Financiamento de campanhas eleitorais e o desempenho eleitoral nas eleições para prefeitos do brasil nos anos de 2008 e 2012: um estudo à luz da teoria da escolha pública

Abstract

The objective of this study was to verify the influence of campaign financing on the electoral performance of candidates for Brazilian municipalities in the 2008 and 2012 elections in light of the Public Choice Theory, encompassing the behavior of politicians and interest groups during the electoral campaign. To achieve the results, a quantitative research was carried out using logistic regression as the statistical model. The regression results indicated a positive and significant influence of campaign funding on candidates' electoral performance, in which a majority of mayors who were elected raised more resources for their campaigns than the others. In addition, these two elections also revealed that candidates who had already been elected to some public office previously also took advantage of candidates who had not yet been elected. Another aspect observed is that women are the great minority of the candidates and receive less resources for their campaigns than the men, reflecting this fact in the electoral performance of them in a negative way. The main contribution of this work is the fact that in municipalities with higher per capita GDP, as well as municipalities with the most educated population, funding resources are less relevant to electoral performance. This suggests that the voters of the richer, more schooled counties are less susceptible to the frivolous or impractical proposals made by the campaigning candidates. One of the limitations of this work was not obtaining data on financial resources made in the form of illegal donations, also popularly known as "box 2". This information would be important, since it would give the real dimension of the expenses with the campaigns carried out in Brazil. In this way, as future studies, it is suggested to conduct research with the separation of sources of public and private funding resources in relation to these elections and thus obtain more detailed information on the distribution of electoral financing.