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The relevance of municipal elections: analyzing the recent trajectory and political strength of the Brazilian Socialist Party

ABSTRACT

Introduction:

The paper aims to contribute to researches on party’s electoral strategies by analyzing the latest Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) performances. In order to accomplish it, we explore what leads the party to put forward mayor candidates in 2000 and 2012 elections.

Materials and Methods:

We gathered electoral data from Electoral Supreme Court (TSE) database. Through multivariate logistic regressions, taking into account socioeconomic and political covariates, we stablished the odds ratio for PSB putting candidates on the ballot. Next, We compared the results with Worker’s Party (PT), Brazilian Social Democracy’s Party (PSDB) and Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) performances.

Results:

The first finding reveals PSB’s stable political growth not enclosed to Brazil’s northeast. We also found PSB as a party with the highest number of own candidacies in urban centers. We infer that the party’s low capacity to head local campaigns is due to lack of local leaders’ autonomy. Moreover, their low capacity to influence elections in smaller cities can be explained by restricted political autonomy of local leaders, due to the weak institutionalization of party organization consisting predominantly of provisional committees instead of permanent ones.

Discussion:

We analyze PSB’s dependency on incentives from party coordination at the subnational level as a challenge to PSB’s political growth in municipal elections. This context would make PSB susceptible to this type of incentive when compared to stronger national contenders.

Keywords:
Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB); Local elections; Party Organization; Campaign nationalization; Provisional committees

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