Race and Campaign Resources: Candidate Identification Numbers in Brazil

Abstract

Party elites may hinder racial and ethnic minorities from winning public office by withholding resources. Prior studies have explored the distribution of money, media access, and party-list positions. In Brazil, party elites provide each candidate with a unique identification number. Voters must enter their preferred candidate’s identification number into an electronic voting machine to register their support. In this article, we replicate and extend Bueno and Dunning’s (2017) analysis of candidate identification numbers. They conclude that party elites do not provide white candidates with superior identification numbers than non-whites. We contend that assessing intraparty variation is theoretically and methodologically warranted. Using party fixed effects, we find that party elites provide non-white candidates with worse identification numbers than whites. We demonstrate that our findings are generalisable using data from other elections. Moreover, we show that party elites also withhold advantageous numbers from women and political novices.

Length of candidate lists and political careers: Quasi-experimental evidence from Brazil

“…Concerning the racial gap, our results show that the expansion of party lists and the extra seat does not reduce racial inequalities in Brazilian elections. An emergent literature points out that the worst electoral performance of Afro-Brazilian candidates is associated with discrimination by party elites, who provide greater campaign resources (Firpo et al, 2022), media access (Janusz and Campos, 2021) and "better" identification numbers (Janusz and Sells, 2022) to white candidates, especially men. Additionally, even when controlled for non-racial candidate characteristics, the difference in electoral outcomes remains, indicating that racial discrimination plays an important role in Brazilian elections (Janusz, 2018).…”