Race and collective self-esteem: an experimental approach to the puzzle of political representation in Brazil

• Ano de defesa: 2016
• Autor(a) principal: Santos, Giovani Rocha Batista
• Orientador(a): Ribeiro, Daniela Campello da Costa
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Palavras-chave em Português: Representatividade política; Ação afirmativa; Relações raciais
• Link de acesso: https://hdl.handle.net/10438/17641

Despite the existence of a set of institutional features that are markedly related as conducive of a solid reflection of social and ideological cleavages of the population amongst representatives in local, state and national legislature (i.e. open-list proportional representation, high-magnitude legislative districts, candidate-centered campaigns, low cost for candidate entry and highly fragmented party system), Brazil’s recent democratic history has been strongly characterized by the underrepresentation of a considerable ethnic majority. In particular, as of the latest election for federal deputies in 2014, while 50.9% of the population declared themselves as pretos (blacks) or pardos (browns), only 20.3% of the Federal Parliament corresponded to that group. Therefore, this study aims to analyze the causes for the discrepancy in terms of racial political representation in Brazil by focusing specifically on the perspective of the voter. Particularly, this experiment also disentangles how a candidate’s race, their support for race-targeted policies (i.e. university quotas) and a voter’s level of Collective Self-Esteem (CSE) are intertwined and ultimately impact the electoral choice and the trade-off between descriptive (based on physical features of a candidate) and substantive (based on a candidate’s policy support) representation. In order to do so, I explore the voter’s electoral choice in a survey experimental setting by implementing a Choice-based Conjoint Analysis that allows for the interconnected evaluation of both characteristics of the voter and the candidate.