As estratégias de doadores de campanhas eleitorais: uma tipologia empírica dos financiadores privados das eleições gerais de 2002 a 2022

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how private donors structure their electoral financing strategies in Brazil, based on an original empirical typology constructed using Superior Electoral Court (TSE) data on more than 1.2 million donors who participated in the General Elections from 2002 to 2022. Beginning with the question “what financing patterns do private donors adopt?”, the study seeks to understand the behavior of these actors within a system marked by strong resource concentration, significant regulatory changes, and asymmetric incentives for electoral donation. This analytical-descriptive effort was motivated both by the need to understand how different donors define their actions in a context permeated by multiple interests (in line with an Olsonian perspective) and by the absence of studies examining donor behavior over the long term. This gap in the literature was identified through a scope review focused on the guiding question of the dissertation, which mapped more than 300 works on the topic and ultimately documented the findings of 41 studies. To address this gap, the dissertation develops a typology based on two binary indicators: (i) electoral dispersion, which considers the different offices and states to which the donor contributed; and (ii) ideological dispersion, measured from the ideological classification of the beneficiary parties (cf. Brazilian Legislative Studies data). The combination of these criteria resulted in four types of private donors: pragmatic–dispersed (Type I), ideological–dispersed (Type II), pragmatic–concentrated (Type III), and ideological–concentrated (Type IV). The empirical results reveal highly stable patterns over the two decades analyzed: among the nearly 68,000 recurrent donors, more than 85% maintained the same type of behavior across elections. Type I, composed mostly of companies until 2014, accounts for the largest proportional volume of revenue and distributes resources evenly between Executive and Legislative candidates. Type IV, composed almost exclusively of individuals, is numerically predominant but financially less expressive and shows a clear preference for right-wing legislative candidates. Types II and III, less expressive in financial volume, display hybrid combinations that reinforce the heterogeneity of the phenomenon. The analysis also confirms well-known trends - such as the structural concentration of donations among a small politico-economic elite and the greater flow of resources toward right-wing candidates - while introducing findings that qualify overly simplistic interpretations. The stability of donor behavior, even in the face of major institutional changes, suggests that the end of corporate donations did not eliminate previous coordination patterns but rather reconfigured them. The dissertation concludes that the proposed typology offers an analytical instrument for understanding the diversity of strategies adopted by private donors in Brazil. It also opens avenues for future research on the (in)variation regarding patterns of contribution, as well as determinants of contributions, their relationship with candidate attributes (such as incumbency), and their potential post-electoral effects, thereby contributing to the development of the research agenda on money and politics in the country.