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I spent a week with the wife and el kiddo visiting my folks. Very nice overall, wonderful warm weather and plenty to do. It was also an eventful week in Brazil: the Panamerican games were/are going on in Rio (not that anyone in US would know, it is barely a blip in the American Press), the longtime political boss of Bahia died, and a plane crashed in São Paulo killing about 200+ people.

Busy week indeed On my way back South I had the "privilege" of experiencing some of the so called "chaos" that has been plaguing air travel in Brazil for at least a year. Ostensibly the latter increase in the difficulties originated from the crash mentioned above. The plane couldn’t stop and some wonder if the recently reopened runway is at fault. The investigations are going to take a while, but we  know beforehand that the runway alone cannot possibly be the single cause, given the dozens of take-offs and landings throughout the day up to minutes or seconds before the crash! The blame has to be at least partly with the plane and/or pilot.

Anyway, I had a connection flight in Guarulhos (the other major airport in São Paulo) and the next flight was delayed. After pointing the passengers to wait in the wrong gate, twice!, we finally boarded with a 6 hour delay. The cause for the delay was never explained to us on the ground. What was picturesque and somewhat disturbing was what served as apologies from the pilot once we took off. He didn’t blame the weather, or the fact that the other airport was closed, or just "I don’t know". You see, for him the problem was higher up and his company had nothing to do with it. The "chief", that is the President of Brazil was the culprit!!! He even accused the government of being corrupt.

I am all for freedom of expression, but in this case I found myself very unnerved. First, the company obviously didn’t do a good job even considering the conditions. For example, our baggage didn’t come with us in the plane. In fact, I only received it today, four days later. This can’t possibly be Lula’s fault. In addition, a company whose owner is all over the news because of  extremely shady negotiations with a senator and ex-governor of the federal district involving a 3 million reais check cannot possibly  point out corruption from others with a straight face. Finally, how is one supposed to respond to the pilot? His position of authority on air makes it very hard and even unwise to attempt any answer.

Thanks for the very pleasing (for me) week, I didn’t get stressed  over the whole thing. (nor did all but a couple of the passengers) I am back, it is cold, and I already miss Salvador… 

The TSE for unknown reasons pulled out the Access files for the 2002 election. I haven’t looked at them in a while, but here are the two that I have:

estcand2002

and

VotoMun_DadosCand_2002.mdb.zip

these are big files. Let me know if you find out that just one of the two is needed or if you have problems downloading. eleoni at gmail dot com

Jos compains of my 1995 technique to create the animations (animated gifs), and the lack of interactivity. Perhaps this flash(y) version will be of greater appeal to him.

The whole 1982-2006 period is posted. If you pay attention, the map changes slightly to reflect changes in the distribution of seats across the nation. E.g. the creation of Tocantins following the 1988 Constitution (1990 map), or the increase in the number of deputies elected from São Paulo in 1994.

I’ve been collecting Brazilian electoral data for my dissertation for some time, and have always wondered about how to display the somewhat massive data available in an efficient manner. Take the best case scenario: 27 districts (states) x 4 elections (since 1994) x 7 largest parties=756 data points. This is a lot of numbers to look at in a table! Imagine using aggregate data at the municipality level: 5000 x 4 x 7! No, you do the math…

Maps, of course, is one way to display the data. The major problem then is that the widely varying population density in Brazil would produce a misleading map of the voting distribution across the country. That is the reason I am considering using cartograms, as discussed in the last post (link). Displayed below is a whole set of cartograms displaying data for the Câmara dos Deputados for the past four elections. The idea now is that areas in the cartogram should be proportional to the number of seats assigned to each district (which in Brazil are the states.) Given the high degree of malapportionment, the cartogram looks somewhat different from the one based on population or vote totals we presented previously. The time dimension is presented as a movie, so it is easy to follow the spatial distribution of seats for each party throughout the recent elections.

Now I only have to figure out how to put this in paper format…

The Brazilian electoral court (TSE - Tribunal Superior Eleitoral) has finally posted the 2006 elections results in a format suitable for researchers. This past week I got the data in shape for analysis in my dissertation and decided it was a good time to do some charts. As usual, the plots were done in R, this time using the maptools package.

The second round was a landslide in favour of the incumbent, Lula da Silva, from the PT (Workers’ Party). He got around 61% of the votes, while Geraldo Alckmin got 39%.

