As previously stated, Brazilian legislature is comprised of an upper chamber, the Senate, or Senado, and a lower Chamber of Deputies, or Câmara dos Deputados. Formally, the Senate contains 81 seats, where three senators are chosen from each of the 27 federal states to ensure equal representation. In the Chamber of Deputies, 513 seats are chosen based on the open-list proportional representation, or open-list PR, the electoral system instituted within Brazilian politics. As stated by J. Tyler Dickovick and Jonathan Eastwood in Comparative Politics, “this system allows each voter to select a specific candidate and then attempts to achieve proportionality by aggregating the votes across parties,” (Dickovick/Eastwood, 209). In Brazil and European nations, open-list PR features the opportunity for political parties to gain house support from the various states while allowing citizens to actively seat candidates they believe will benefit their regional constituency. Furthermore, PR systems give political access to minority parties even if they do not receive a majority of the vote, meaning that to some extent everyone is being represented. Additionally, these weaker political parties can form coalitions with larger, more prominent parties to form coalitions that sway chamber voting. Coalitions aid smaller, weaker parties to combat social dominance theory as “the dominators in order to continue domination, and the disadvantaged group to try to change the status quo,” (Aguilar/Barone/Cunow/Desposato, 180). In this way, power sharing between parties, and even interest groups become more apparent to citizens so they know who is responsible for the policies being enacted, which influences the next election cycle. Overall, open-list PR produces a number of advantages permitting a level of transparency between the governing bodies and the populace at large.
On the other side of the aisle, there are a handful of disadvantages associated with the relationship of open-list PR. In traditional PR, party leaders would have the power to allocate seats to their parties candidates as they deem appropriate, taking away political influence from citizens. Candidates in both systems have incentives to garner political party support as it allocates more party power within the upper and lower chambers of the legislature. However, since candidates have more personal power in making a name for themselves without necessarily following party principles, this can lead to a weakening of political parties. Lack of faith in political parties leads to what is known as floor crossing, political figures would change party affiliation, “in an attempt to jockey for the best positions for future elections,” (Dickovick/Eastwood, 409). Only causing faith in open-list PR to further disintegrate, political leaders would offer bribes to legislators to maintain a majority vote on specific pieces of legislation. Also, due to legislators loyalty to their federal states, they do not always have Brazil’s interests in mind when enacting legislation, as only the members of their respective state ensure re-election. What’s more, Brazil contains a multi-party, fragmented party, system where “voters may face as many as one thousand candidates in a single district… [caused by] high-magnitude legislative districts, low cost
