Joaquim Meira, an academic master’s in administration student at the FGV Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration (FGV EBAPE), received a prize for “Best Panel in Political Science” at the 43^rd Annual Meeting of the National Association de Graduate Education and Research in Social Sciences (Anpocs). During this event, he presented his study, titled “Votes, ideas and links: ideological congruence between voters and lawmakers in Brazil,” produced under the guidance of Professor Gabriela Tarouco at Pernambuco Federal University and Professor Cesar Zucco at FGV EBAPE.

This study analyzes the degree of similarity between the opinions and stances of voters and politicians – a topic known as ideological congruence – in Brazil. This topic, despite its great importance to democracy, has received little attention in Brazil, and the few existing studies have tended to use low-quality methods or data. Meira’s study filled this gap by using reliable and representative data from opinion polls carried out in 2013 and 2014 (the Brazilian Legislative Survey for politicians and the World Values Survey for the general public) and a recently proposed method that allows complete distributions of opinions to be compared.

The results indicate a high degree of congruence between voters and lawmakers when it comes to income redistribution and social topics like gay marriage, but little congruence on subjects related to free enterprise and meritocracy. This suggests that parliamentarians represent public opinions in some major areas of political debate, but not in other ones that are also important.

For more information about FGV EBAPE’s academic master’s in administration, click here.