The President's ‘New’ Constituency: Lula and the Pragmatic Vote in Brazil's 2006 Presidential Elections

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