Social scientists are prone to disqualify the elections held during the Brazilian Empire. Elections would be marked by the indiscriminate and constant presence of manipulation, fraud and violence. This characterization is offered as proving that the representative government could not work on Brazil. This paper is an attempt to question this view. The paper deals with the effect of electoral laws over the electoral practices during the Brazilian Empire. More specifically, I discuss the effects of the 1824 Instructions, the 1842 Decree, and the 1846 Law over the use of manipulation, fraud and violence on elections. I show how the combination among these three resources varies as a function of the legislation. The main problem, the partisan manipulation of the composition of the constituency, has no easy institutional solution. The model tried by the 1846 Law is sophisticated and advanced. Its failure shows the limits of institutional solutions to deal with party competition.
Elections; Representative Government; Electoral Laws; Manipulation; Fraud; Violence