Voting patterns in time and space: classifying Brazilian presidential elections

Abstract

In 2018, Brazil held its eighth post-redemocratization presidential election, accumulating empirical evidence that are crucial to the analysis of the characteristics of electoral processes that may be responsible for substantial changes in the distribution of power among political parties. From a conceptual basis grounded in international literature on critical elections, this article aims to create a classification for Brazilian elections. As the main subsidy for this classification, it is analyzed simultaneously, in time and space, through factor analysis, the electoral performance of the first runners in the presidential elections of 1989 to 2018 in the first round of the scale of the Brazilian micro regions seeking to identify the support regions and periods of stability and changing voting patterns. As a result, presidential elections are classified into three types: maintained, deviant and converted (critical).

presidential elections; critical elections; realignment; electoral behavior; Brazil