Collective Candidacies and Mandates in Brazil: Challenges and Pitfalls of a Gambiarra

• Mendonça, Ricardo Fabrino, Lucas Gelape and Carlos Estevão C. Cruz. 2023. Collective Candidacies and Mandates in Brazil: Challenges and Pitfalls of a Gambiarra. In: Bua, Adrian; Bussu, Sonia (org.). Reclaiming Participatory Governance: social movements and the reinvention of democratic innovation. New York: Routledge, p. 154-159.

Abstract:

In this chapter, we examine the democratic innovation of collective candidacies and mandates in Brazil. These candidacies can be defined as a group formed within a party list to run together for a single seat in parliament. These groups usually adopt participatory practices on their campaigns and, when elected, in their legislative activities. Such innovation arose from a crisis of legitimacy of representative institutions in the country, which deepened over the last decade. We read this phenomenon through the idea of gambiarra (which can be translated as a kludge, workaround or stopgap). This gambiarra reinvents electoral politics through improvisation, amid institutional constraints, currently happening in a legal limbo of uncertainty and open possibilities. By making sense of this phenomenon as a gambiarra, we stress its precarious yet creative status. The chapter presents the capacity of collective candidacies and mandates to renovate institutional politics, while pointing out some limitations and risks derived from these practices.

Figure: Percentage of city council candidacies per race/ethnicity and age in the Brazilian 2020 elections.