Eleições legislativas e geografia do voto em contexto de preponderância do Executivo

Abstract

The article analyzes the impact of governing coalitions at the national and state levels on the geography of the vote in Brazilian elections to the federal chamber. Our central claim is that the government-opposition divide has a very strong impact on the territorial distribution of parties’ and candidates’ vote. Candidates affiliated with parties that integrate governing coalitions at the national and state levels simultaneously have a much greater likelihood of obtaining geographically dispersed and dominant vote distributions within the state's territory. We argue, further, that this effect weakens incumbency advantage in legislative elections. The empirical analysis relies on a large dataset with information on indexes of domination and concentration of the vote for all candidates to the Federal Chamber from 1998 to 2010. Statistical results confirm that candidates affiliated with parties that are members of governing coalitions at the federal and state level display much more often fragmented-dominant voting patterns. Also, the empirical evidence indicates that the effect of incumbency on electoral domination is less relevant than the benefits of access to resources controlled by the federal executive. The article concludes that traditional hypotheses on the electoral connection deserve to be reassessed considering the preponderance of Executives and strong subnational governments in Brazil's presidentialism.

KEYWORDS:
electoral geography; legislative elections; federalism; presidentialism; electoral connection