Programs and Parties: Rethinking Electoral Competition Through Analysis of Brazilian 'Grotões'

Nara Salles

doi:10.1590/1981-3821201900020003

Abstract

The 'salience theory of party competition' moves on from the 'programmatic paradox' imposed by the classic Downsian proximity model and demonstrates that parties compete with each other by means of the emphases they give to certain issues. They do this by leveraging their government programs to shape voter preferences that form an innate component of the electoral process. This phenomenon has been neglected in a Brazil supposedly dominated by weak parties, personality politics and clientelism. This scenario is most pronounced at a local level, particularly in the country's so-called 'grotoes' where the electorate is motivated by a desire to meet its basic needs, which has the effect of strengthening client relationships with political candidates. In these areas, the relevance of government programs reaches its nadir. The aim of this article is to investigate this phenomenon in Brazilian municipalities with the lowest Municipal Human Development Index (MHDI) scores. The study is underpinned by two hypotheses: 01. that government programs form an integral component of electoral competition in Brazil and 02. that they are formulated along partisan lines. In order to test these hypotheses, I have performed an analysis of the government programs registered by mayoral candidates running in 2012 and 2016, using the text analysis method that estimates political positions through word frequency (Wordfish). The results fully confirm the first hypothesis but only partly confirm the second.

Highlights

Government programs may be important, if not central to many party or electoral competition theories applied to democracies, they have been neglected by the literature on Brazilian elections
This new requirement – alongside recent efforts to demonstrate the importance of government programs (BABIRESKI, 2014; JORGE et al, 2018; KITSCHEL et al, 2010, OLIVEIRA, 2011; TAROUCO, 2011; TAROUCO and MADEIRA, 2013) – puts us in a position to resume the debate on electoral competition in Brazil from a fresh perspective
In order to do this, I have performed an analysis of the government programs registered by mayoral candidates in the 2012 and 2016 elections in Brazilian municipalities with very low Municipal Human Development Index (MHDI) scores according to the 2010 Brazilian Atlas of Human Development

Summary

Introduction

Government programs may be important, if not central to many party or electoral competition theories applied to democracies, they have been neglected by the literature on Brazilian elections This oversight can be attributed to the widely held belief that Brazil's political scene is made up of weak parties and that personality politics and relational practices such as clientelism hold sway. For such authors as Ames (2003) and Mainwaring (1991, 1999), this perspective is associated with the current open-list proportional representation system, which favors political individualism Such a diagnosis follows quite naturally in the light of the fact that historical continuities have been unable to replace the country's traditional political elites and their archaic political practices (HAGOPIAN, 1996). From the point of view of this study, there would be no contradiction in concluding that parties and candidates leverage government programs for the sole purpose of electoral competition

Objectives

Findings

Methods