The Use of Electoral Manipulation by Political Parties in Oligarchic Regimes: The Case of Brazil (1900-1930)
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2014
ABSTRACT The use of electoral manipulation by political parties has attracted much attention from... more ABSTRACT The use of electoral manipulation by political parties has attracted much attention from political scientists recently, but the debate has focused primarily on the contemporary period and autocratic regimes. In this paper, our objective is to analyze the use of electoral manipulation during the historical Brazilian oligarchic regime, observed much before its first democratic transition. While most authors claim that electoral fraud at that time was widespread, turning the level of political competition extremely low, we contend that fraudulent practices were actually an instrument for regulating political competition. We base our analyses on an original dataset with information from historical Annals of the Brazilian Congress. Evidence from appeals presented at the legislative floor by parties that had lost previous electoral contests suggests high level of political competition in most Brazilian federative units. Those parties had the ability to report cases of violence, intimidation of voters, and other kinds of fraud, within the frame of a legitimate federal political arena, suggesting that not one, but several parties were legitimately competing for state resources in each state. In a political system characterized by clientelistic voter-politician relations and lack of citizenship rights, the maintenance of political stability required the control over the electoral process, from voters' registration to the counting of votes, but several parties were persistently competing for such a control. Electoral fraud during the Brazilian pre-democratic period served as mechanism for regulating elites' struggle for power, rather than for eliminating competition altogether.
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Papers by paolo ricci
por meio de um levantamento de dados inéditos em jornais e fontes oficiais, o estudo revela que em 1932 a Justiça Eleitoral apresentava 1) um elevado comprometimento nos aspectos organizacionais, ainda que atuasse em condições de 2) relativa parcialidade, sobretudo no âmbito administrativo local. O artigo conclui propondo que o tema da democratização no Brasil deva ir além das dimensões clássicas discutidas pela literatura (sufrágio, voto secreto, competição política) e passe a incorporar o papel da Justiça Eleitoral, contribuindo para a construção de uma agenda de pesquisa em torno deste ramo especializado do Poder Judiciário.
pre-electoral or electoral phases. By examining the Brazilian First Republic (1889-1930), this article shifts the focus to a later phase, discussing a particular type of electoral fraud that has been little explored by the literature, namely, that perpetrated by the legislatures themselves during the process of giving final approval to election
results. The Brazilian case is interesting because of a practice known as degola (‘beheading’) whereby electoral results were altered when Congress decided on which deputies to certify as duly elected. This has come to be seen as a widespread and standard practice in this period. However, this article shows that this final phase of rubber-stamping or overturning election results was important not because of the number of degolas, which was actually much lower than the literature would have us believe, but chiefly because of their strategic use during moments of political uncertainty. It argues that the congressional certification of electoral results was deployed as a key tool in ensuring the political stability of the Republican regime in the absence of an electoral court.