In 2002 Brazilians went to the polls to choose a new president, the members of the bicameral national legislature, governors for the component parts of the federation (26 states plus the Federal District of Brasília), and members of the unicameral state legislative assemblies. This was the fourth direct election since the end of the military regime in 1985 of the president and all other major legislative and executive posts.
Presidential elections in Brazil take place under a two-round majority run-off system, with candidates competing for votes throughout the country’s 8,511,965 sq km area. Following a constitutional amendment approved in June 1997, presidents are now allowed to run for re-election once. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the incumbent at the time the amendment was approved, won re-election in 1998 in the first round with 53.1 per cent of the vote. However, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva polled 46 per cent in the first round in 2002 and was elected in the run-off round.
The rules governing legislative elections have remained essentially unchanged since they were first established in 1946. The Senate is the chamber where the regions of Brazil are represented: each of the 27 component parts of the federation is represented by three senators who are elected by plurality for an eight-year term. Membership is renewed every four years by one-third and two-thirds, in alternation: when two senators are to be elected, voters have two votes under a Block Vote (BV) system.
The Chamber of Deputies has 513 members who compete in 27 multi-member electoral districts, corresponding to the 26 states and Brasília. Their magnitude is determined by population, subject to the restriction that no state can have fewer than eight or more than 70 representatives. Elections take place under a system of open-list PR. Each voter has one vote to cast, which can be given to a political party or to an individual. Votes given to candidates from each party are pooled and added to the votes received by that party to give a total party vote, which is used to determine the number of seats to be allocated to each party. The candidates with the most votes on each party list win the seats allocated to that party. Seat allocation has been made under the D’Hondt Formula since 1950. Parties that do not gain a full quota in a district are, however, excluded from gaining a seat. Until 1998 the calculation of the quota was based on the total number of valid and blank votes, making the threshold for representation higher.
Deliberate Malapportionment
The rules for the Chamber of Deputies elections are probably the most controversial element of the Brazilian electoral system. The floor and the ceiling on the size of electoral districts mean that representation in the Chamber in terms of population is uneven across the states. This seriously violates the principle of ‘one person, one vote, one value’ (OPOVOV), as the number of votes necessary to elect one representative in São Paulo, which has over 25 million voters and 70 seats, is ten times higher than it is in Amapá, which has about 290,000 voters and eight seats. The resulting malapportionment benefits the less populous states, which tend to be poorer and more reliant on agriculture, and is disadvantageous to the larger states, which are richer and more industrialized. For this reason it has been blamed as one of the main mechanisms for reinforcing traditionalism in politics and thereby weakening political parties.
However, this needs to be qualified. The only significant loser from malapportionment is the state of São Paulo, where the number of representatives would increase by about 40 if the size of the electoral districts reflected population size strictly. Some other states are marginally under-represented, the second-biggest loss occurring in Minas Gerais (about four representatives). The losses due to malapportionment are therefore concentrated. They also reflect the goals of the makers of the 1946 constitution, who were concerned with finding a formula that would prevent São Paulo (and to a lesser extent Minas Gerais) from dominating the federation as they had done during the period known as the First Republic (1899–1930).
To the extent that malapportionment favours relatively poor states politically, it may help
to promote a regional redistribution of wealth that is of no small consequence in a country with such high levels of regional inequality as Brazil.
In addition, the frequent assumption that over-represented states are capable of systematically blocking legislation of national scope remains to be proved. It is not necessarily the case that the pattern of politics that characterizes the over-represented states is any different from the one in the under-represented ones. Clientelistic practices exist in all states, and elections are mass phenomena that generate a high degree of competition. If clientelism characterizes Brazilian politics, malapportionment of the Chamber of Deputies is unlikely to be a significant cause.
Competition Between Parties—and Within Parties
One of the main features of the system of open-list PR for the Chamber of Deputies is that it induces both inter- and intra-party competition. These elections are quite competitive. For example, in 2002 a total of 4,901 candidates stood for the 513 seats in the Chamber. In only nine of the 27 districts were there fewer than 100 candidates; the lowest number was 66 for eight seats in Tocantins. There were 793 candidates for 70 seats from São Paulo, 602 for 46 seats from Rio, and 554 for 53 seats from Minas Gerais. Parties compete with each other. Candidates, seeking to be elected for the seats which their parties gain, compete among themselves for the votes their parties obtain. This is said to lead to personalism, which is considered to be at the root of the weakness of Brazil’s political parties, to clientelistic ties between voters and their representatives, and to a national legislature that is primarily concerned with local rather than national, and clientelistic rather than programmatic, issues.
