Abstract:
The article focus on analyzing the senatorial election of two seats, defining its place within the great family of majoritarian systems as a kind of block vote. I investigate several pieces of electoral law across Brazilian history in an effort to describe how it was initially employed and later modified. Furthermore, I perform a preliminary analysis of electoral results in the elections of 1994, 2002 and 2010. My main conclusion is that phenomena such as the “married vote” and the subjective ordinal vote, typically present in the dynamics of such competitions for two votes, justifies treating them as entirely distinct in its strategic effects from single-member plurality rule.
Keywords:
electoral systems; block vote; senate