LGBTQ+ Candidates in Brazil’s 2024 Municipal Elections

A Comprehensive Descriptive Analysis

Authors
Affiliations

Malu A.C. Gatto

University College London

Alberto Lopez Ortega

VU Amsterdam

Published

February 15, 2026

1 Overview

Brazil’s 2024 municipal elections were a watershed moment for LGBTQ+ political representation. For the first time, the Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (TSE) allowed candidates to voluntarily declare their sexual orientation and gender identity on official registration forms, creating an unprecedented population-level dataset.

This site documents a descriptive analysis of LGBTQ+ political candidates across approximately 464,000 candidacies. Before any regression models or causal claims, we ask: Who are these candidates? How do they differ from the general candidate population? And how do they differ from each other?

2 Chapters

Chapter Title Focus
1. Candidate Universe The Baseline Who runs for municipal office in Brazil in 2024? Demographics, parties, ideology, geography, and outcomes for all ~464K candidates
2. LGBTQ+ Profile How They Differ Systematic comparison of LGBTQ+ vs non-LGBTQ+ candidates across every dimension
3. L-G-B-T Disaggregation Within-Group Heterogeneity Breaking the monolith: Lesbian vs Gay vs Bisexual vs Trans along ideology, age, race, party
4. Geography Where They Run Choropleth maps, geographic concentration, urban/rural, and regional patterns
5. Campaign Finance Follow the Money Transparent processing of raw TSE revenue data, funding sources, LGBTQ+ financing gaps
6. Intersections Compounding Disadvantage LGBTQ+ x gender, race, ideology, and triple intersections
7. Manifestos What Do They Promise? Quantitative text analysis of ~15,300 mayoral manifestos: corpus statistics, policy dictionaries, and structural topic models comparing LGBTQ+ vs non-LGBTQ+ candidates
Methodology Data Pipeline Data flow, LGBTQ+ matching algorithm, finance classification, municipality crosswalk
8. Candidate Explorer Individual Lookup Searchable table of all ~3,100 identified LGBTQ+ candidates with demographics and outcomes
Codebook Data Documentation Source files, variable dictionary, identification methodology

3 Data Sources

All data originates from Brazil’s TSE (Electoral Court) official records for the 2024 municipal elections, supplemented by the VOTE LGBT candidate identification project. Source files are read from the parent research project and are never modified by this analysis.

4 Interactive Tools

Candidate Explorer: Chapter 8 provides a searchable, filterable table of all LGBTQ+ candidates directly in this website — no installation required. Browse by name, state, party, identity, or any combination.