Strategies, Political Position, and Electoral Performance of Brazilian Political Parties

Brazil has a multi-party political system with 30 registered parties (as of 2013). However, anyone who knows a little about politics understands that is nearly impossible to have 30 dimensions of political positions (e.g. center, left, right, center-left, etc.) with no overlap. Hence, the obvious challenge is to understand this party system and how parties group together. However there is no obvious way to group these parties because the data we normally have come from the parties' self-assigned positioning. What we see in practice, based on how the alliances are built and how politicians change from one party to another, is that most of them do not have a well-defined positional basis. Such phenomenon has been investigated since the 90s but always based on how elected politicians migrate between different parties. Today, we have at our disposal much more data that may be used to review political leanings. In this paper, we focus on the inter-party movements of candidates and on the relationship between movements and parties' ideology and performance. Results suggest that parties' performance in elections is strongly correlated with the parties' strategies for promoting candidates.