Party switching in the Camara
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.
The second panel shows the _change_ in the party shares throughout the period.
The parties that grew recently the most were the PSB in the left and the PDT in the center. The main loser was the PL, a centrist party that used to hold a large number of deputy linked to the evangelical churches, but decided to exit a party that was much tainted by the recent scandals.
The increase in the PMDB came much earlier, in January, when Garotinho (a former governor of Rio de Janeiro and presidential pre-candidate) worked to increase the membership of the party with legislators supportive of his faction of the party before the intra-party elections took place.
The figures help one not to be drawn in the “letter soup” of party labels in Brazil. Which brings us to the final point: what do party labels mean? If they were meaningless, legislators wouldn’t bother switching (Desposato’s argument.) But the sheer number of parties probably make accountability and signalling to the electorate difficult to say the least! Who are they signalling to? One, largely unexplored, possibility is that they are politicians are communicating something to each other. If true, state level and interbranch disputes may become fundamentally important. But this is a topic for a later post.