Spatial analysis of intra and inter-party fragmentation in subnational elections: revealing party coordination strategies

• Grant number: 15/00267-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: June 01, 2015
• End date: May 31, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - State and Government
• Principal Investigator: George Avelino Filho
• Grantee: Frederico Roman Ramos
• Host Institution: Escola de Economia de São Paulo (EESP). Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 13/15658-1 - Subnational political institutions: a comparative study of Brazilian States, AP.TEM

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to analyze the spatial distribution of the intra and interparty fragmentation index calculated for subsequent subnational elections in Brazil. We are specifically interested in the identification of geographical coordination strategies adopted by the parties to maximize votes. Our hypothesis is that each party establishes an internal evaluation process comparing the potential outcome of votes for candidates and their direct concurrent taking into account previous electoral results in different parts of the territory. To fulfill this objective, we propose to analyze the fragmentation index at the most disaggregate level available corresponding to the pooling places and apply spatial analysis techniques to identify empirically areas of dominance/fragmentation that could reflect different maximization strategies. We will use the data available at the CEPESPDATA, an application under development at the Center of Politics and Economics of the Public Sector - CEPESP/FGV that compiles the electoral results for all the Brazilian for recent subsequent elections. For the development of the spatial analysis it will be necessary to geocode all the pooling places. This will represent a substantial operational effort that will generate an important dataset infrastructure that will be internalized by CEPESP allowing the integration with other dataset such as the demographic census and the development of further investigations by different research groups at the institution.