote throughout the 27

Brazilian states (including the Federal District). Although Rousseff obtained at least

35% of the electorate support in every state, and Neves at least 20%, their strongholds

were located in different regions. The electoral support for Rousseff in the Northeast

was overwhelming: in three states approximately 80% of the state electorate voted

for her, and in four states this figure reached 70% of the voters. In the case of

Neves, the states where he received stronger support, around 60% of votes, were

Sao Paulo, Parana, Santa Catarina, and Acre.

Attempting to understand the geography of voting behaviour by municipalities one

can see a nuanced picture. Of the 5570 municipalities in Brazil, Rousseff won in 63%

of them and several of them are concentrated in the Northeast. In the Northeastern state

of Bahia, which has 412 municipalities, Rousseff failed to win a majority of the votes

in only five municipalities in the state. As for Neves’ voters, the majority of them are

living in cities with more than 500 000 inhabitants. This advantage in gaining support

in bigger cities has allowed Neves to win in the majority of state capitals. He won in 15

of the state capitals, most of them concentrated in the southern regions. In effect, he

won 10 out of the 11 capitals of the South, Southeast, and Centre-East. Neves only

Figure 1. Distribution of votes per state in the second round of the 2014 presidential elections (%of vote).

Source: Own elaboration based on data from the Brazilian Electoral Court, http://www.tse.jus.br/eleicoes/estatisticas/estatisticas-eleitorais-2014-resultado.

Territorial Polarization in Brazil’s 2014 5

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lost in Rio de Janeiro. Figure 2 maps the votes by state and municipality, showing a

clear territorial voting pattern.

Clearly, Brazil is entering into divisive years of government. Unmistakably,

despite their electoral victory, Rousseff and her party are politically weaker since

her re-election as president than they were at the beginning of the campaign. This

weakness stems partly from the PT’s poor performance in electing members of the

National Congress and state governors. In 2014, in addition to the president,

Brazilian voters also elected 513 deputies for the lower chamber, 81 senators, and

27 governors. In these elections, the PT has seen its influence diminish as it elected

fewer politicians for the National Congress and for the states’ governor offices. In

addition, the 2014 elections led to a further fragmentation of the parliamentary

arena as the number of political parties increased in congress and no single party

won the majority of congressional seats.

As for the gubernatorial election, there was a relatively high degree of continuity

with 11 of the 27 governors being re-elected, yet the PT elected fewer governors than

in the previous elections. Also, for the first time, the Democrats (DEM), an important

catch-all party that was part of the governing coalitions in the early governments of the

re-democratization period, did not elect a governor. Further, the Brazilian Communist

Party (PCdoB) elected a state governor for the first time. An important continuing trend

in the gubernatorial election is that the coalition of parties changed from state to state,

just as in previous elections. In some states, parties that belonged to the opposition at

the national government level aligned with parties that were part of the national gov-

erning coalition. This trend further weakened the PT’s position to maintain a governing

coalition.

All in all, the results point to a growing fragmentation of the political spectrum,

which hinders the possibility of political and economic reforms that voters desire.

This fragmentation led to a polarization that can be seen in voting behaviour in

2014, which reflects a territorial voting pattern in the country.

Figure 2. Map of vote distribution by sate and municipality.Source: Own elaboration based on information from the STF.

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Brazilian Federal Political Dynamics

The article suggests that the regional question in Brazil became particularly active in

the discourse dimension of the election campaign in 2014. As such, discourse is inter-

preted as an electoral tactic that has underlining causes. These causes are structural and

institutional and they are associated with several political changes that Brazilian

federal politics have been experiencing for more than a decade.

Several factors can be said to have contributed to the rise of the regional divide in

Brazil. Firstly, the lack of clear ideological orientation of the main Brazilian political

parties forced them to politically exploit other cleavages such as regional differ-

ences.6 Secondly, the voters’ shifting allegiances to political parties at the local

level across Brazil favoured the construction of a new political discourse that was

unique to the electoral campaign. Thirdly, the socio-economic differences between

the Brazilian regions have led to the design of federal programmes to reverse this

trend. At election times, politicians exploit these programmes in order to gain

credit for them.

