Brazilian Campaign Financial Network in 2014 Elections: Topological Properties

Abstract

General elections were held in Brazil on 5 October 2014 to elect the President
of Republic, the Senators, the State Governors and State Legislatures, amounting to 1603 positions to be filled in by more than 18.000 running candidates. In order to meet this competition, candidates receive private financial contribution to make campaign among their electorate. Based on this, electoral justice requires candidates to provide a detailed accounting of revenue which is available to public just after elections is over. Using these reports, we model a new social network, until now unexplored, which represents the financial relation between the participants involved in Brazilian campaign of 2014 elections. Analyzing the structure of the network, we show that the major component, which represents more than 96% of nodes and edges within the original network, has a small-world behavior and it can be classified as a scale-free network, two well-studied network models found in different areas of social networks.