Electoral Donations In Brazil

Context

Brazil has elections every two years, but alternating between two different types of elections, each type occurring every four years. There are the municipal elections, where mayors and city council members are elected (the last one occurred in 2016) and general elections where president, governors, senators and congressmen (regional and national) are elected (the last one occurred in 2014). Brazil has 26 federal units plus the federal district. Each one of these units (regions) elects its senators, congressmen and governors.

For each federal unit, Brazil's TSE provides information on the donations declared by the three entities: candidates, parties and committees. The data comprises information describing every donation received. The donations can be divided in two categories with respect to the donor: they can come from legal persons (private citizens, identified by the CPF (CPF is an identification number used by the Brazilian tax revenue office. It is roughly the Brazilian analogue to a social security number. With the same purpose, companies are identified with a similar number called CNPJ number) or from legal entities (i.e. companies, identified by the CNPJ number). Also, some entities can make donations among them (the party can give part of the money from a given donation to a candidate). In this type of transaction, the information on the original donor is also specified in the declarations. From now on, these type of donations will be referred to as non-original donations. Apart from information concerning each Brazilian federal unit separately, one can also obtain the information declared by the parties and committees at national level and for the presidential campaign (which has national and not regional scope).

Related paper:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.08826.pdf