A dinâmica local de financiamento eleitoral: o peso dos recursos próprios nas campanhas dos eleitos à Câmara Municipal de Santa Maria/RS nas eleições de 2004, 2008 e 2012

Abstract

Campaign financing through corporate donations has guided investigations into the relationship between financial resources and electoral success for nearly two decades. However, in 2015, the Federal Supreme Court declared the unconstitutionality of corporate donations to parties and candidates in election campaigns, leading researchers to hitherto neglected aspects of electoral financing studies. Thus, maintaining, for example, legislation that enables the elected candidate to finance his or her own electoral enterprise raises new questions: Has the weight of corporate donations not been exacerbated far beyond the national dynamics of campaign financing? Would it not be possible to think of a state and / or local dynamic with other characteristics? Given this, it was intended to conduct an analysis of the importance of electoral investment through own resources in the campaigns of the elected to the City Council of Santa Maria / RS in the elections of 2004, 2008 and 2012. This investigation was justified by the lack of studies about the electoral financing in the municipalities and the almost absence of research on the importance of other sources of resources for electoral competition. The main hypothesis of this work was that, in the campaigns of the elected, the revenues from own resources, when compared to the other sources of electoral financing, were prevalent. The methodological procedure was divided into bibliographic and documentary collection, mapping of electoral legislation and data collection. With the exception of bibliographic research carried out on specific platforms, the remaining materials came from the virtual environments of the Superior Electoral Court. Collected and tabulated, the data were submitted to statistical treatment and analysis, the latter based on the legal framework on campaign financing and on the specific literature on the subject. It is concluded that investment through own resources was predominant among the elected - which points to a possible local dynamics of electoral financing.