In July of 1997, the Brazilian Congress amended the Federal Constitution granting incumbents of executive offices (i.e. the president, governors, and mayors) the right to run for reelection for one consecutive term. The constitutional amendment brought back to life an institution that had been banned from Brazilian political life since the “First Republic” (1989-1930), when the re-nomination of “presidents of provinces” (governors) and “intendants of municipalities” (mayors) was the usual practice of oligarchic governments.

Since the passage of the constitutional amendment in 1997, local elections have been held in 2000, 2004, and 2008 in more than five thousand municipalities in Brazil. These elections were the first in which incumbent mayors where allowed to run for a second term.

Local governments in Brazil enjoy substantial political autonomy. Brazilian municipalities are currently among the most decentralized local governments in Latin America Gibson (2004). In particular, local governments are responsible for the protection of historical and cultural heritage, the parceling and regulation of land use, the organization and provision of public services of local interest (health, education, public transportation and welfare) as well as some targeted redistributive programs (Arretche 2000).

Mayors have substantial authority over budgetary decisions and the allocation of government jobs. As a result, municipal elections matter and their importance is recognized by Brazilian voters. In an unusual constitutional arrangement, municipalities are in fact not even politically subordinated to the states they are in, but are considered “state-members” of the national federation, on equal footing as states (Baiocchi 2006). Given the importance of municipalities in the Brazilian federalist framework and, consequently, the political attractiveness of local executive offices, the central aim of the paper presented in this seminar is to investigate the electoral advantage enjoyed by incumbents in local elections in Brazil.

There is a long and ongoing debate among scholars and policy makers about the electoral effects of incumbency status in developing countries. This paper contributes to this literature by developing a model of incumbency advantage that considers candidates’ quality and localities’ characteristics. This approach enables us to go beyond existing work that may suffer from various sources of bias. Drawing upon recent studies on incumbency advantage in the U.S. House of Representatives, as well as in Brazil and other developing countries, Ceneviva proposed a simple theoretical model and provide an empirical test using data from approximately 22,000 local races, including more than 40,000 individual candidates running for the office of mayor in 5,560 different municipalities.

The Ceneviva found that Brazilian mayors face a significant incumbency disadvantage. The extent of this disadvantage is declining over time and is found to be somewhat larger in poorer and less populous cities.