Scaling behavior in a proportional voting process.
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.
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Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Ceará, Campus do Pici, Centro de Ciências Exatas, Caixa Postal 6030, 60455-760 Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil.
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