Theoretically, the above factors can be linked to normative theories that have been

revisited in the past years. One of the theories once revised perceives political parties in

Brazil as stronger than initially thought. The lack of alternation of party holding the

Brazilian presidency for the past 12 years seems to confirm this new interpretation.

Another theory that has been re-examined concerns the state governors, who once

have been perceived as effective veto agents in Brazilian federal politics but now

have seen their powers diminished. In effect, several policies of the central government

over the past years have been successful in bypassing the state governors while having

an impact on local matters.

A hypothesis widely used to interpret the Brazilian political dynamics is that of

‘coalitional presidentialism’. According to this hypothesis, Brazilian presidents must

rely on a loose coalition of parties in order to govern. An underlying assumption of

this dominant proposition has been the weakness of Brazilian political parties to guar-

antee governability of a president elected with a minority party (Abranches, 1988).

In the first decade following Brazil’s transition to democracy, Brazilian coalitional

presidentialism was perceived as a dysfunctional characteristic of the Brazilian politi-

cal system and only in the late 1990s did it start to be perceived as an effective mech-

anism for political stability (Power, 2009). In the face of the apparent weaknesses of

political parties, governability in Brazil would be achieved through several insti-

tutional mechanisms that included presidential decree powers, executive discretion

over allocation of fiscal resources, and parliamentary constraints on the power of

congressmen.

However, scholars increasingly recognize that political parties in the Brazilian

multiparty system are stronger than once thought (Figueiredo and Limongi, 2006;

Bohn and Paiva, 2009; Peres et al., 2011). Also, there is growing evidence that

party leadership in the hands of strong party leaders has been behind the greater cohe-

siveness of small parties (Guarnieri, 2011).7

In this scenario, Brazilian federalism has exercised important political constraints.

The main assumptions that have been used to analyse federal dynamics have been

undermined in recent years. Among them it is important to mention the assumption

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prevalent in the 1990s that powerful state governors dominated Brazilian federal

dynamics. However, there are indications that the power of subnational politicians

was overestimated (Cheibub et al., 2009). In effect, Brazilian presidents can bypass

the power of state governments in several policy areas, especially in social policies

(Arretche, 2005, 2007). Indeed multiparty presidentialism in the Brazilian federal

context has proved to be less dysfunctional than predicted (Pereira and Melo, 2012).

Revision of the main theoretical assumptions of Brazilian scholarship came

especially with the emergence of the PT as a national political party in the early

2000s. In its early stages, the PT, which helped to end the military regime (1964–

1985), attracted a limited number of urban voters that sympathized with left-wing pol-

itical programmes. However, the party’s constituency was mainly located in the cities

of Sao Paulo and Porto Alegre. The party slowly advanced in other capitals across the

country but failed to reach a wider constituency. In order to attract more votes, the PT

started to soften its leftist ideological stand, electing Lula as president in 2002. Once

occupying the most important elected political post in the country, the PT became more

pragmatic and in order to win future elections it turned into a catch-all party (Hunter,

2007). This transformation influenced the way the party would pursue new electoral

strategies.

In a country where municipal elections have an effect on other levels of govern-

ment, amounting to a reverse coattail effect (Avelino et al., 2012), the municipal elec-

toral arena is of major importance for electoral success at other levels of government.

This served the PT well as it started to elect local politicians in the southern Brazilian

states with grassroots mobilization of voters. As part of the PT’s political strategy, it

strengthened its organizational capacity at the local level in the Northeast and as a

result it increased its ability to gain new votes in the region (Van Dyck, 2014). This

penetration by the PT into small municipalities by opening local party branches has

been particularly important in mobilizing voters (Samuels and Zucco, 2014).

In addition to the strengthening of the PT’s local organization capacity, there is a

fast growing literature that points to multiple federal social programmes associated

with the PT federal governments as an effective mechanism for gaining political

support (Hunter and Power, 2007). Moreover, direct involvement of the federal gov-

ernment in the distribution of social benefits at local level has sidelined the state gov-

ernments, whose political power in the federation is systematically waning (Fenwich,

2009). It is clear that over time there have been changes in the local political dynamics

in some North and Northeastern states, where historically there is lower electoral com-

petition (Borges, 2007). For example, the entry of new political parties into these

‘brown areas’ is weakening local political bosses (Borges, 2011).

