Electoral system and the lack of accountability in Brazilian politics
This is a short summary of my 2016 research on electoral systems and Brazilian politics
Issue
While the 1988 Constitution was an important step in the return of democratic rule to Brazil, its resulting political institutions have not fared well. Brazilian public governance has been plagued by countless corruption charges, inefficient governments and political instability. This paper examines some of the electoral rules which might be at the root of this problem.
Background
The 1988 Constitution established a tripartite separation of powers with parallel elections for the executive and the legislative branches. Each of the three levels of government uses the same system. Elections are held once every four years for a fixed term. For the executive branch, the country utilizes a two-round majoritarian system (i.e., if someone surpasses 50% of the vote, he is elected on the first round; if no one reaches that level, the two most popular candidates go to a decisive second round). For the legislative branch, the country utilizes a proportional system (with open lists, multi- member districts and multi-party coalitions).
The system utilized for the executive branch is very popular (Brazilians massively voted against its replacement at the federal level in a recent referendum). This is probably due to the fact that the two-round majoritarian system is very straightforward. The system gives better odds to challengers from small parties without generating an excessive amount of candidates. It functions as a middle ground between first-past-the-post (where the two main parties benefits the most) and proportional systems (where a multitude of small parties tend to arise). It allows voters to pick among multiple choices while still knowing who they are voting for.
The same does not happen at the legislative branch. Brazil’s particular implementation of a proportional electoral system became so convoluted that it removed accountability from the system as a whole. The number of parties grew to the point that no group enjoys a significant share of parliamentary seats. The largest parties usually control only a tenth of the available seats and multiple parties have less than 2% of the vote. In this extremely fragmented scenario, even passing a simple and popular bill becomes next to impossible since it must be negotiated among multiple political players. Moreover, party fragmentation has weakened even the merits of proportional representation itself. Over 2/3 of voters consistently claim that party membership has no bearing on their voting decision. Thus, in a peculiar paradox, Brazil has so many parties that party membership no longer matters.
Analysis
In theory, proportional representation should not be a problem. In fact, the move towards more proportionality has been a staple of many electoral reforms in the past few decades. Therefore, it is important to understand what Brazil got wrong in trying to implement it.
We should look into the basic principles behind electoral systems. Proportional representation is based on the notion that each group of candidates should have a number of seats proportional to their popular support. Thus, a group of candidates with the support of 10% of the population should have around 10% of the available seats (proved the minor necessary adjustments to account for split seats). The challenge lies in establishing adequate rules regarding the grouping of the candidates. Which is another way of saying: a proportional system requires a party system.
This gives us an important clue into what went wrong in Brazil. The 1988 Constitution came after two decades of authoritarian military rule. Therefore, the country simply did not have a mature party system which could support proportional elections.
Of course, this begs the question: Why a mature party system did not arise in the years following the new constitution?
For that answer, we must look into other characteristics of the Brazilian electoral system. Other mechanisms came into play which prevented parties to mature into important political entities.
The first piece of the puzzle is the open list system. This means that the distribution of seats among each group is not known in advance, but arises out of the electoral process by virtue of the relative popularity of each candidate. Thus, if the Group A has earned the right to three seats, those three seats will be awarded to the three members of Group A with the most individual votes (regardless whether they are senior or junior party members). In itself, the open list is an institutional mechanism which increases voter choice (since it allows voters to pick a junior member against the wishes of party leadership), but it has its drawbacks. Most importantly, it decreases party loyalty (since party leadership might be displaced by recent, uncooperative arrivals) and increases the complexity of the voting decision (since voters are not aware of who is actually getting elected from each list beforehand).
The voting decision is further complicated by the fact that Brazil has massive, multi- member electoral districts. Instead of dividing up the territory into smaller districts, elections in Brazil are always province-wide affairs. In the case of the largest provinces, this means that over fifty seats are simultaneously in dispute. Moreover, since each list of candidates can field more challengers than the number of seats available, this means hundreds of candidates competing in a single race. Thus, instead of choosing among a handful of candidates from a small district, Brazilians must pick among huge, province-wide lists with hundreds of names. It becomes practically impossible for voter to accurately assess so many variables. Most striking, this dilution of the field leads to many races being decided by less than 0.1% of the popular vote.
A third piece of the puzzle lies in the use of “electoral coalitions”. This allows multiple parties to momentarily band together to build a single open list. Each electoral coalition is built for a specific electoral dispute. Therefore, it is entirely possible for two parties to be opponents in Province A while remaining allies in Province B. Moreover, coalitions are valid only for the election itself. Thus, multi-party electoral coalitions cheapen all party’s brands while making it next to impossible for voters to keep track of whom they are actually voting for (after all, a vote for “Coalition X” might help “Party A” or “Party B”).
The combined result of those three rules is the removal of accountability from the electoral system. Brazilians have no power to directly reward or punish a candidate. Unpopular candidates are protected by a layer of party membership (they can survive scandals by jumping from one party list to another). Furthermore, even unpopular parties can find cover under the layer of coalition membership (a group of disgraced parties can band together to pool enough votes to protect a few parliamentary seats). It goes without saying that such a large disconnection between citizens and representatives can explain many of the governance problems faced by the country in the last couple of decades.
Concluding remarks
This papers attempts to show that, contrary to current conventional wisdom, proportional systems are not always a positive development. Each system has its own sets of virtues and vices which might be enhanced by its underlying rules.
For instance, majoritarian systems (like Canada’s first-past-the-post) have an important benefit: they allow for instant democratic accountability. In a single-member district, the majority of the population will always have the option to band together for (or against) a politician. Even as an implied threat, the possibility of removal of office functions as an effective mechanism to keep negative behaviour in check.
Proportional systems deal with accountability in a quite different manner. Citizens have much less power to express their preferences towards a single candidate because their vote goes primarily to the party as a whole. Therefore, this kind of election is not effective as a sanctioning mechanism against specific candidates. Its merits lie in gauging how popular certain political principles are in society — and not how popular
individual candidates are. Thus, in a proportional system, personal accountability comes as an indirect result of party discipline: since political parties can be punished by voters, party leadership will try to keep its members in check ahead of the next round of elections. Of course, this implies that proportional system require a mature party system in order to produce personal accountability. Without stable parties, we cannot hope for political sanctions to trickle down to individual candidates.
With that in mind, we can conclude that Brazil has two quite distinct paths to reform its system: it must either move away from a proportional system or built stronger parties. Both proposals are currently being debated by the Brazilian national legislature. However, both strategies must contend with a seemly unsurmountable obstacle: how can an unaccountable system reform itself?
