Data: The President's New Constituency: Lula and the Pragmatic Vote in Brazil's 2006 Presidential Election

The 2006 presidential elections in Brazil witnessed a dramatic shift on Lula's voting base away from the more developed regions of the country and into its the poorest areas. In this paper, I use municipal level data to argue that while this shift represents an important change for Lula himself, it can be mostly explained by the government's massive cash transfer program called Bolsa Familia and by the empirical regularity by which incumbent party presidential candidates in Brazil always perform better in the less developed regions of the country.