The article investigates some of the most relevant factors for the voting decision in the 2002 presidential election by testing some of the main hypotheses about electoral behaviour in the country by means of logistic regression analyses based on data from the ESEB (Brazilian Electoral Study), a post-electoral survey conducted on a national sample of voters. In the models, taken as a whole, political opinions did not have much weight in the voting decision. Furthermore, they are unable to “explain” a very large share of voters’ positioning on a left-right scale or on a scale of voters’ “party sentiments”. All these “political” variables taken as a whole, in turn, “explain” only part of the evaluations that voters make of the government's performance. The analysis shows that Brazilian voters’ voting decision seems rather varied, since some variables were shown to be relevant to “explain” the vote for a candidate, but not for the others. The variables shown to be more frequent (for all four candidates analysed) and with more considerable weight were: voters’ religion, their “party sentiments”, their positioning on a left-right scale, the evaluations made of the then current government (in actual fact important only for the vote for Serra, the government's candidate) and the candidates’ attributes (especially “reliability” and “preparedness/competence”).
Key words:
Brazilian politics; presidential elections; electoral behaviour