The hyperfragmentation of the Brazilian party system is unparalleled. The party system has splintered repeatedly over the years, with 24 parties currently represented in the lower house of Congress and 33 parties registered at the electoral court at last count. The effective number of parliamentary parties – a standard measure of parties to seats – has increased correspondingly, from roughly 4 in 1988 to more than 16 in 2018.
If you imagined that this might be driven by the incentives facing politicians, you’d be correct. However, in a recent article in Comparative Politics, Timothy Power and Cesar Zucco do a bang-up job of demonstrating just how strong these incentives are. They eliminate alternative explanations, such as identity and issue-based cleavages or changes in electoral rules, and demonstrate the range of strategic considerations that lead politicians to prefer to be high-ranking members of small parties rather than low-ranking members of large parties.
Core to this strategic calculus is the fact that most politicians are “free agents”: they “possess personal political capital (i.e., votes and networks)” that is “portable across parties.” Under these conditions, politicians have the flexibility to choose which electoral lists to join. Leading a small party in one’s own state provides much more flexibility than being at the mercy of a big party’s foibles, especially as large parties may need to trade off various interests at the federal level as they decide which multiparty electoral coalitions they will form nationally. In consequence, Power and Zucco show, 2 of every 5 deputies in the lower house today are the only representatives of their state-level parties – “truly one-person enterprise[s]” that would otherwise be unexpected in a country with very high average district magnitudes.
Second, even as electoral rules have remained relatively stable, campaign funding has increased significantly in volume and become much more favorable to small parties, raising the incentives to striking out on one’s own. Third, because presidents in Brazil’s coalitional presidential system “have attempted to insure against defections by building oversized coalitions,” they have wooed even the smallest parties, allowing these to extract resources from the presidency via legislative bargaining. Running one’s own party guarantees that one has a “seat at the bargaining table” in negotiations with the President, and ensures that the returns from such bargaining are not dissipated among a lot of troublesome backbenchers.
All in all, these strategic considerations add up to an entrepreneurial race to create ever more “microparties,” and also to a cycle of ever more competitive horse-trading for legislative support, in an accelerating feedback loop. Although there are a few factors that lead to some consolidation of parties within Congress once elections are over, the underlying strategic conditions are omnipresent in legislators’ calculations. This suggests that whichever candidate is elected this October will be forced to negotiate with an ever more fractious Congress. If Lula, the current front-runner, were to be elected, on current trends he will likely govern a party system that is twice as fragmented as it was when he first took office in 2003. Under these conditions, even the most able coalition-builder will need to employ all of the tools at their disposal to push their preferred legislative projects forward effectively.
Image: By author. Data from https://www.camara.leg.br, January 2023.
