Electoral (game) design: sistemas eleitorais sob a ótica do desenvolvimento de jogos

Great socio-political phenomenon of the 20th Century, the Democracy has lived an apogee from the end of the Second World-War on, with a rising wave of nations adhering to this government system. However, the strength and quality of this system appears to never have been consolidated, showing signs of risk in recent decades especially by in face of new technologies. Amongst the factors that makes a democracy to be frail, is the popular perception of institution's malfunctioning, among which the elections, the main pillar of this type of system. Seeking to understand how such perception comes to be, this work harnesses the knowledge of the Game Design practice, which involves planning engaging competitions, as means to propose a new prism of electoral systems analysis. To fulfil this objective, exploratory research was done, comprised of literature reviews, gathering knowledge from the broad areas of Law, Political Sciences, Behavioural Economics, Philosophy and Applied Social Sciences, in an effort for achieving interdisciplinarity. Specifically, the dialogue between research on Electoral Design, Game Design and Gamification, resulted in elements that allow the characterization of elections as games, from the elector perspective. From such elements, it was possible to design a model that guides the investigation of an electoral system, or proposed changes in a current system, and that can produce indicators of the potential for electoral engagement in such system, based on the motivational drivers that are activated by its rules, theoretically. To evaluate it, the model was applied to the cases of elections for head of government in 12 territories and the obtained results were compared against electoral turnout rates and answers given by voters from such places. The research makes explicit the model's usage, its contributions to the debate Democracy's safety debate, but also its limitations and points to be improved in future research.