Brazil: Financial market paid for 62% of the 2022 national polls

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Banks and brokerage houses financed 62% of all election surveys with national coverage registered in 2022.

There were 65 surveys registered until Tuesday (June 21, 2022), 40 financed by the financial market. In all, financial market companies have disbursed -from January 1 to June 21- R$4 million for the surveys, according to data from the TSE (Superior Electoral Court).

The surveys frequently appear in newspapers, magazines, and news programs on major TV stations. Some of these surveys have been contracted to be carried out regularly.

This trend has been consolidated this year. In 2018, the financial market had paid for 21% of the national surveys recorded in a similar period (through June 20).

The company that has done the most surveys so far this year is Ipespe. There were 13 surveys, all contracted by XP Investimentos. PoderData (11 surveys, with own resources) and Quaest (6, paid by Genial Investimentos) are in the sequence.

“I don’t know of any other place in the world where this [surveys paid for by the financial market] happens. Banks and brokerage houses realized they could gain visibility by publishing these surveys and started this trend,” says Rodolfo da Costa Pinto, coordinator of PoderData, the research division of the digital newspaper Poder360.

On June 8, XP decided to reformulate its partnership with Ipespe completely. The surveys, which used to be carried out every seven days, are now done monthly. The bank did not detail the reason for the decision.

In Brazil, it has become a custom to call companies that do public opinion polls institutes. The tradition goes back to the former Ibope (now extinct), whose original name was Instituto Brasileiro de Opinião e Pesquisa (Brazilian Institute of Opinion and Research).

In reality, the expression “research institute” is a euphemism that refers to a possible non-profit entity or related to a university, which is not the case for most companies that do this type of survey in Brazil.

The “institutes” are almost always private companies whose commercial activity is to do research for profit.

With information from Poder360

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