Campaign expenses and candidate success in Brazilian legislative elections

The following article contributes to the growing body of national literature on the drivers of success in legislative elections by gauging the electoral impact of financial, political, and personal factors associated with the candidates running for Ceará Legislative Assembly in 2010. Medium in size, the state was chosen in order to minimize any potential issues of endogeneity and to maximize the homogeneity of the sample, in order to obtain more robust statistical results. A subsequent empirical application based on models for discrete data was carried out, highlighting the following facets: 1) the impacts of the vote varied dramatically according to the geographical location of the municipalities; 2) the candidates’ personal characteristics were relevant to their obtaining of votes, particularly their marital status; 3) within the political variables, an affiliation to a party in the governor’s coalition was only significant for the candidates elected via votes from the metropolitan region, with none of these variables proving significant for those not to have been elected; 4) incumbent candidates enjoyed a significant advantage in the obtaining of votes; 5) the campaign expenses declared influenced the candidates’ electoral performance. The final empirical finding reveals a grave problem in the workings of representative institutions in a country profoundly unequal from a socioeconomic perspective.