Funds for Women in Brazil - An approach to the consequences for female right-wing candidates

• In Event: Power, Political Representation and Gender Violence

Abstract

The high cost of political campaigns in Brazil is one of the most significant variables to inhibit women from running for office and being elected. The country has the worst Latin American rate of female representation in the Congress. In March 2018, the Brazilian Supreme Court defined that all Brazilian parties must spend 30% of their campaign funds in female candidacies. A total of R$ 515 million (US$ 150 million) will be available to women candidates. Among the 10 parties with the highest amount of funding, 8 are right-wing or center-right. The purpose of this paper is to work on some dimensions to better understand the impact of the increase for conservative female party candidates. It also seeks to identify if and how, during the process, they have decided to call upon a feminist discourses and practices, usually more related with left-wing parties. In this sense: 1) it will describe the strategies that these eight parties adopted to allocate the financing resources, i.e. which proportion of the resources went to majoritarian and proportional campaigns, as well as their concentration in different candidates; 2) Through interviews with the female leaders and candidates of these parties, identify how the availability of funds for women changed the internal dynamics of gender power and the corresponding discourse; 3) Since it is already known that there was no increase in the number of women candidates, to identify a possible increase in the female candidates' chances to been elected and their results in ballots.

Author

• Debora Thome, UFF