Legislative Representation in a Multilevel System: The Case of Brazil

How well do parties represent their voters? Recent work has endeavored to examine voter congruence with parliamentary elites to identify the distortions in representation process, due to party structures or voter behavior. We extend this line of reasoning to the case of a presidential system with weak party organization and multi-level governance, Brazil. We make use of a dataset that combines information from three different sources, totalling 7,474 observations in 7 surveys. We combine elite surveys from the National Deputies and State Deputies in Brazil with two waves of CSES surveys of voters. The State legislative surveys include twelve states in Brazil with variance in region demographic and economic backgrounds. We make use of the fact that these surveys include questions asking respondents to place major Brazilian parties and themselves in a left-right ideological scale. To estimate deputies and respondents’ ideal points, we use Bayesian Aldrich-McKelvey scaling to place voters, state and national deputies in a common scale. We show that even in the fragmented Brazilian party system, voters and politicians' ideological positions are largely congruent across states. However, left-wing parties are more aligned across levels, while party supporters in the center and right-wing parties have more extreme positions than their representatives. We conclude by showing how our approach can be used to address important questions on democratic accountability in new democracies.