In contemporary world, are strong the clues that political parties are no longer a big electoral reference. There was a loss of ideological identity by partisan organizations. Thus, some forms of political representation rearticulates and can contribute in relationship between principal and agent. Among of such forms of representation, stands out the electoral accountability. This instrument means the capacity of reward or punishment of representative in an electoral moment. However, to that it can be developed, there is the necessity of the voter know who is government, or, in conceptual terminology, have clarity of responsibility. Some institutional variations can difficult the vision about who governs. Among them, a high partisan fragmentation can inhibit the electoral comprehension about who is government, hampering, with this, the electoral accountability. The Brazilian case serves like a big reference because of yours extreme relevant number of political parties in Legislative. In theory, a wide partisan participation in political arena favors a democracy more consensual, more benevolent. Thus, the work’s objective is evaluate how an increase of political parties difficult the capacity of know who is responsible for policies adopted. For this, elaborates the hypothesis: in Legislative, as bigger the party fragmentation, more difficult to the voter identify the government party. To test this, we created a proxy of clarity of responsibility and a database of presidentialist countries of American continent between elections from 1993 until 2012. Utilizing electoral data, information about government type and the index of effective number of political parties. The data was processed from SPSS. The results show how countries with high party fragmentation and with government coalitions hamper the association between the success or fail of incumbent party in Legislative and Executive, accepting the hypothesis. It also shows that Brazilian multiparty system hampers the approximation from performance of incumbent party between the House of Representatives and the Presidency. Therefore, the model of Brazilian democracy departs of notion of electoral accountability, more important in majoritarian democratic models. In current difficulty of political representation by partisan organizations, the lack of such instrument can show consequences yet do not explored by political science.
political parties; clarity of responsibility; electoral accountability; partisan fragmentation; elections
