Alheamento eleitoral: reflexões sobre o significado de votos em branco, votos nulos e abstenções na teoria política contemporânea

The present article analyses the impact of blank and annulled votes and electoral abstention upon the legitimacy of representative democracies with the help of some classic contemporary political theory authors of the end of the 20th century (specifically liberal authors and their critics). Considering elections are central to present day western democracies, even if they do not overtake politics as a whole, the goal is to understand the meaning of such “non-decisional” events to nowadays representative systems with special emphasis in the interpretations of Giovanni Sartori, Seymour Lipset, Samuel Huntington, Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba on one side, and Carole Pateman, C.B. Macpherson and Pierre Bourdieu on the other