Scaling behavior in a proportional voting process

Abstract

We perform a statistical analysis on the proportional elections held in Brazil in October 1998. We show that the distribution of votes among candidates for the whole country follows a power law N(v) is proportional to v(-alpha), with alpha=1.00+/-0.02, extending over two orders of magnitude. The voting distributions for several states of the federation also display scale-invariant behavior with alpha approximately equal to 1. We argue that this particular voting system can be modeled as a typical multiplicative process in which the choice of the candidate is governed by a product of probabilities.