Principal investigator: Adriano Valladão Pires Ribeiro
Article title: Intra-party alliances and electoral performance in Brazil
Article authors: George Avelino, Ciro Biderman and Leonardo S. Barone
Location of the intervention: Brazil
Sample size: 266 municipalities
Main theme: Economic Policy and Governance
Type of Intervention: Impact on votes for state representative of having elected a mayor in the municipality in the previous election.
Main Variable of Interest: Proportion of votes for the party
Evaluation method: Discontinuous regression
Policy Problem
A nationally popular politician would be able to steer votes toward local candidates in elections, but how important would local politicians be in influencing voters to choose a particular candidate at another level of competition? More specifically, how much influence would a mayor have in impacting state legislative elections in favor of their party? This relationship will certainly depend on the party's capacity for articulation and organization.
Evaluation Context
For the party of an elected mayor to have a potential advantage in the following state election (which takes place 2 years after the local elections), its organization needs to be well-structured; otherwise, candidacies would be handled in an isolated and individual manner. Electoral planning will depend on the party's structure and administration, especially its degree of centralization. On the one hand, centralized parties would have a national leadership responsible for the entire organization and would make decisions regarding the recruitment of local leaders, the selection of candidates, and coalition strategies. On the other hand, decentralized parties would give more autonomy to local leaders to define strategies and negotiate coalitions.
In Brazil, the federal system recognizes the political sovereignty of municipalities and gives mayors the authority to implement certain public policies, particularly in education and health. Given this importance, the municipal level becomes a key element in electoral competition, culminating in a more decentralized party structure. Although there is an intra-party hierarchical order between the national leadership, state leadership, and municipal leadership, municipal conventions have a high degree of autonomy regarding recruitment, candidate selection, policy definition, and coalition strategies. This motivates the exploration of the importance of local leadership in broader elections.
Intervention Details
The influence exerted by mayors in state-level elections would signal the existence of intra-party coordination in Brazil and would also highlight the importance of local leadership. This idea contrasts with the intuition of national influence over local structures and the unanimity of higher party leadership over regional leadership. Avelino et al. (2012) explore this issue based on the results of the 2008 municipal and 2010 state elections in Brazil. First, the mayoral candidates are filtered to isolate only the two most voted, excluding municipalities with a second round and with only one competitor. Second, the proportion of nominal and party-list votes for state and federal deputy candidates from the parties of the two mayoral candidates selected by the first procedure is aggregated. Using the proportion of votes for deputies in 2010, along with some characteristics of the municipalities and the margin of victory of the mayors in 2008, the desired effect can be measured following the explanation below.
Methodology Details
To isolate the political effect of the mayor in elections for state representative, it would suffice to compare the difference in the proportion of votes when the same candidate won and lost the mayoral elections, with the difference then being counted as the mayor's influence. In practice, however, only one of the results (victory or defeat) is observed in the elections. Therefore, a new parameter for comparison must be found, and this is done by considering only the municipalities where the mayor's margin of victory over the second-place candidate in 2008 was small.
The idea behind the argument is that parties with similar electoral performance would have similar influence in municipalities; that is, when the difference in the margin of victory is small, it is assumed that the election was defined by random factors in voter behavior. Thus, in these municipalities, the influence of the two filtered parties would not be so distinct from each other, and the difference in the proportion of votes for deputy would be caused by the mayor. Therefore, the treatment group is composed of the winning party in each municipality in the 2008 mayoral elections, and the control group is the party that came in second place.
Results
The political effect of the mayor was measured for victory margins of less than 5%, 3%, and 1%, and for each of these exercises, the number of observations was 1374, 823, and 266 municipalities, respectively. Even with the variation in the victory margin and observations, the result of the mayor's political effect was similar in all measurements, ranging between 3,4% and 4,28%. In other words, winning the mayoral election implies a higher proportion of votes for deputies from the mayor's party in that municipality compared to votes for the party of the candidate who lost the municipal election.
Lessons in Public Policy
The study presented provides some lessons. First, it shows that the political effect of the mayor is positive; that is, the parties that elected mayors in 2008 had an advantage in the elections for state representatives in 2010. If there were no intra-party coordination, having an elected mayor would not be related to the votes in other spheres of government. In other words, this result highlights both the existence of relationships between the different levels of party organization and an active role of the mayor in supporting his party in state elections.
Reference
Avelino, George; Biderman, Ciro; Barone, Leonardo S. “Intra-party articulations and electoral performance in Brazil.” Dados, v. 55, n. 4, p. 987-1013, 2012.
