Electoral strategy in Brazilian municipalities: Programmatic component and partisan alignment

Abstract

Introduction: This paper aims to investigate theprogrammatic component in Brazilian municipal elections. We want to know if and to what extent government programs demanded by law since 2009 are partisan aligned. Despite the weakness and the preponderance of particularistic practices inside Brazilian parties, often stressed by the literature, our hypothesis is that parties' programmatic dimension does provide an electoral strategy, presenting some degree of partisan consistency. Materials and Methods: In order to test it, we analyzed 3.410 programs from 2016 election's mayoral candidates in 1.355 municipalities, through the text analysis method that estimates political positions from word frequency (wordfish). Results: Our findings reveals that: 1) from the electoral point of view, mayor candidates distinguish themselves programmatically and align each other on partisan lines when competing in bipartisan disputes in small cities; 2) from a partisan point of view, big parties spread their policy proposals in a diffuse way. That was the case of PMDB, PSDB, DEM, PT, PSB and PSD and we may associate this to a wider electoral strategy, trying to get closer to the average voter. Discussion: That means not only that the programmatic dimension is one of the strategies mobilized in Brazilian electoral competition, but also that parties contribute to its understanding, even though not always decisively.