ABSTRACT
Introduction:
The crisis of political representativeness in Brazil after 2013 evidenced the inadequacy of the country's electoral and partisan arrangements. Under this context, the collective mandates emerged. They are mandates composed by two or more persons that occupy the same chair in the municipal, state, or federal legislature. In 2020, there was more than 200 collective candidacies, of which more than 20 were elected. Starting from the theoretical key of the incremental institutional transformation, the paper analyzes the nature of collective mandates in Brazil as a way of institutional bypass to the individual elective mandate.
Materials and methods:
The analysis is based on two theoretical approaches: 1) relationships between institutional arrangement, electoral and party system, and elective obligation based on the model proposed by Arend Lijphart; 2) the concept of institutional bypass elaborated by Mariana Mota Prado and Michael J. Trebilcock. An extensive review of the literature on collective mandates in Brazil was carried out in the databases of the National Library, Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations, Digital Library of the Chamber of Deputies, Google Scholar, HeinOnline, Oxford Handbook Online, ProQuest, Scielo, SSRN and Scopus. In total, only 44 works on the subject were found, revealing the need for research that fills gaps in this subject. We also analyzed news and electoral advertisements of collectively elected mandates in Brazil.
Results:
We conclude that there are caveats to be made when comparing the collective mandate with the bypass figure. Traditionally, bypass is applied to institutional arrangements aimed at providing services. Despite this, we argue that the approximation is useful since collective mandates are inserted in a highly competitive field such as the electoral field.
Discussion:
The article improves the understanding of collective mandates within the Brazilian political-institutional framework, advancing the debate on the normative security of this type of mandate. This has theoretical implications for institutional transformations, as well as empirical implications for the practice of collective mandates and for attempts to regulate this new figure of representation.
Keywords
representativeness; collective candidacies; collective mandates; institutional reform; institutional bypass