Study title

The project used secondary data to assess the role of women as policymakers in Brazil by analysing mayoral elections. The project focuses on two municipal administration mandates in municipalities below 200,000 voters: 2001–2004 and 2005–2008. Electoral data comes from 'Tribunal Superior Eleitoral' (Superior Electoral Court), which is the highest judicial body of the Brazilian Electoral Justice. Data on mayoral characteristics, including gender, education, political affiliation, and political experience also come from Tribunal Superior Electoral. For our analyses, we focus on races with two candidates where one candidate is a woman and the other is a man, which gives us a sample of 723 races. The project further assesses corruption differentials between male and female candidates in elections. Data on corruption come from random audits of municipal governments since 2003. For each municipality, the auditors collect documents and information starting in 2001 and prepare an audit report. Over 2,000 municipalities were audited at the time of this project. Corruption data are available for 161 races in the sample. The dataset also includes: (1) data on the number of public employees in municipalities obtained from National statistics office, (2) data on electoral campaign contributions from the electoral tribunal, and (3)data on public expenditure in the municipalities.