Daniel Gamermann

Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, BR

Analyzing electoral campaigns with the Benford law and legislative dynamics with help of the K-means.

Abstract

We use publicly available data to analyse the financing of the presidential electoral campaign of 2014 and the dynamics in the Brazilian congress since the redemocratization. With respect to the electoral campaigns, our work points to two disturbing conclusions: money is a determining factor on whether a candidate is elected or not (as opposed to representativeness); secondly, the use of Benford’s Law to analyze the declared donations received by the parties and electoral campaigns shows evidence of fraud in the declarations. On the other hand, we start analyzing the legislative dynamics by measuring the cohesion of the parties and the congress in the roll-call votes. Then, by quantifying the agreement between the votes of congressmen we observe that there is a stronger polarization among congressmen during legislative periods where there was no impeachment. Our analyses allow us to quantitatively identify some differences between stable presidential periods and Legislative terms with an impeachment.

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