POWER AND DEMOCRACY: AN ANALYSIS ON THE ELECTORAL FINANCING NETWORK IN 2014 IN BRAZIL

This article analyzes the political-business power relationships formed in the electoral financing process in 2014 in Brazil. The study of investment networks reveals that a third of the candidates participated in the election with chances of electoral success close to zero, while another third participated in a corewhere 0.16% of the private donors directly financed 81% of the elected representatives in the country. To explore this asymmetry, we analyzed 220,000 relationships among 185,000 actors, including financiers and party agents as well as candidates who declared a more than seven billions Brazilian Reais flux of resources. We used candidacyand accountability data available on the TSE website, which were processed and submitted to network calculations and statistical tests. The results allowed to identify the structural constitution of a political-business elite and contribute to the consolidation of relational methods of critical analysis of political financing.