Abstract

SOUSA OLIVA, José Daniel. Voter´s dilemma between honest and competent candidates in the 2018 elections in Mexico and Brazil. Nóesis, Rev. cienc. soc. [online]. 2023, vol.32, n.64, pp.27-46.  Epub Dec 08, 2023. ISSN 2395-8669.  https://doi.org/10.20983/noesis.2023.2.2.

This article is dedicated to understanding and explaining the electoral dilemma “Dishonest, but competent” and “Honest, but incompetent” in the elections of legislators, governors and municipal presidents in 2018 in Mexico and Brazil. The research questions that guided the investigation are: Why are there voters in Mexico and Brazil who vote for “dishonest” candidates? And how do the voters of those countries decide their vote in the face of this dilemma? The theoretical approach of this work is Social Psychology through two analytical tools: the Funnel of Causality and the Tripartite Model of Attitudes. The methodology is mixed, quantitative and qualitative, using statistical models with data from the international surveys World Values Survey and Comparative Studies of Electoral Systems, as well as the application of Focus Groups in the distance modality. In this way, four categories of voter are proposed: moralist, moralist-moderate, pragmatic-moderate and pragmatic. The arguments of this work are: first, that regardless of cultural differences, there is an “affective voter” “non-rational” who makes decisions based on emotions and intuition, demonstrating that the affective components of attitudes are more relevant than the cognitive ones in electoral choice; second, that voting for “dishonest” candidates is determined under a greater influence of “short-term factors” such as candidate characteristics and short-term events rather than “long-term factors” such as party loyalties and ideology.

Keywords : politics; electoral behavior; political culture; democracy; public opinion.

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