Campaign finance, gender and electoral justice: the jurisprudence of the Regional Electoral Court of Amapá (TRE-AP)

Resumen

The paper seeks to answer the following question: how has the Regional Electoral Court of Amapá (TRE-AP) ruled on the judicial policy requiring the mandatory allocation of resources to finance women’s campaigns? The hypothesis is that the TRE-AP’s decision-making pattern tends
not to ensure the transfer of at least 30% of the resources from the Special Campaign Financing Fund (FEFC) and the Party Fund (FP) to women’s candidacies, owing to a procedurally lenient approach in which the recognition of irregularities in the flow of funds does not result in sanctions against political parties. The research seeks to understand how institutional barriers validate gender-quota fraud, perpetuate the underrepresentation of women in politics, and reveal the Judiciary’s inability to ensure the material viability of women’s candidacies. The study combines qualitative and quantitative approaches. Initially, data were collected through jurisprudential research to identify TRE-AP rulings on campaign finance and gender concerning proceedings  conducted between 2018 and 2025. Subsequently, 200 rulings were analyzed using (1) jurimetrics, based on descriptive statistics, to examine procedural classes, decision dates, reporting judges, and outcomes, in a sample of 183 rulings; and (2) Discursive Textual Analysis (DTA), through which analytical categories were identified in a sample of 19 rulings. The main finding confirmed the hypothesis that the Electoral Justice system in Amapá does not effectively sanction political parties that fail to properly allocate resources in accordance with the gender quota.