ELECTORAL SYSTEMS AND CONGRESSIONAL MALFEASANCE: COMPARING BRAZILIAN SENATORS AND DEPUTIES IN THE SUPREME COURT CASES

Abstract

This article contributes to our understanding of therelationship between electoral systems and legislative malfeasance byexamining personal vote, district magnitude, and electoral accountability.Studies emphasizing individual responsibility argue that personal-voteelectoral systems promote good performance by elected politicians andconstrain their malfeasance by enabling voters to identify, monitor, andhold responsible individual politicians. Another strand of the literatureclaims that large district magnitude ensures the availability of goodpoliticians and electoral competition, which reduce malfeasance. Atfirst glance, personal-vote systems with relatively large magnitudedistricts, such as open-list proportional representation, appear to combinethe beneficial attributes of the electoral systems that prior studies haveshown to lower malfeasance. This study develops a proposition thatdue to high information costs to voters faced with many candidates,multimember-district personal-vote systems may weaken, rather thanstrengthen, electoral accountability. Thus, the combination of personalvotes and large district magnitude can paradoxically encourage the entryof bad politicians, facilitate their elections, and fail to deter them frommisconduct once elected into office. Examining data on congressionalmalfeasance in Brazil, this study finds that deputies, who are electedthrough relatively large magnitude open-list PR, are more likely toreceive court notices about the charges against them than senatorselected by plurality rule.