Female Feminino no Rio Grande do Norte

A case study on female candidates for the position of governor

Abstract

This paper analyzes the brazilian electoral scenario for the governor race in the 2018 and 2022 elections through a gender perspective. Faced with a scenario in which the importance of women and the effectiveness of their management for the exercise of democracy has been increasingly discussed, the following questions were raised: How many women ran for governor in the elections between 1998 and 2022? How many women were elected? How does female participation occur in majority elections? And which are the regions that stand out the most in terms of women applying for the aforementioned position? How did the victory of Fátima Bezerra (PT) in the RN happened when she competed against a member of one of the most expressive oligarchic families in the state in 2018? The methodological approach was based on quantitative data when searching the website of the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) for the numbers of the elections in the aforementioned years and on qualitative data when directing attention to newspapers, official pages and interviews to outline the profile of the elected candidate. As a result, we were able to visualize that the two states that predominate in the representation of women as Governors are in the Northeast. In the specific case of the election of Fátima Bezerra, the non-existence of family capital resonates as an alternative to the citizens – even with the difficulty faced by women – to be elected in more prominent positions in institutional politics, because although gender quotas exist, they are intended for proportional candidacies, and nothing is done with regard to the majority candidacies.