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Al Brown's avatar

Thanks for this excellent and thought-provoking essay. I live in Brazil, a country that practices proportional representation at the municipal, state, and federal (lower house of Congress only, the Chamber of Deputies) levels, so I can add some further observations on how it works, and how it doesn’t.

Brazil has no national electoral threshold and many natural thresholds (roughly, number of seats available divided by the number of registered voters) for parties at different levels, so parties proliferate. There are always around 30 parties; currently 19 parties are represented in the National Congress, and nine others without current federal representatives are recognized by the Electoral Courts and can field candidates. Legislative elections are generally at-large. Each party (or federation of parties, for which there are special rules) proposes a list of candidates, and each voter votes for just one name for each office. Seats are allocated to parties based on the number of votes that all of each party’s candidates receive, and the party’s seats are distributed to its candidates based on the number of votes that each candidate receives, in descending order starting with the one who received the most votes. Legislators at all levels have alternates from the same party who take their places if they take leaves of absence or permanently vacate their posts between elections. This is the basic system for city councils, state legislatures, and the federal Chamber of Deputies.

City, state, and federal executives are elected individually. Each party or coalition of parties (with different rules from and less permanent than legislative federations) names an individual candidate for senator, or a two-person candidate slate for prefect (mayor), governor, or president with a candidate for vice in each race. Forming a coalition creates the chance to gain more votes, but it often means that the executive and his or her second will be of different parties. For the federal presidency and vice presidency, state governorships and vice governorships, and prefectures and vice-prefectures of cities of 100,000 inhabitants and over, there is a second round between the two top slates if none receive an absolute majority in the first round. For senators and prefects and vice-prefects of cities with fewer than 100,000 inhabitants, the candidates receiving the most votes in the first round win, regardless of the percentage of the vote.

This system creates extreme factionalization of legislative bodies, and often divisions between executives and their seconds. Brazil, like the United States, is very much a Center to Center/Right country, and what counteracts the factionalization at the federal level is a semi-formal coalition of the centrist parties in the Chamber of Deputies that’s generally called the “Centrão”, the “Big Center”. Brazilian presidents, whether of the Left or the Right, govern by cutting deals with the Centrão, and combining its votes with those of their own allies to form working majorities. All of the parties of the coalition expect to have ministries, so the Cabinet is always very large and subject to renegotiation. Something similar is acted out in the Senate, and in the state legislatures. This informal system is sometimes called “Presidencialismo às Avessas”, “Upside-down Presidentialism”, because it’s institutionally a Presidential system but functions almost as a Parliamentary one. The dominance of the Centrão determines that regardless of who the President is almost all changes will be gradual, and that distribution and re-distribution of appropriations is a major item on every agenda.

A factor that underlies all this is a weakness of proportional systems that I think too often goes unnoticed and uncommented, the lack of connection between individual officeholders and individual voters. The notion of “constituent services” so fundamental for successful American politicians, is unknown in Brazil. It never occurs to a Brazilian to write, or call, or email his or her Congress member or anyone else about a problem or a complaint, and an officeholder wouldn’t know how to respond to a contact like that if one arrived. They are approved by the voters once every four years, but aside from that have no contact, and no sense of responsibility to voters as individuals. In that context, careers depend on managing upward, on being a dependable team player for the party leadership, and gradually working one’s way up that party leadership. The folks back home aren’t a factor. At most, they’re an abstraction that periodically confirms the legitimacy that the party leadership provides.

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