Perhaps more interesting is the spatial distribution of the votes. The individual units in the map are what the Brazilian Geographic and Statistical Institute (IBGE) calls “mesoregions”, but the original data is by municipality and electoral zone.

It is noticeable how the Northeast is overwhelmingly red, indicating Lula won there by extremely wide margins. On the other hand, margins were much thinner in the south, in the center-west and in São Paulo.

I’ve always been dissatisfied with maps like this, since it overrepresents areas such as the west of the country, where the population (and therefore vote) density is much lower than in the coast. Ditto for country areas versus the big cities. Yet, the geographical representation allows us to grasp the overall pattern and correlate with facts that we know. For example, the northeast is much poorer than the south, so we immediately recognize that Lula did worse in richer areas.

Cartograms are a way to “correct” the overrepresentation of low density areas. By correction, of course, we mean distorting, but that is the whole point of the procedure. For voting and other social science data, geographic distance is just as arbitrary. Gastner and Newman invented one method to produce cartograms that seem to work very well in practice (paper here.) The original software was written in C, but there is a java version by Frank Hardisty which I used, since it uses shapefiles as input and output. Click here to take a look at maps for the 2004 US election.

Most of the Brazilian west is dramatically shrunk, while the big cities (particularly São Paulo) are several times blown up. In fact, I find it particularly helpful in showing the votes in the big metropolitan areas, and comparing it to areas in the country side. Although interesting, I wonder if the cartogram is too distorted to be useful, and would be interested in hearing other opinions.

I wonder if it is a common practice in other countries for the big press to call the president names like “sapo barbudo” (hairy toad). Or is it just a sign of prejudice against an uneducated president born in the poor northeast?

Brian Mulloy, one of the founders of Swivel, wrote a nice comment on my post explaining how Swivel is in fact able to condition on data categories. For example, if you want to do a graph highlighting a particular category, or even using only data from a particular category, you are able to. The process has to start in the dataset view.

See his comment for the full explanation.

I guess I have to spend more time on it, but it still doesn’t seem to be able to do what I want. I downloaded my own data in csv format and created a couple of figures using the ggplot package in R. I don’t expect Swivel to have the same flexibility, since its objectives are very different from those of an academic statistical software. However, I don’t see why in the not so distant future something like this would be possible in a web application.

The code:

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The never ending ongoing political reform debate is a never ending source of amusement and befuddlement for anyone with even paltry knowledge about the effects of political institutions. Fernando Rodrigues, for example, claims that the system as it is, which is to say as dysfunctional as it is, is better than most proposed reforms. Although I do not agree with the specifics of his arguments, he is probably correct in the overall assessment.

Case in point, the proposed reforms that the Câmara president, Arlindo Chinaglia, wants to start discussing on the floor in the next week or so. It proposes to change to a closed list proportional electoral system. Comparative scholars everywhere know that such a system is purported to increase the roll call discipline of legislators. The mechanism is simple, legislators that do not behave in accordance to the political party recommendations risk not being placed at or near the top of the list in the next election.

And herein lies is the Brazilian twist: in the proposed reform, legislators running for reelection are placed at the top of the list by default! plus ça change …

Read on for the relevant excerpt from the bill (in Portuguese.)

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In the past two weekends, two different events took place to discuss the role of corruption in Brazilian politics. The Centers for Latin American Studies at University of Arizona (UA) and at Michigan State University (MSU) organized round-tables to discuss how corruption still plays a central role in Brazilian politics and how Brazilian political institutions may create incentives for corruption. In MSU, the focus of the event was on political corruption in general, with some emphasis on the Brazilian case. Brian Crisp, Lucio Renno, Timothy Power, Carlos Pereira and Claudio Couto delivered papers ranging from the macro-determinants of corruption to the details of the current Brazilian scandal and how it is linked to the rules of the electoral system, to campaign finance and to strategies of coalition management in multiparty systems. In the University of Arizona the emphasis was more on the challenges posed to the strengthening of democracy in Brazil by corruption. The goal of this round-table was to discuss the progress of and challenges to Brazilian democracy especially in face of the current crisis. Mauro Porto talked about the role the media plays in the Brazilian political system and how it participated in the current scandal. Ben Goldfranck evaluated the impact of the political crisis on the Workers’ Party and Carlos Pereira discussed how legislative/executive relations in coalitional presidentialism created incentives for the existence of the Mensalao. All in all, both events generated an interesting debate about the causes and consequence of corruption in new democratic regimes.

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