The Mayor Is On

A Radiography Of Online Campaign Spending In The 2020 Elections

Abstract

The main objective of this article is to address the theme of online campaigns as an important tool for mobilizing and boosting visibility by political actors involved in the scenario of electoral campaigns in recent years. We start from the following question: in view of the expansion of internet access and the intensive use of online social networks, accompanied by recent changes in the Brazilian institutional framework, within the scope of electoral legislation, spending on online campaigns in the 2020 Brazilian municipal majority elections took place homogeneous throughout the national territory? The survey brings together a universe of 5,568 electoral disputes held in Brazilian municipalities in the first round of elections, we collect data on accountability in the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) repository, we gather all this data in a single source, using R software, where the optimization and analysis of data was carried out from the selected variables: electoral size of the municipality; region of the country; ideological orientation; and elected and non-elected. From the descriptive analysis it was verified that the expenses with online campaign did not occur homogeneously throughout the Brazilian territory; moreover, with regard to the variable parties and ideological orientation, they somehow reflect contextual aspects regarding the growth of the right-wing bloc in the last Brazilian municipal elections; and that among non-elected candidates they are relatively higher than among elected candidates.