How Many Political Parties Should Brazil Have? A Data-Driven Method to Assess and Reduce Fragmentation in Multi-Party Political Systems

PLOS ONE, Dec 2019

In June 2013, Brazil faced the largest and most significant mass protests in a generation. These were exacerbated by the population’s disenchantment towards its highly fragmented party system, which is composed by a very large number of political parties. Under these circumstances, presidents are constrained by informal coalition governments, bringing very harmful consequences to the country. In this work I propose ARRANGE, a dAta dRiven method foR Assessing and reduciNG party fragmEntation in a country. ARRANGE uses as input the roll call data for congress votes on bills and amendments as a proxy for political preferences and ideology. With that, ARRANGE finds the minimum number of parties required to house all congressmen without decreasing party discipline. When applied to Brazil’s historical roll call data, ARRANGE was able to generate 23 distinct configurations that, compared with the status quo, have (i) a significant smaller number of parties, (ii) a higher discipline of partisans towards their parties and (iii) a more even distribution of partisans into parties. ARRANGE is fast and parsimonious, relying on a single, intuitive parameter.

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How Many Political Parties Should Brazil Have? A Data-Driven Method to Assess and Reduce Fragmentation in Multi-Party Political Systems

October How Many Political Parties Should Brazil Have? A Data-Driven Method to Assess and Reduce Fragmentation in Multi-Party Political Systems 0 Computer Science Department, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais , Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais , Brazil 1 Editor: Cheng-Yi Xia, Tianjin University of Technology , CHINA In June 2013, Brazil faced the largest and most significant mass protests in a generation. These were exacerbated by the population's disenchantment towards its highly fragmented party system, which is composed by a very large number of political parties. Under these circumstances, presidents are constrained by informal coalition governments, bringing very harmful consequences to the country. In this work I propose ARRANGE, a dAta dRiven method foR Assessing and reduciNG party fragmEntation in a country. ARRANGE uses as input the roll call data for congress votes on bills and amendments as a proxy for political preferences and ideology. With that, ARRANGE finds the minimum number of parties required to house all congressmen without decreasing party discipline. When applied to Brazil's historical roll call data, ARRANGE was able to generate 31 distinct configurations that, compared with the status quo, have (i) a significant smaller number of parties, (ii) a higher discipline of partisans towards their parties and (iii) a more even distribution of partisans into parties. ARRANGE is fast and parsimonious, relying on a single, intuitive parameter. - In June 2013, Brazil faced the largest and most significant mass protests in a generation, comparable in size to the protests that triggered the collapse of the military dictatorship in 1984 [1]. The 2013 protests had been exacerbated by the broader disenchantment of the population towards the party system in Brazil [2]. Banners with sentences such as “no party represents me” or “we don’t have a party, we are Brazil!” were commonly seen among the protesters. In response to these protests, the government proposed a program of political reform [1]. However, more than one year has passed and very little has been done. Why are people so unhappy with the Brazilian party system? To illustrate its incapability, consider the following examples. 19 months before Rio de Janeiro stages South America’s first Olympic games, an Evangelical pastor without any link to sports was nominated as Brazil’s data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. new sports minister. He replaced communist Aldo Rebelo, who oversaw preparations for the World Cup and was highly criticized for subsidizing the construction of white-elephant football stadiums [3]. Aldo Rebelo, who in 1994 proposed a bill that prohibits the adoption of any technological innovation in local, state and federal agencies, is, ironically, Brazil’s new minister of science and technology. Moreover, in 2010 elections, Tiririca, a well known entertainer whose career began as a circus clown in Brazil, was first elected to represent São Paulo in Congress, winning the most votes of any candidate in the country with the slogans “It can’t get any worse” and “What does a Congressman do? In fact, I do not know, but vote for me and I will tell you”. One of the main causes of Brazil’s political inefficiency is its highly fragmented party system [4]. This is a system with many political parties and with no one party being able to obtain an absolute majority in the representative assembly. The more fragmented the party system is, the less likely it is that the president’s party will control a majority of seats in the legislature. Therefore, presidents are usually forming informal coalition governments, needing to build crossparty coalitions to implement most major policies [5]. Under these circumstances, many (if not most) deputies spend the bulk of their time arranging jobs and pork-barrel projects for their constituents in exchange for legislative support [6]. Also, parties rarely organize around national-level questions, which means that Congress rarely deals with serious social and economic issues [6]. As a consequence, individualism, clientelism, and personalism, rather than programmatic appeals, dominate electoral campaigns [6]. More generally, party system fragmentation impacts the electoral dynamic, the process of coalition formation, governing, and ultimately, the survival of political systems in presidential democracies [7]. In Brazil, party system fragmentation has reached one of the highest levels ever found in the world [8, 9]. After 2014 elections, the number of parties represented in Congress grew from 23 to 28. Besides Brazil, many countries have party systems with high levels of fragmentation, such as Bolivia, Bulgaria, Denmark, Ecuador, Finland, France, Guatemala, India, Israel, Italy, Netherlands and Thailand [9]. In theory, the number of parties of a country can be explained by its electoral and social structures [10–12]. With regard to the electoral structure, whil (...truncated)


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Pedro O. S. Vaz de Melo. How Many Political Parties Should Brazil Have? A Data-Driven Method to Assess and Reduce Fragmentation in Multi-Party Political Systems, PLOS ONE, 2015, 10, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0140217