Political Ambition and Powerless Subnational Actors: the Goal-Oriented Preferences of Brazilian State Legislators on Electoral Reform

• In Event: Recentralisation and Electoral Preferences at the Subnational Level

Abstract

Political scientists have long identified that incumbents’ main goal is to retain office or secure higher positions. In this light, scholars have argued that incumbents use the tools at their disposal to maximize their goals. One of these tools is electoral reform. Incumbents, however, are not always in the position of shaping rules to their favour. The Brazilian National Congress is currently engaged in a political reform that is set to change national and subnational electoral laws. Although federal legislators are the ones leading the debate, subnational actors will also be affected. Using data collected from an online survey experiment conducted with state legislators, the paper seeks to assess how endogenous institutionalism manifests itself at the subnational level. It does so by analyzing the preferences of state legislators in regards to the main aspects of the political reform bill, namely, electoral system, party lists, and campaign finance. In doing so, it tests the hypothesis that legislators’ preferences are shaped by their goals of static or progressive ambition. Although endogenous institutionalism has often been used to study the behavior of national actors, it has not been applied in the same extent to explore the preferences of state legislators – perhaps precisely because their preferences often do not ultimately lead to changes in electoral rules. This paper thus seeks to test whether this lack of institutional power leads to diverging preferences, or if assumptions of political ambition still hold.

Author

• Maria Luiza Aberceb Carvalho Gatto, University of Oxford