Political representation of women in the city council of Belo Horizonte

Abstract

The persistent under-representation of women in legislative positions, despite the adoption of gender quotas, highlights the limits of formal measures for political inclusion. This article analyzes how party quotas are linked to factors such as campaign funding, recruitment structures and individual trajectories to shape the competitiveness of women’s applications in Belo Horizonte. The focus is on the trials of 2020 and 2024, moments of inflection marked by normative changes and the emergence of new leaders. The research combines analysis of electoral data with a review of national and international literature on representation, affirmative action and gender-based political violence. The results indicate that, although quotas have boosted the number of women councilors - from five in 2008 to twelve in 2024 - their effectiveness depends on complementary conditions: equitable transfer of resources, opening the party to non-traditional profiles and confronting political violence. The study also shows that left-wing parties, such as PSOL, stand out for incorporating applications from social movements and with greater racial diversity, while right-wing parties concentrate a larger number of elected women, but reproduce traditional recruitment patterns. It is concluded that Belo Horizonte constitutes a privileged field to understand how the effects of quotas vary according to party practices and local contexts. The contribution of the article is to show that the democratization of brazilian politics requires not only the numerical presence of women, but also institutional and cultural conditions that make their applications substantially competitive.