Archive for June, 2005
What do Voters Expect from their Federal Deputies?
What are the factors voters weigh more heavily when choosing a candidate for Federal Deputy? Do voters want their representatives to make national level policies or do they expect them to work for their localities of origin, investing federal monies at the municipal level? Does casework play an important role in vote choice? All of these questions are in the essence of voter/representative relation and in orienting the behavior of legislators once elected. The Brazilian system has been repeatedly characterized as one in which federal transfers to the municipality, arranged by Federal Deputies through budgetary amendments, plays a central role in incumbents’ electoral success. If these transfers are in fact to affect electoral success, as they seem they do, they must resonate with voters’ expectations. The 2002 Two City Panel Study, conducted by Barry Ames, Andrew Baker and Lucio Renno provides an answer to this question.
No commentsIdeological Map of the Câmara - 52nd Session February 2003-May 2005
One of my main research areas is spatial analysis of roll call data. If you keep on reading this site you will learn more about it then you would like to know about it. At this time I only itend to show one of the cool things it can do, namely identifying the left-right positions of parties in legislatures using individual deputies roll call decisions.
The following figure plots the region where the central 50% of the deputies of each party are expected to be in. You can get the roll call votes I used to generate the map right here .
1 commentA Study of Federal Deputies from the Voters’ Perspective
We know very little about how Brazilian voters’ choose their candidates for Federal Deputy, what they expect from their representatives in the Chamber of Deputies and what they actually know about both candidates and representatives. There aren’t many survey studies designed specifically to focus on the local level and that include several items on legislative elections. With this in mind, we (Barry Ames, Andrew Baker and Lucio Renno) designed and collected a four-wave public opinion panel dataset in two mid-size Brazilian cities during the 2002 elections. One of the many goals of the project is to investigate vote choice for Federal Deputy. By focusing on the city level, the study attenuates the enormous national fragmentation in number of candidates and each candidate’s number of supporters is large enough to allow analysis of vote choice. Several questionnaire items, in several of the waves (some repeated in all four waves) focused exclusively in the elections for the Chamber of Deputies.
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