From the null vote to citizen participation

Abstract

In the most recent federal elections, citizen movements arose that invited voters to go to the polls on July 5, 2009 but to cancel their vote. In opposition, from March until the day of the election, a little more than seventy groups, throughout the country, carried out "another political campaign" without public economic resources but with a lot of creativity and managed to put in the national debate the usefulness of the citizen's vote as a way for the political and economic transformation of our country. The debate generated by the annulment groups surpassed, by far, the proposals of the candidates and instead of the proposals of the candidates and their parties being discussed in the public arena, the quality of our democracy was discussed.

Several surveys conducted by opinion polls prior to the election showed a growing trend of voters who were going to nullify their vote; these surveys indicated the socioeconomic profile of the respondents: high level of schooling, middle and high income and mainly young people. Therefore, this research proposes to analyze, by means of a multiple linear regression model, which socioeconomic variables, such as income, schooling, age and unemployment impacted the volume of null votes in the state of the federal deputy elections. In addition, the number of civil groups that promoted the null vote in each entity will be included as an independent variable. The aim is to evaluate statistically, ex post , which of the described socioeconomic variables had the greatest impact on the null votes cast by voters.