Collective Mandates in Brazil: Democratic Innovations to Boost Participation in Legislature

ABSTRACT

Recently in Brazil, some politicians and organised groups have aimed to increase representation and legitimacy in legislatures via ‘collective mandates’, a democratic innovation (DI) that allows a group of citizens to collectively campaign and, if elected, share decision-making of a legislative seat. This article maps and analyses collective mandates implemented in Brazil from 1994 to 2022 to find their differences and similarities. This study identified 643 candidacies; 56 of them were elected for legislative mandates in city councils, state legislatures, and the National Congress. The qualitative analysis focused on six benchmark cases using the following analytical dimensions: initiative, group size, eligibility, moment of access, decision-making process, and interaction mechanism. The data sources were two nationwide reports on the theme (until 2020), raw data from the 2022 elections, and information available about the mandates on their websites, blogs, and social media. In conclusion, despite being generally labelled as ‘collective mandates’, the ongoing experiences have produced at least two subtypes: pure collective mandates and shared mandates. The common denominator holds the innovative concept: a legislator shares their power with a group of citizens, giving up parliamentary autonomy to foment democratic participation and accountability in the mandate.

KEYWORDS:

• Representative democracy
• democratic innovations
• collective mandates
• deliberative democracy
• Brazil

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the contributions from multiple partners. In the first phase of the research, on collective mandates, we received financial and editing support by Rede de Ação Política pela Sustentabilidade (RAPS) and Instituto Arapyaú. In the second phase, on collective bids, we had the collaboration in building and analysing the dataset along with Professors Leonardo Leal (Universidade Federal de Alagoas), Debora Rezende de Almeida (Universidade de Brasília), and Lígia Lüchmann (Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina). The final version of this paper received financial support for translation into English from Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior – Ministry of Education of Brazil (CAPES/PROAP/AUXPE 2022). Finally, we would like to thank Dr. Ernesto Cruz Ruiz from Technische Universität München – TUM – for the technical proofreading.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Brazil has a proportional electoral system to elect city councillors, state deputies, and members of Congress, while senators are elected in a plurality of voting. The Brazilian open list system means that party candidates compete against each other to get the most individual preferences (votes) to reach the top of the party’s list (and eventually win a legislative seat). Yet, they collectively root for each other, because the total number of preferences to a party (and their candidates) is used to calculate the party coefficient (and the number of elected legislative seats in the proportional system). There is no district within the state or the municipality, so all candidates can get votes throughout the state (state deputies and congressmen) and throughout the municipality (city councillors). The electoral system is considered candidate-centric (Samuels, 1999) and personalistic (Nicolau, 2012), with weak political parties (Mainwaring, 1999) in a hyper fragmented multiparty system (Zucco & Power, 2021). There are currently 32 political parties registered in the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), 23 of them represented in the Chamber of Federal Deputies, none with more than 19.2% of seats (Câmara Federal, 2022).

2 Eulau et al. (1959) proposed the ‘Politico’ as the third style of representation between the two extreme ideal types of trustee (fiduciary model) and delegate (delegated model). Politico combines both styles by either alternating their orientation towards the clientele or the general welfare according to context, or by balancing the representative roles of trustee or delegate.

3 The name given to such experiments can vary depending on the discretion of the politician or group. They have been branded shared mandates, collaborative mandates, participatory mandates, or simply bancadas (backbenches).

4 Rede de Ação Política pela Sustentabilidade (RAPS) is a civil society organisation promoting a network of political and social leaders in Brazil to advance the agenda of ethics in politics, public transparency, democracy, and environmental sustainability.

5 Candidates aged between 18 and 24 years were only 3% of the total, but collective bids led by candidates of the same age range represented 8.31%. The percentage of Black candidates was only 10.9%, but 28.39% of the total number of collective bids had Black candidates as frontrunners. Only 34,6% of candidates were women, but 47.3% of collective bids were led by women. Collective bids from left wing parties and the center-left represented 80.83% of the total number of collective bids (Secchi & Leal, 2020).

6 Felipe Rigoni led the only identified case of an elected collective mandate for the national Congress, which created an advisory board for his legislative mandate with 100 advisers. The Congressman appointed his advisers during his tenure between 2019 and 2022, but he has not tied his legislative position strictly to the advisory board’s consultation (RAPS, 2019). In the 2022 general elections, Rigoni was candidate for reelection, but not on a promise to form a collective mandate. He was unable to get re-elected (Folha, 2022).

7 Detailed examples and first-hand anecdotes of conflicts within collective mandates are available in Marques’ thesis (2019) and Campos’ dissertation (2021).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior [grant number CAPES/PROAP/AUXPE 2022].

Notes on contributors

Leonardo Secchi

Leonardo Secchi is Ph.D. in Political Studies (University of Milan), professor of Public Policy at Santa Catarina State University (UDESC), and vice-president for Latin America and the Caribbean of the International Association of Schools and Institutes of Administration (IASIA). E-mail: [email protected]

Ricardo Alves Cavalheiro

Ricardo Alves Cavalheiro is Ph.D. in Administration and professor of Public Administration at Santa Catarina State University (UDESC).

Camila Vichroski Baumgarten

Camila Vichroski Baumgarten holds a bachelor's degree in Public Administration from UDESC.