THE ROLE OF PARTIES IN ELECTING BLACK WOMEN IN BRAZIL

democratic mediation with obstacles

Abstract

Brazilian political science has recently been focusing on understanding political inequality from the perspective of gender and race. This interest stems from the greater difficulty black women have in gaining access to positions of political representation.The reasons for the under-representation of this group are manifold, as are the solutions to reverse it. One of these solutions is for the parties to take action (Sacchet, 2020). It is this political actor with great relevance in democratic regimes and electoral processes that we propose to analyze in this article. Specifically, we seek to examine the mediation exercised by political parties to boost or obstruct the candidacies of black and brown women. The focus of this exploratory study is the relationship between parties and black women candidates in the proportional elections of 2014, 2018 and 2022, based on two variables: the party's ideological positioning and black women's chances of success. The TSE data is processed in R language and analyzed from an intersectional perspective (Crenshaw, 2002; Collins; Bilge, 2021).The methodological choice is quantitative. The results show that in the 2014 and 2022 elections, left-wing parties elected a higher percentage of black and brown candidates, something that did not happen in 2018. This data indicates that ideological positioning influences mediation, facilitating or hindering their access to decision-making spaces.