Graduate student Bruna Pereira won first prize in Arts and Humanities 1 for her study, “The Impact of the Period of Crisis on the Electorate Behavior in Brazil.”
Several Modern Languages students presented their research and projects at Ohio University’s Student Research and Creative Activity Expo on April 11.
Graduate student Bruna Pereira (M.A. Economics, M.A. Latin American Studies and Portuguese instructor in Modern Languages) won first prize in Arts and Humanities 1 for her study, “The Impact of the Period of Crisis on the Electorate Behavior in Brazil.”
Her adviser is Dr. Matthew Layton, Assistant Professor of Political Science.
Pereira says that research on voting behavior is an important area of study in political science. Her research focused on the Economic Voting Theory, which suggests that democratic citizens tend to favor governments whose time in power corresponds with positive economic or social outcomes and reject governments that they see as responsible for poor performance.
Pereira evaluated how a recent period of political and economic crisis affected voting behavior in Brazil. She concluded that the Economic Voting Theory is effective in explaining voting behavior in Brazil but fails to explain the variation in voter certainty regarding their choice of an opposition candidate.
“This demonstrates the need to incorporate other variables, such as level of education and ideological inclination, to understand voting preferences,” Pereira says. “Combining sociological and psychological theories with Economic Voting Theory improves predictions of respondents’ vote choice.”
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