In spite of the transformations at the local level in places where traditional political

parties played a dominant role, it is too early to state that new political actors such as

the PT will not establish client relations in these places. One needs to be mindful that

the PT has been increasingly involved in political corruption (Melo and Santos, 2013).

There is evidence that, in order to finance its campaign, the PT relied on the donations

of small and medium-sized firms, and while in power the party awarded government

contracts to these firms as payback (Boas et al., 2014).

After highlighting the main theories and dynamics in the Brazilian federal politics,

it is possible to argue that the way of doing politics has been changing with the

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emergence of the PT as a party that attempts to consolidate its political power in a

context of higher electoral competition.

The Regional Question as an Electoral Strategy

The majority of Rousseff’s votes in the two rounds of the 2014 presidential elections

came from the Brazilian Northeast region.8 As evidence of the important weight of the

northern states in Rousseff’s re-election victory, in several municipalities of the North-

east and North the PT obtained more than 80% of the votes in the municipal

circumscription.

In order to dissect the reason for this overwhelming support for the PT, particularly

in the Northeast, a region that has traditionally been the home of the oligarchic elites,

this article identifies three critical aspects of Brazilian electoral politics that explain the

territorial vote divide in 2014. The three aspects focused on are the weakness of the

ideological vote, the decrease of political support for the PT in the southern states

where the party obtained most of its votes in the past, and the influence of social

cash-transfer benefits from federal programmes.9

Lack of Ideological Divide

The ideological divide in the left–right scale is on the rise, at least in the discursive

arena, as the Brazilian party system becomes less fragmented and electoral volatility

decreases. However, generally speaking, in Brazil the party position in terms of the

ideological divide has remained largely stable, or has become even more attenuated

over the years (Power and Zucco, 2012). It would be expected that, as the party

system in Brazil becomes less fragmented and electoral volatility decreases, left–

right ideological self-placement of voters would change (Zechmeister and Corral,

2012). But Brazilians have systematically shown low levels of ideological identifi-

cation with political parties (Kinzo, 2005). Yet, as some scholars argue, the ideological

stance of parties has a tendency to change during electoral campaigns (Campello,

2014).

The Brazilian median voter is located in the ‘centre’ category of the ideological

spectrum, as Figure 2 illustrates. While 35% of Brazilians consider themselves as

‘left’ or ‘centre-left’, 45% classify themselves as belonging to the ‘right’ or ‘centre-

right’ of the political spectrum. The median voter is located among the 20% of Brazilians

that are the ‘centre’ of the ideological spectrum. This information is useful in assessing

how most of the ‘centre’ intended to vote in the presidential elections.

Based on the survey carried out in the first round of the election campaign,

most of the voters from the ‘centre’ were split in their voting intention with

37% declaring their vote for Rousseff, and 33% for Silva. Neves attracted 15%

of the votes. However, it is interesting to note that these percentages of voting

intention were almost equally distributed among the different groups of voters in

the ideological spectrum. In Figure 3 it is possible to see this equal distribution

of voters across the ideological spectrum with higher variation only at the extremes

of the spectrum.

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PT’s Decreasing Electoral Support in the Southern Brazilian States

The PT’s electoral inroad into the Brazilian political arena started in the early 1980s by

building a constituency in Sao Paulo, then spreading to other industrialized states such

as Rio Grande do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas Gerais. In the 2002 presidential elec-

tions, when President Lula was elected, the PT’s votes in the above-mentioned states,

which contain approximately 50% of Brazilian voters, reached 55.4% in Sao Paulo,

55.8% in Rio Grande do Sul, 66.4% in Minas Gerais and 79% in Rio de Janeiro.

However, this support has been steadily decreasing in every presidential election

ever since, and in the 2014 presidential elections votes for the PT were reduced to

35.7% in Sao Paulo, 46.5% in Rio Grade do Sul, 52.4% in Minas Gerais, and 54.9%

in Rio de Janeiro.

In the states of Sao Paulo and Rio Grande do Sul, in the 2006 presidential election

the total votes obtained by the PT were less than the total votes received by the con-

tender party. In Sao Paulo, the vote difference between the PT and the PSDB

reached 29% in favour of the latter party. This trend has not been reversed. In

Minas Gerais and in Rio de Janeiro, voters have been showing less support over

time to PT’s presidential candidates, although the majority of the votes in these

states go to the PT, while the number of votes for the PSDB has remained stable in

these states.

