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The Tribunal Superior Eleitoral  has at their [site](http://www.tse.gov.br/) electoral data for elections at the local and national level since 1994. Despite the data being archived in the horrible Microsoft Access format, it is very easy to extract and manipulate it in your program of choice.

Unfortunately they moved to a web only service since the 2002 elections, making it much harder to get all the data. We emailed them recently and fortunately enough they still use internally MS Acess, and were kind enough to send us a cd-rom with the data. It is a huge file, and I am still working out the wrinkles before I post a processed version in our data section. Nevertheless, if someone needs it before them, just email me and we can arrange something. I cannot post the access files before we move to a new server, since it is a 122mb  zip  file! If you want to donate to this noble cause (our own server account), click on the donate button in the side bar. You will have our most sincere thanks… and plenty of bandwidth and storage for Brazilian political data!

[Incidentally, I would like to add that the site is going well. We had more than 500 unique visitors in October, and we already show up as the first link if you [google brazilian politics](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=brazilian+politics&btnG=Google+Search)! ]

On the other hand, although (very) buggy, the web tools are kind of neat. If you haven’t checked it out already, look at maps and text reports about the distribution of votes for the winning candidates across each state [here](http://www.tse.gov.br/partidos/principal.html) (see a screenshot below). You can play around with the layers and colors interactively (they use Adobe’s implementation of a new graphic format called svg. You have to download the viewer here
to use the tools.

They also have now electoral data at the “zona eleitoral” (electoral subdivision of municipalities) level, but I don’t have the data base for it yet. Anyway, very cool if you want to explore the electoral patterns for specific candidates with no gis knowledge required.

Brazilians went to the polls yesterday (10/24/2005) in order to vote
for or against the passage of a gun ban law. Although in fact quite lax
(e.g. existing gun owners could continue to own guns, but access to
bullets would be restricted; one could also become a member of a gun
“club”/shooting range, etc.) the proposal was soundly defeated.

Two years ago, when the legislation proposing the referendum passed in Congress,

three-quarters of Brazilians favour banning the sale of guns

Guns in Brazil | Disarming | Economist.com

The results? 59 million voters (64%) casted a “”no” vote? while only? 33 million voted “yes”.

Some say the defeat is linked tho the decline in support for Lula’s
government after the long batch of corruption scandals. There is no
reliable survey data to support this fact. What we know is that voting
in the last presidential election is not significantly correlated with
the gun ban results at the state level.

On the other hand, the vote for the ban was weaker at the upper
income and education levels, which were also are the most critical of
Lula administration. As this datafolha poll
shows, at the lowest income level, 55% answered they would vote “No” in
the referendum, while 67% answered similarly at the higher income
levels.

The gun ban was never a policy intended to stop criminals, but
rather to help diminish the staggering rate of futile homicides that
happen in Brazil. Fortunately, local policy experiences (such as the
decline in homicides in Diadema, Sao Paulo) show that much can be done even without the ban. Let’s hope the local governments across the country are up to task.

It was almost like a soccer match. The most popular brazilian politics bloggers (in Portuguese, of course)  NOBLAT and Josias de Souza
broadcasted vote by vote  an important decision in the Brazilian
Supreme Court. Federal Deputy Jose Dirceu, former President of the PT,
Chief of Staff (and at times called “Prime Minister”) in the Lula
government, was trying to stop the ongoing expulsion procedure in the
Camara.

The  episode illustrates a broader pattern. Supreme Courts  have
been performing an increasingly important role in economic and
political issues in contemporary latin american politics. However,  our
understanding of how decisions are cast in these bodies  is quite
incipient. Not much data have been assembled in a easily accessible
form, and our theoretical understanding is in an even worse shape.

This is the main reason Antonio Pedro Ramos and I embarked on a project to estimate the ideal points of the Brazilian Supreme Court Justices. Our objectives are twofold: a) to what extent do ideal point models account for the votes cast in the STF? b) How are the preferences of outside actors, in particular the Executive, related to those of the Supreme Court Justices?

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Federal Deputy Ricardo Berzoini will be the new President of the Workers’ Party, having defeated Raul Pont in the run-off of the elections that took place last week. What does Berzoini’s victory represent? Very simply, it represents continuity with the party’s previous administration, deeply involved in the current corruption scandal. Like the victory of Aldo Rebelo for President of the Chamber of Deputies, the victory of Berzoini is further proof that the Workers’ Party and the government’s strategy is to stick with its current policies and its approach to the corruption scandal. The medium term goal of both the Workers’ Party and the current administration is obviously to invest in the reelection strategy, avoiding any deep restructuring of the party. The PT and the Lula administration hope to promote its achievements while in power as well as vehemently denying the involvement of its top leaders in the scandal. Reelection is the goal, and dealing with the scandal is but a component in the strategy of achieving electoral success.

The question then is, what are Lula’s and the PT’s chances in the 2006 elections? It has become common place to see Brazilian political analysts being asked to estimate Lula’s chances. Instead of engaging in a guessing game of speculating the probability of Lula’s success in 2006, we will instead list some of the current administration’s achievements and failures and leave it up to the reader to judge what Lula’s chances are. Comparisons with the Cardoso administration are unavoidable simply because the main competition Lula will face will come from a candidate backed by the PSDB/PFL coalition that is strongly restructuring itself.

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September 30th was the last day politicians in Brazil had for making a party switch if they wanted to compete in next year’s election. Excessive party switching between elections is seen as a permanent problem in the Brazilian polity.

The following figures help to make some sense of the dynamics of party switching in Brazil. The first plots the number of seats held by each party.

One of the things to note is the slight drop in the number of seats held by the PT, somewhat accentuated in the last days of September 2005. Another is the rise in the number of seats held by the PMDB, making it now just as large as the PT.

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Aldo Rebelo (PC do B/SP) defeated José Thomaz Nonô (PFL/AL) by 15 votes in the runoff for the presidency of the chamber of deputies, last Wednesday night. In spite of the victory of the Lula administration, represented by the success of Rebelo, the tight margin reflects how hard it will be for the government to construct a supporting coalition in congress in this pre-electoral year.

In fact, the first signs are that it will be very hard to construct consensus around pressing issues. Take the political reform, for instance. Today is the last day for changes to be made in the electoral code in order for them to become effective in next year’s general elections. There was a growing agreement that a constitutional amendment was going to be voted today to extend the deadline for reform to December, so that Deputies could debate the several proposals in Congress’ agenda. Still, as of now, no agreement has been reached and it seems like no changes in the electoral rules will be implemented in 2006. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that any kind of agreement will be reached by December.

Another factor that caught the media’s attention during this race was allegations of rampant use of pork barrel distribution and patronage in the weeks prior to the elections. According to speculations of the media, the use of pork and patronage was fundamental to assure Rebelo’s victory. Such claim is completely in line with a strand of research in Brazilian legislative politics that claims that a main mechanism of pork barrel politics in Brazil is the allocation of monies by the executive branch to fund budgetary amendments presented by Federal Deputies. During the year, the allocation of federal monies was quite restricted. Some analysts of Brazilian politics (Carlos Pereira and Tim Power), have actually made the claim that the disproportional allocation of resources amongst the supporting coalition, and concentration benefiting the PT, is in the essence of the difficulty in dealing with congress and the need to rely on the mensalao.

It seems though, that even amidst its most serious crisis, when the government put all of its muscle in the dispute, it came out victorious, especially because apparently it has distributed resources more proportionally amongst potential allies. Maybe that is the strategy the administration will follow in the remaining of its first, and very likely, only, term in office.