Este trabalho aborda a questão regional enquanto uma estratégia dos partidos na arena eleitoral. Ao acrescentar a dimensão partidária aos trabalhos que advogam pela regionalização dos distritos eleitorais de elevada magnitude, o intuito foi mostrar que é do sistema eleitoral, sobretudo da lista aberta, da magnitude e da estrutura da competição que emanam os incentivos à subdistritalização. Como uma perspectiva teórica alternativa à solução distributivista, o argumento é que o sistema eleitoral traz o elemento regional ao plano das decisões partidárias, isto é, a subdistritalização ocorreria em decorrência da ação intencional política que, com isso, garantiria a diminuição ou a ausência da competição intrapartidária no território. O resultado da análise da lista de candidatos brasileira reforça que o meio social e o político respondem aos fatores regionais, que influencia suas atitudes e estratégias. Por meio de uma dinâmica não política, mas geoespacial partidos encontram estratégias para lidar com as restrições institucionais a fim de atingir o sucesso eleitoral. / This thesis considers the regional question as a partisan strategy in the electoral arena. The goal is to show that from the electoral system, especially the open list proportional representation, the magnitude and the structure of the electoral competition, emanates the incentives for subdistricting. Therefore, partisanship is introduced, adding a new dimension to the scholarship that advocates for the regionalization of the high magnitude districts. When arguing that, in fact, parties decisions are influenced by regional elements which were fostered by the electoral system, this study pursues an alternative theoretical perspective to distributivism. Subdistricting is a byproduct of intentional political action, which, in turn, ensures the decrease or absence of intra-party competition over the territory. The findings based on the analysis of the list of candidates presented by parties in Brazil reinforces that the social and political environment responds to regional factors that influence their attitudes and strategies. Through a non-political, but geospatial dynamic, parties can strategically deal with the institutional constraints in order to achieve electoral success.

This dissertation presents a theoretical framework about which voters parties distribute to and with which policies. To develop this full framework of distributive policies, the dissertation proceeds in two stages. First, it analyses which voters parties have more incentives to target distributive policies. Second, it also develops the conditions under which political parties can focus exclusively on these voters or need to combine this strategy with appeals to a broader electorate. The first part of the argument analyses which voters parties have at the centre of their distributive strategies, or, in the words of Cox and McCubbins (1986) to whom parties will give an available extra dollar for distribution. The argument is that core voters provide more efficient conditions for distribution, contradicting Stokes’ (2005) claim that a dollar spent on core voters is a wasted dollar. The explanation is twofold. First, core supporters might not vote for another party, but they can get demobilised. Once we include the effects on turnout, core voters are more responsive. Their party identification makes them especially attentive and reactive to economic benefits provided by their party. Secondly, incumbents cannot individually select who receives a distributive policy, and not all voters are equally reachable with distributive policies. When a party provides a policy, it cannot control if some of those resources go to voters the party is not interested in. Core supporters are more homogenous groups with more definable traits, whereas swing voters are a residual category composed by heterogeneous voters with no shared interests. This makes it easier for incumbents to shape distributive benefits that target core voters more exclusively. These mechanisms define the general distribution hypothesis: parties will focus on core voters, by targeting their distributive strategies to them. The second part of the dissertation develops the conditions under which politicians stick to this distributive strategy or, instead, would provide more universalistic spending to a more undefined set of recipients. The conventional argument explaining this choice relies on the electoral system, arguing that proportional systems give more incentives to provide universalistic policies than majoritarian systems. This dissertation challenges this argument and provides two other contextual conditions that define when parties have a stronger interest in their core supporters or in a more general electorate. First, the geographic distribution of core supporters across districts is a crucial piece of information to know the best distributive strategy. When parties’ core supporters are geographically concentrated, they cannot simply rely on them, as the party will always fall short of districts to win the election. Therefore, parties will have greater incentives to expand their electorate by buying off other voters. This should reduce the predicted differences between electoral systems in the provision of universalistic programmes. Secondly, the policy positions of candidates are a result of strategic considerations that respond to other candidates’ positions. Thus, I argue that parties adapt their distributive strategies to the number of competing parties, independently of the electoral system. In a two-party scenario, parties need broader coalitions of electoral support. In equilibrium, any vote can change the electoral outcome. As more parties compete, the breadth of parties’ electorates is reduced and parties will find narrow distributive policies more profitable. In summary, the main contribution of this dissertation one is to provide a new framework to study distributive politics. This framework makes innovations both on the characterisation of swing and core electoral groups, and the rationale of parties’ distributive strategies, contributing to advance previous theoretical and empirical research.

This thesis examines the ways that fluctuations in voter expectations for the state of the economy affect party strategies, throughout 28 countries across the EU and OECD between 1995 and 2021. I thus make a theoretical contribution to the existing research by testing the theoretical models that claim that parties primarily respond to voter preferences and perceptions when conducting their policy strategies. Utilizing data from the Comparative Manifestos Project, the Eurobarometer, QOG and ParlGov, the study examines policy positions on economic issues, as presented in party manifestos ahead of elections. Using fixed-effects regressions with interaction variables, the effects of voter expectations on policy stances are examined, both in parliaments more generally as well as for each party family respectively. Specifically, Social-democratic, conservative, populist, Christian-democratic, and liberal parties are considered. Results show that when citizen expectations for the state of the economy worsen, parties show tendencies of shifting their policy stances to the left across the left-right scale. This is true across parliaments more generally, and results indicate that it may also be true when looking at each party family respectively. Most notably, results show that economic expectations impact the policy positions of parties even when controlling for the actual state of the economy, implying that parties are responsive to voter expectations independently of other macroeconomic considerations.