Party affiliation: an important forgotten variable in Brazil

Abstract If we consider only the recent affiliated to political parties in Brazil, they are three times the votes received by Jânio Quadros in the 1960 presidential election. According to the database of the Brazilian electoral justice, about 16.8 million voters were members of political parties at the end of 2018: the equivalent of 11,4% of the electorate. How are these members distributed in Brazil? What variables explain the geographical differences of the affiliation? Our objectives are: 1) verify the growth of party affiliation in Brazilian municipalities in the 2014, 2016, 2018 election years; 2) analyze de variations between them, from a social-spatial perspective. It is an exploratory study. We use spatial-statistical and cartographic methods to analyze the party affiliation database. We found a network of associations with socio-demographic, economic and electoral indicators. We wanted to know what changed, when it changed, where it changed, and what changed together. We identify patterns of associations that are presented in the article.