Despite the systematic loss of voter support in most of the above-mentioned states,

in the second round of the elections Rousseff improved her electoral performance in

the Southeast region, receiving 38% more votes in the region than in the first round.

The states driving this growth of votes were Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Minas

Gerais, which cast approximately 5 228 000 votes for Rousseff. However, she lost elec-

toral support in the second round in Rio Grande do Sul.

Although Rousseff’s performance in the Southeast states increased in the second

round, the Southeast as the most relevant region in the country in terms of number

Figure 3. Voter intention in the first round of presidential elections based on voters’ ideologicalidentification.

Source: Datafolha 2013 and 2014.

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of votes has been reducing over the past years its electoral support for the PT’s presi-

dential candidates.

Federal Social Cash-Transfer Programmes to the Brazilian Northeast

The Brazilian cash-transfer programme known as Bolsa Familia (BF) became a notor-

ious social benefit federal programme for alleviating poverty as it is estimated that

from 2004 to 2008 approximately 40 000 000 Brazilians were lifted from poverty.

Established in 1998 under the government of President Cardoso, the cash-transfer pro-

gramme was expanded in 2003 and given its current name. Nowadays, 45 000 000

people, representing 25% of Brazilian inhabitants, benefit from the programme.

From 2004 until 2013 the public funds allocated to the programme have been stea-

dily increasing. The distribution of the programme’s resources between the Brazilian

states is unequal as the programme targets households living below the income threshold

of $R125.00 per month. Between 2004 and 2011, approximately 53% of the resources

were allocated to the Northeast, while the remaining 47% were spent in the other four

geographic regions. The state that draws most of the resources from the BF is the North-

eastern state of Bahia, followed by Sao Paulo. In some states, such as Maranhao,

approximately half of the population is a beneficiary of the BF.

The relationship between BF and voter intentions has been gaining academic atten-

tion. Hunter and Power (2007) suggest that the re-election victory of the PT’s presiden-

tial candidate in 2006 had a great deal to do with the influence of the federal

government’s social policies. In a similar vein, Zucco (2008) found a positive relation-

ship between the votes for Lula and the benefits distributed under the BF in the North-

east of the country.

In attempting to build a relationship between the election results and the benefits of

the BF, this article explores the potential correlation between votes for the two presiden-

tial candidates in the second round by municipality and the total amount of BF funds that

the municipality received in 2014. The results, which are illustrated in Figure 4, reveal a

strong correlation between the votes for Rousseff and the BF benefits in the 2014 presi-

dential elections.10 The article took into account the influence of the total transfers of BF

funds to 3090 municipalities in 2014 on the percentage of votes for Rousseff in these

municipalities in 8 states, which are the main beneficiaries of BF transfers.11

Final Remarks

This article has sought to explain the territorial dimension of the 2014 presidential

elections. This dimension was explored through the south–north regional divide,

which was used as a strategy by the incumbent candidate and her party to mobilize

voters from the poorer regions of the country during the electoral campaign.

However, despite the clear regional polarization in voter preferences, this polarization

did not have any consequences in the long-run for federal dynamics in the country. In

effect, as explained earlier the regional question is considered a takeoff issue with a

short lifespan.

By delving into the reasons behind the utilization of the regional divide, it is poss-

ible to understand that territorial polarization would work as a mechanism behind voter

Territorial Polarization in Brazil’s 2014 11

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mobilization in a political environment in which ideology has little relevance to Bra-

zilian electoral politics. In such a context, the regional divide, which is grounded on

important historical socio-economic differences between Brazilian regions, becomes

an important mechanism for voter mobilization. This would work in favour of the

PT mainly because this party has been making political inroads in the Northeast,

home of oligarchic politicians in Brazil, and also where the PT has been building a

new constituency. In addition, the Brazilian Northeast is the region that contains the

majority of the beneficiaries of the federal cash-transfer programme Bolsa Familia,

the flagship programme of the PT governments.

