PhD Seminar: Roadblocks to the Ballot: Politicized Policing and the Cost of Voting in Brazil’s 2022 Election

Title:Roadblocks to the Ballot: Politicized Policing and the Cost of Voting in Brazil’s 2022 Election

Abstract: Can incumbents use ordinary law-enforcement powers to impede electoral participation? I study Brazil’s 2022 presidential runoff, when the Federal Highway Police (PRF) carried out an unprecedented wave of roadblocks and vehicle inspections on election day. I combine documentary evidence from seized intelligence materials and internal directives with administrative data on PRF operations and polling-station returns. First, I show that the second-round escalation in enforcement was politically targeted: municipalities explicitly identified in Federal Police evidence experienced an abnormal increase of roughly five additional fines between rounds in 2022 relative to the corresponding round difference in 2018, with intensity declining sharply beyond the top-ranked targets. Second, using within-municipality variation in polling-station proximity to PRF operations, I show that stations newly exposed to enforcement experienced higher abstention. In the targeted municipalities, moving into the 0–1 km exposure band increased abstention by 1.38 percentage points, with effects decaying rapidly with distance and no comparable effect in 2018. I find no corresponding change in vote margins conditional on turnout. The results suggest that politicized state enforcement can raise the cost of voting and distort participation even without altering ballot access rules directly.