Organización, territorio y sistema partidario: difusión territorial de la organización de los partidos y sus potenciales impactos sobre la estructura del sistema partidario en Brasil

Abstract

What is the territorial pattern of Brazilian political parties? What kind of relation this spatiality present with the party system? In order to answer these questions, this articles focus on three main objectives. Firstly, it will investigate the systematic pattern of political organization and affiliation in Brazilian municipalities. Secondly, it will perform an exploratory analysis of the spatial distribution of the political parties’ organization in Brazil. Third, it will produce some tentative hypotheses concerning the causal relations between party organization, party system structure, and electoral performance. Teoretically, this work will be based on the work of Panebianco (2005 [1988]), as well as it will employ extensively some more recent analyses such as those from Katz and Mair (1995) and Gunther and Diamond (2003). The methodology used will, most of all, perform an Exploratory Spatial Data Analysis (esda). The results reveal that there were a constant movement towards expansion of party affiliation in Brazilian territory and it is manifested through a structural difference between large (with national territorial coverage) and small parties (mostly regional) in terms of party organization.