THE END OF PRE-ELECTORAL COALITIONS IN PROPORTIONAL DISPUTES: where did the political parties go in the 2022 elections?

Constitution Amendment (EC in its Portuguese acronym) 97/2017 established the end of pre-electoral coalitions for legislative disputes. The 2020 municipal elections were the first to take place under the new law, when it was possible to observe a reduction in the party fragmentation of the city councils (Santana, Vasquez, Sandes-Freitas, 2021). The changes were applied for the state legislatures and for the Chamber of Deputies in the 2022 election. This article aims to analyze the impact of this rule change on Brazilian political parties in terms of candidacies and electoral results and investigate their effects on party fragmentation. To do so, we analyzed data from the disputes for federal deputy in two elections prior to the institutional change (2014 and 2018) and another with the new legislation already in progress (2022). The data were taken from the Open Data Portal of the Superior Electoral Court and were investigated using descriptive and inferential statistics. Our results indicate that EC 97/2017 reduced party fragmentation, parties anticipated the effects of the amendment, changing the candidacy pattern, and small parties had their chances of electing parliamentarians reduced.

Constitution Amendment 97/2017; Pre-electoral coalition; 2022 election; Chamber of Deputies; Party fragmentation