Collective candidacies and mandates in Brazil: Recasting democratic mediation

Abstract While global discontent with democracy has reached its highest rates since 1995, there is no consensus on what is causing so much democratic backsliding. In Brazil, scholars discussing how to reinvigorate citizens's trust in democratic systems emphasize the need for an understanding of political representation to include issues such as recognition, inclusion, and a thorough assessment of institutional affordances provided by the available instruments for mediation of conflictive political interests. Meanwhile, grassroots activists are exploring the space between civil society and the state to reshape political representation through collective candidacies and mandates. The former refers to organized groups of four or more activists campaigning together for a single seat in government office. The latter involves legislative seats run collaboratively by groups committed to sharing their representative power with their constituents during their term in office. Using abductive reasoning to discuss secondary data and review literature, the paper argues that: (a) growing dissatisfaction with democracy stems from a perceived decline in the ability of its established mechanisms to equitably aggregate and negotiate citizens' diverse interests; (b) power‐sharing, civic imaginaries, trust, mistrust, distrust, and interests are key psychopolitical elements that simultaneously inform citizens' skepticism about democratic institutions and are mobilized to rebuild these mechanisms. Presenting these experiments as products of the Brazilian political system's affordances and highlighting their relevance for creating accountable and inclusive institutions, the paper encourages political psychologists to apply their interdisciplinary tools to study democratic innovations emerging at the intersection of theory and practice.