Again, this view needs to be qualified. First, the view that it is personalism that mainly drives voters’ decisions in elections to the legislature in Brazil is far from well established. Although the proportion of preference votes (when the voter chooses a specific candidate, not simply the party) is far larger than the proportion of party votes, these figures say very little about how voters actually decide. If voters give greater relative weight to the individual than to the party, many voters who vote for a specific candidate would presumably also vote for that candidate even if he or she were to change parties. While no studies have tried to address this issue directly, scattered evidence indicates that representatives who switch parties in the middle of the legislative term are less likely to be re-elected, which suggests that they are not able to carry with them the votes that got them elected in the first place.
Voters and Their Representatives
Even less is known about the ties between voters and their representatives. A great deal of effort has been spent trying to uncover the pattern of clientelism and localized favours that must have served as the basis for a successful electoral campaign and legislative career. Successful candidates, it is said, are those who bring ‘pork’ to their ‘constituency’. In Brazil’s multi-member district system, however, the individual member is one of at least eight representing the district, which makes it difficult to establish the link between a particular member and a new spending project. Even though some candidates may and do try to carve de facto geographic constituencies for themselves, this is not the only, and may not even be the most effective, way of getting into the Chamber of Deputies. One study of the geographical distribution of the votes of successful candidates demonstrates that in 1994 and 1998 only about 17 per cent of representatives adopted such a strategy, that is, were able to obtain the largest share of votes in a cluster of geographically concentrated localities. The others adopted different strategies, such as sharing with competitors a relatively defined geographic area, dominating localities that were distant from each other, or obtaining relatively small shares of their total vote in geographically dispersed areas. Given the level of competition of elections and the lack of legally protected constituencies, it is unlikely that a representative will feel safe about his or her ‘bailiwick’. Indeed, rates of re-election are not very high: estimates put it at around 60 per cent of those who seek re-election. Thus, clientelism does not characterize, at least not exclusively, the ties between representatives and voters.
Does the Electoral System Contribute to Party Fragmentation?
There is much we still need to know about the way in which the system of open-list PR with large electoral districts, such as the one that exists in Brazil, operates. We do know, however, that elections are extremely competitive, that the advantage of incumbency is relatively weak, and that deputies’ relations with their electoral districts differ, so that there is no dominant strategy for a successful candidacy.
The extent in which the electoral system induces clientelism and individualism inside the Chamber of Deputies is at least questionable. While it is beyond the scope of this overview to discuss the mechanisms which the president and the party leaders may use to shape the behaviour of individual deputies, deputies face other pressures in addition to the demands of localized and particularistic constituencies. These pressures are a counterbalance to increased party fragmentation.
Party fragmentation in the Brazilian legislature has been held responsible for a number of the malaises the country has suffered from in the past 15 years. The high degree of fragmentation of the party system is usually attributed to a combination of factors, which include the electoral system and its individualistic tendencies, the characteristics of presidential systems, and the strong federalism adopted by the 1988 constitution.
The degree of fragmentation in the Chamber of Deputies has, however, remained constant, at around eight effective parties, since the 1990 election. Some aspects of the electoral law tend to favour the larger parties and work against fragmentation. Examples include the adding of blank votes to the base on which the electoral quota is calculated (which makes the quota larger and hence more difficult to achieve), and the exclusion of all parties that do not obtain one quota in a district from winning a remainder seat.
The links between presidentialism and party systems are not yet well enough understood. This leaves federalism as a possible cause of fragmentation of the party system. Some of the national parties in Brazil are de facto coalitions of regional parties. Smaller parties emerge out of these coalitions for purely local reasons, thus leading to a multiplication of parties at the national level. Whether this is the real or the only reason why new parties emerge, it remains unclear whether federalism is a cause of fragmentation or simply a reflection of the variety of regional interests that a country as large as Brazil must accommodate in order to operate democratically.
