Democracia e Partidos: um “raio-X” da jurisprudência do Tribunal Superior Eleitoral (1999-2024) enquanto determinante institucional sobre a correlação entre partidos e democracia

Abstract

The following work aims to analyse the Brazilian Judicial Authority (hereinafter, TSE) as institutional determinant that impacts the correlation between political parties and democracy. The correlation is twofold: first there is an external dimension, which investigates how parties can fit in democratic context. This scenario may vary due to democratic approaches that can be extracted after deliberative theories. For didactical purposes, following a concentrical perspective, they were classified into three: elitist approach, which emphasizes the competition between groups; aggregative approach, which emphasizes the decision-making aspect; deliberative approach, which emphasizes the deliberative reason and some rights precommitment in order to deliberate. The second dimension is internal and is related to intraparty democracy, which intends to debate if democracy is a value that must be pursued by internal organization, specially after party raison d’ètre (electoral competition, party in government, and expressive function), as well the oligarchical tendencies and convergence tendencies, typical character of catch-all parties. Based on these premises, a x ray in the TSE case law was performed to debate two questions: (i) if the TSE impacts party organization connected to any democratic ideal; and (ii) if affirmative, what its normative ideal would be. The x ray consists in classifying, separating, and cataloguing judgments and normative acts that were published in the Courts’s releases from 1999 until 2024, divided into eight themes (power abuse and forbidden acts; propaganda; electoral lists; electoral felonies; eligibility; political parties; accountability; voting). Incidentally, the analysis provides a TSE profile change through the last 25 years, as it was a mere conformity institution and turned into an intervening variable that directly impacts the electoral competition. Regarding the effects over the correlation between parties and democracy, the analysis shows that TSE became a determinant institutional variable only in 2016, by induction and by friction, when the parties were required to follow a deliberative democracy approach.