Although Rousseff was re-elected, her political ability to govern the country until

2018 has been worsening. As already pointed out, the fragmented governing coalition

is becoming increasingly fractured as the weaker PT, which has reduced its number of

elected politicians in the National Congress and in the state executive offices, is unable

to exercise political leadership. The scandal of corruption in which the PT is currently

implicated further dents its leadership in the presidency.

A weak president such as Rousseff leading a fractured coalition is unable to

respond to current challenges. The government will have to embrace new policies to

Figure 4. Correlation between votes for Rousseff in the second round of elections and thetransfers from Bolsa Familia by municipality in eight states.

Source: Vote for Rousseff from STF the Brazilian Electoral Court, (http://www.tse.jus.br/eleicoes/estatisticas/estatisticas-eleitorais-2014-resultado). BF’s transfer by municipality from BrazilianFederal Prosecutor Office (http://www.portaldatransparencia.gov.br/PortalTransparenciaTRProgramaPesquisaPrograma.asp).

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remedy the low growth rate and high inflation rate. The economic measures being

adopted are very unpopular, putting further pressure on the decreasing popularity of

the president. Furthermore, the reform package that was discussed during the campaign

seems a more daunting prospect under a weak PT government. This package includes

the expansion of agrarian reform, improvement of the quality of primary and secondary

education, reduction of urban violence, and improvement of the infrastructure capacity

of the public sector, among others. Political reforms are also on top of the political

agenda but they will be difficult to carry out as long as there are diverging positions

within the governing coalition on several issues.

In the post-election period, President Rousseff has not referred to the regional

divide that this article has been talking about, even with growing signs that the re-

elected government is facing a governability crisis. This serves as evidence that

indeed the territorial issues mainly appear to be time-specific, as in the 2014 electoral

campaign.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding

This work was supported by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies Research Fund of 2015.

Notes

1Hawkins (2010) shows using the case of Hugo Chavez’s Venezuela that social polarization might led

to political radicalization with the articulation of a discourse that is confrontational and dualistic.2Each of these five regions is a geo-administrative region, which is devoid of any official political

meaning. This division is based on historical, social, economic, and cultural similarities between

the federal states that compose them.3As of June 2013, approximately 80% of Brazilians wanted to see political changes in the way the

country has been managed.4An election survey pointed out that although 49% of voters declared that the Petrobras corruption

scandal would influence their vote, only 18% of the voters believed that Rousseff was involved in

the scandal, while 64% of the voters considered that other members of the PT were implicated in

the scandal (Datafolha) 15/10/2014, http://media.folha.uol.com.br/datafolha/2014/10/15/intencao-de-

voto-presidente-2-turno.pdf.5The association of Neves with Cardoso contributed to a higher rejection rate of Neves. Despite the

economic accomplishments of the Cardoso government, the general population evaluated his govern-

ment negatively, as his macro-stabilization plan did not directly translate into an immediate improve-

ment in the population’s standard of living.6The decline of ideological orientation in Brazil has to do with two factors: the weaknesses of parties in

the Brazilian political system and the low levels of party affiliation.7The strong role of party leaders does not mean that there is a growth of ‘personalistic politics ’ in

Brazil, as Power and Zucco (2012) demonstrate.8In the first round of the elections, Rousseff obtained approximately 15 000 000 votes from the North-

east, 12 000 000 from the Southeast, and the remaining 13 000 000 votes from the other five regions. In

the second round of the elections, the distributions of Rousseff’s votes across the regions, in relation to

the first round voters’ support for her, increased more in the Southeast region.

Territorial Polarization in Brazil’s 2014 13

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9Another factor that could have an impact is incumbency, which according to Zucco (2008) is an impor-

tant element in understanding voter behaviour in presidential elections in the Northeast. Most voters

from this region vote for the incumbent presidential candidate.10The following equation was obtained: %Vote for Dilma ¼ 20.0801 + 6.250 × Bolsa Familia’s

Transfers. It suggests that for every R$6250.00 increase in the Bolsa Familia transfers there is an

increase of vote for Rousseff.11If a regression analysis is run separately between the four states in the Northeast and the four states in

the Southeast, this relationship between these two variables is stronger in the Northeast.

ORCID

Helder Ferreira do Vale http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4993-7932

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