Does Greater Women’s Presence Make a Difference? The Composition of Executive Party Committees and the Allocation of Public Funds for Election Campaigns in the 2018 Race to Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies

Abstract

This article primarily aims to understand the extent to which women holding key party positions can contribute to improve women candidates' access to public funding for their campaigns. We have looked into the 2018 election to the Chamber of Deputies (Brazil’s lower house of Congress) and present the following hypotheses: the greater presence of women in their parties' key decision-making levels leads to better access for women who ran for office, and left-wing parties have more women on their executive committees and, consequently, better-funded women candidates. We have used data from the Electoral Data Repository and the Party Information Management System, disclosed by Brazil's Superior Electoral Court. With these data, we were able to measure the number of women holding key party positions and the total public funds allocated to women candidates. We have used descriptive statistics and beta regression analysis to work on this information. We observed that the presence of women at the highest ranking positions at the state level could be positively linked to the total funding received by women candidates. Investigations into national and state levels, on the other hand, did not show evidence of our second hypothesis, as left-wing parties performed very similarly to parties across the ideological spectrum.

Women's political participation; election funding; executive party committees; women members of female federal deputy