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Este texto revela de forma inovadora traço distintivo do nosso sistema eleitoral proporcional de lista aberta, a saber, a existência de quatro modalidades de distribuição espacial do voto a partir das quais se elegem quatro tipos de repre sentantes para nossas casas legislativas: deputa dos com votação concentrada e dominante, de putados com base fragmentada e dominante, deputados com votação concentrada e partilhada e deputados com votação fragmentada e par tilhada. O texto aponta, por meio da análise de emendas ao orçamento, o incentivo ao distribu tivismo e a práticas clientelistas decorrentes de propriedades de nosso sistema eleitoral. Correla ciona dados de carreira política às modalidades diversas de distribuição do voto, discrimina as circunscrições eleitorais seguras e avalia, por fim, o retorno eleitoral de práticas distributivas.

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T hat democracy is unthinkable without political parties is now conventional wisdom in political science. One of the necessary functions parties fulfill is to simplify the labyrinthine world of politics by supplying voters with relevant information in digestible form. In stable democracies parties facilitate electoral decision making by providing the informational shortcuts and standing choices that many citizens rely upon at the start of every campaign (Popkin 1991;Sniderman 2000). While this makes reasoned choice easier for "informationmising" voters, it also lends an air of predictability and even inevitability to most elections in stable party systems. Because campaign effects tend to be limited or offsetting, outcomes can often be forecast before campaigning even begins (Campbell and Garand 2000;Gelman and King 1993).When party systems are young and/or in flux, however, parties commonly have a more limited presence in the electorate (Converse 1969). Partisan attachments Andy Baker is assistant professor of political science, Northeastern University, Boston, MA 02115-5000 (a.baker@neu.edu). Barry Ames is Mellon Professor of Comparative Politics, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 (barryames@yahoo.com). Lucio R. Renno is assistant professor, Center for Latin American Studies, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721 (lucio renno@yahoo.com).Thanks to Jorge Dominguez, Kenneth Greene, Robert Huckfeldt, Chappell Lawson, William Mayer, Mauro Porto, David Samuels, Ethan Scheiner, Katherine Cramer Walsh, members of the Latin American Seminar Series at Harvard University, and the Political Science Department at the University of California-Davis for valuable comments and assistance. The data collection for this project was funded by the National Science Foundation (SES #0137088).are only weakly formed, so voter preferences are more volatile, campaigns more crucial, and election outcomes less predictable (Lawson and McCann 2005). Though this combination-weak partisan cues, low levels of partisan identification, and volatile voters-characterizes many new democracies, scholars have only begun to study how citizens in such contexts gather political information and make electoral decisions. We address this question with a unique public opinion dataset collected during a particularly volatile campaign, the presidential election of 2002 in Brazil. Our central claim is that politically colored information gathered by citizens through social networks plays a primary role in short-term attitude change and vote choice. We explain how interpersonal influence produces short-term preference volatility among voters and shapes election outcomes. Our analysis also contributes to the heretofore U.S.-dominated social network literature by clarifying some of its conceptual and theoretical ambiguities and by pointing out causal mechanisms that

Increasingly, it is said that the main determinants of electoral outcomes are class, ethnicity, and religion and that local political organizations occupy only marginal roles in national elections. I assess the effects of local party organizations in the presidential election of 1989 in Brazil. Given the long hiatus in competitive politics, the absence of any parties linked to the country's previous democratic experience, and the weakness of citizen identification with political parties, Brazil should be a textbook example of the collapse of local political organizations. The presidential candidates, however, acted as if party endorsements mattered, and in the context of Brazilian politics, it was rational for municipal mayors to trade blocs of votes for future local benefits. Applying a series of increasingly complex models to the vote shares of the leading candidates, I show that all candidates did significantly better in municipalities where the mayor represented their party. I also show that spatial factors affect the tactics of local politicians, and I distinguish charismatic from purely organizational components of support.