Spatial voting patterns in open-list proportional elections: a multi-level comparison

One fundamental characteristic of modern democratic representation is its territorial nature (Urbinati and Warren, 2008). Proportional representation, in turn, introduces the possibility of electing candidates with weaker territorial ties. In the case of Brazil, elected federal and state deputies display a more dispersed geographical voting pattern if compared to non-elected candidates (Avelino, Biderman, and Silva, 2016), despite indications of their territorial connections to state regions (Silva and Davidian, 2013; Silva and Silotto, 2018; Silotto, 2019). Are these patterns mainly a product of open-list proportional representation, or do they stem from other factors related to these electoral races? To address this research question, we examine local elections for city councilors in Brazil. This design serves as a useful testing ground since these elections follow the same rules, but allows us to better assess the relevance of the electoral systems, given theoretical and methodological reasons. From a theoretical point, city councilors, being in closer contact with voters, may have a stronger incentive to establish territorially based representation, which aligns with the presupposed characteristics of modern representation in its origins (Rehfeld, 2005). Methodologically, we leverage the large number of cases (cities) and observations (candidates) to conduct a more precise assessment of this potential relationship. Early findings from case studies in previous works (Kinzo, Borin and Martins Junior, 2003; Terron, Ribeiro and Lucas, 2012; Gelape, 2017) suggest that the electoral system might indeed play a fundamental role in shaping the observed patterns, and preliminary results, which expand the number of cases, point in the same direction.