Electoral justice as a strategy: candidates, brokers and bureaucrats in municipal elections.

• Grant number: 24/16747-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: October 01, 2024
• End date: September 30, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - Political Behavior
• Principal Investigator: George Avelino Filho
• Grantee: André Luiz Togni Barros Filho
• Host Institution: Escola de Administração de Empresas de São Paulo (EAESP). Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 19/27645-8 - Electoral strategies and public policies: what is the importance of municipalities?, AP.TEM

Abstract

In many countries, the political elites' acceptance of competing for power through clean and fair elections is accompanied by a series of rules that make electoral competition viable and create limits on the actions and strategies that candidates and parties can take. Not only do the rules that regulate elections vary in different parts of the world, but also the range of powers that politicians assign to the judiciary or bureaucratic agencies to enforce the rules of the game (Paranhos et al., 2014). In Brazil, the electoral justice system is responsible for regulating elections. In addition to managing the elections, with activities ranging from registering candidates to counting votes, the electoral justice system is responsible for imposing limits on illegal practices, such as vote buying and irregular use of campaign resources, as well as preventing the candidacy of incumbents responsible for irregularities in public administration. The problem is that the electoral justice system only acts when provoked by external actors, such as political opponents, prosecutors and audit courts. The literature on the subject in Brazil has brought important contributions regarding the strategic use of allegations of vote buying (Barboza, 2015), the impeachment of mayors following decisions by the electoral court (Silva 2016; Zalamena 2013), as well as the profile of candidates targeted by lawsuits (Mancuso et al, 2023). To further advance the debate, it is essential to have a systematic contribution regarding the actors and reasons that lead to the use of the electoral court as a strategy to impose costs on candidates and parties. It is worth noting that impeachments are not restricted to illegal actions during the campaign, but also involve incumbents responsible for irregularities during the management of their governments. The objective of the project is to analyze which actors have provoked the electoral court to impose costs on candidates and parties, as well as which reasons are mobilized to justify the actions. To this end, the scholarship holder will have access to data on all cases that were processed in the Electoral Court between 1988 and 2022, including those that went through the TREs and TSEs. The data has already been downloaded as part of the thematic project. Analyzing the actors and the reasons used to impose costs on candidates and parties faces some challenges that the scholarship holder will have to face. First, the information on each Electoral Court case is available in HTML format. Each HTML has tables linked to specific aspects of the case, such as the parties involved, the processing in the electoral court, and the court decision. It will be up to the scholarship holder to extract this information and organize it in databases. Second, the scholarship holder will have to clean the data, which contains typing errors and repeated information. Third, through computational methods, the scholarship holder will have to identify the authors of the action, which may involve candidates, parties, the Public Prosecutor's Office and courts and accounts. Fourth, the time at which the action was filed, which may involve reprisals against elected candidates or the imposition of costs before the elections. Finally, the biggest challenge will be to identify the reasons that underpin the action. In short, the challenges mentioned are essential to understanding how electoral justice has served as a strategic means to target candidates and parties. The project contributes to the purposes of the thematic project. This is because the focus of the project is to analyze the use of electoral justice as a political strategy to target candidates and parties at the local level. This is the first step to understanding, in a next stage, whether such a strategy has an effect on the electoral dispute. After all, to assess whether a strategy has achieved its ends, one must first understand what the objectives of the strategy were.