Democracy and informal institutions in Brazilian political parties

• Grant number: 22/00135-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: August 01, 2022
• End date: July 31, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - Political Behavior
• Principal Investigator: Pedro José Floriano Ribeiro
• Grantee: Fabiana Cristina dos Santos de Souza
• Supervisor: Susan Scarrow
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Houston (UH), United States
• Associated to the scholarship: 20/11889-2 - Democracy and informal institutions in Brazilian political parties, BP.DR

Abstract

This project proposes a comparative analysis of six Brazilian political parties, namely, PT, PSDB, MDB, DEM, PSD and PSOL, with regard to party organization, in order to understand the internal democracy of Brazilian parties from two axes: inclusiveness and formality in the selection of candidates and party leaders. The research aims to fill two gaps in the studies on party organization in Brazil: the first is to identify the extent to which statutes reflect the reality of internal party life, that is, to identify the real dynamics of Brazilian party functioning. The second gap that we seek to fill is to understand how internal democracy is associated with the degree of informality present in party organizations, that is, we will pay attention to the insufficiency of analyses that focus only on the formal character of party organizations. To this end, the research will observe the path taken by political parties after the freedom of association granted by the Party Law 1096, from 1995 until 2020. The question that supports the thesis is: do more democratic internal processes encourage organizations to be less informal? To answer it, three stages of work will be carried out: the first will be the analysis of party statutes to understand which path political parties have taken in relation to internal party democracy. Subsequently, from the results of the first stage, the research proposes to understand how internal democracy is correlated with a higher or lower degree of informality, using a binomial logistic regression model. Finally, in the third stage, we propose a typology to classify the analyzed parties into: 1) Formal Inclusive, 2) Informal Inclusive, 3) Formal Hegemonic and 4) Informal Hegemonic. (AU)