Party restriction on career decisions of Brazilian politicians: evidence from Brazilian city councilors

ABSTRACT

Introduction:

How much does intra-party competition affect the career decisions of Brazilian politicians? We know that careers result from the interaction between individual wills, on the one hand, and political opportunity structure, on the other. The party instances are central elements in this structure and shape the composition of slates of candidates in an election, since they are the initial place of political dispute. Therefore, they should affect the career choices of Brazilian city councilors.

Material and Methods:

We descriptively analyzed a survey applied to 422 city councilors from Minas Gerais in 2015. Based on this data, we compared the career choices declared by the councilmen with the candidacy record of these politicians in 2016 to verify the convergence between these two facts. Then, using data from all Brazilians councilors elected in 2012, we constructed a matched sample and estimated multivariate regression models to investigate the causal effect of intra-party competition on the probability of a city councilor running for mayor. Given the difficulty of observing intra-party competition, we created a proxy to identify competitive candidates according to characteristics prior to candidate registration in 2016.

Results:

The survey reveals that the vast majority of city councilors who intended to run for mayor in 2016 did not run. Multivariate regression models show causal evidence that city councilors who faced intra-party competition were less likely to run for the municipal chief executive. We found no variation in this effect among the ten parties with the highest number of elected candidates, as well as among different electorate sizes, except for those with more than 1 million voters (in which the effect was null).

Discussion:

Intra-party competition proved to be an active and important constraint on the decisions of the individuals evaluated. Career choices are directly influenced by party dynamics even in local politics, exactly where the literature points to weaker ties between politicians and political parties. Therefore, it is necessary to extend this analysis to other offices and other types of representatives.

Keywords
political careers; political parties; intra-party competition; local politics; city councilors