Racial self-declaration and effectiveness of public affirmative action policy reserving campaign resources for black people in elections

Abstract

This article addresses the correspondence between the racial self-declarations of elected officials and their racial hetero identification, in order to ascertain the correct belonging to the group of recipients of racial electoral affirmative action. It aims to analyze whether racial self-declaration, in isolation, constitutes a sufficient instrument to ensure that the public policy of electoral racial affirmative action through resource reservation reaches its real recipients. From a theoretical point of view, the article dialogues with recent literature on racial issues in formal politics, as well as with the traditional bibliography on Brazilian racial formation, with emphasis on Brazil’s racial system based on phenotypic characteristics. This is a qualitative research, of an exploratory nature, designed, according to the inductive method, based on the comparative technique, which was carried out through the collection of open data from the Superior Electoral Court on self-declared black candidates elected to the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate, in the 2022 Elections and submission to a simulated hetero-identification panel. It is expected to provoke researchers, public institutions and civil society to promote interventions that guarantee the success of the measure and greater inclusion of the population in the Brazilian democratic process. In conclusion, it was observed that there is a high rate of non-correspondence between self-declarations and racial hetero-identification, after submitting the images of those elected to qualified external verification, and this allows us to infer that there is an insufficiency of racial self declaration to ensure the achievement of the purpose of the affirmative racial electoral policy.