This study aims to estimate fertility trends in Brazil in the 2010s and early 2020s during a period of back-to-back novel infectious disease outbreaks - Zika virus and COVID-19. We use Brazilian Ministry of Health and Association of Civil Registrar data from 2011-2021 to measure general fertility rates at the national and state levels. We also used seasonal ARIMA model to forecast fertility rates by month and state in 2021 and compared these forecasts with observed fertility rates. We find that fertility rates were steady over 2011-2015 with no statistically significant variation, followed by a sharp decline during the Zika outbreak in 2016 followed by a return to pre-Zika levels after the end of the epidemic. Furthermore, to evaluate the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, we make comparisons with observed and forecast rates from 2020-2021, showing that declines were generally larger for observed than for forecast rates, yet statistically insignificant. We argue that the resurgence of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 might lead to further declines, as women might have not had enough time to adjust rebound from either the effects of the Zika epidemic. We also discuss the importance of timely availability of live births data during a public health crisis with immediate consequences for fertility rates.
How does institutional context condition debates’ effects on vote choice during electoral campaigns? The literature on the United States suggests that debates’ effects on vote choice are minimal at best, reinforcing voters’ prior convictions more often than converting or activating them. There have been very few tests of debates’ effects in newer democracies, however, and the strong partisan identification among American voters might mean that this lack of impact is specific to the American context. In this article, the effects of presidential debates are tested in a younger democracy with a multiparty system and runoff presidential elections: Brazil. Data come from the Brazilian Electoral Panel Study, a seven-wave panel study conducted before, during, and after the 2014 Brazilian election. To rigorously measure presidential debates’ effect on voters’ likelihood to change candidates, a difference-in-differences regression was estimated with a generalized least squares (GLS) random-effects model. In the end, debates had a significant effect on vote choice in the first round of the 2014 Brazilian presidential election, as respondents who watched first-round debates were more likely to switch candidates after the debates had taken place than those who had not watched the debates. In the second round, however, when the field had been reduced to only two candidates, debates no longer affected voters’ propensity to change candidates.
In many developing democracies, polling often comes with elevated levels of bias and variance. We argue that electoral malpractice can be one reason why. We build a theory and test it with data from elections between 2002 and 2014 in Brazil. We find that polling errors are larger in: (a) elections with many undecided voters and large imbalances in financial resources among campaigns; (b) the poorer Northeast region of Brazil, which is more closely associated with patronage and vote buying; and (c) low-profile, low-information elections. Our analysis serves as a cautionary tale for interpreting polling in democracies like Brazil, even if/when other sources of error in the polling industry are mitigated.
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