The Environment in Brazil’s 2022 Presidential Election^*,**

Studies on the environment, public opinion, and voting have shown that, despite widespread support for the environmental cause among the population, this support does not necessarily translate into votes. This article will look into concepts including agenda setting, framing, and media effects to provide a background of how the environment became a prominent issue in public opinion. It will also test hypotheses that argue for the significance of issue decision salience, in conjunction with the issue ownership theory, to explain how the environmental issue influences vote choice. Our research focuses on the 2022 Brazilian presidential election, employing mixed methods that include both quantitative and qualitative techniques. All tests conducted confirmed that emphasizing the environment as a relevant issue and identifying a candidate as its primary advocate increased voters’ inclination to support them. This effect persisted even when including controls for other extensively studied factors in voter behavior literature, including the economy, religion, and age. The key conclusion drawn from our study is that the environment holds relevance in the electoral context. Evidence suggests that a relevant factor to understand why the environment and the environmental policy seem to have affected voting intentions (when common knowledge would suggest otherwise) is how the mainstream media and social media have set this agenda.

Amazon; public opinion; voter behavior; environment