Brazil never had a House of Representative so fragmented as the one newly elected.

And the party composition might still change until the beginning of the next term, because, among other reasons, a new constitutional amendment is barring small political parties from accessing government funding and from having airtime during mandatory political advertisement TV broadcasting.

But even with all the expected migrations and consolidations that should reduce dwarf parties to around 10, the fragmentation would still be almost unprecedented.

The clearest indicator is the number of political parties that gained a seat in the House last Sunday: 30, against 28 from the 2014 elections and 18, from the 1989 and 2002 elections.

But not even this number shows how fragmented the House will be.

Indicators used in social sciences show that the Brazilian Lower House hit a new record, becoming an even more pronounced abnormality, trailing behind only Papua New Guinea.

One of these indicators is called the effective party number, proposed in 1979 by the Finnish political scientist Markku Laakso and his Estonian colleague Rein Taagepera.

This metric, calculated by a math formula, takes into consideration not only the number of political parties but also the size of each caucus in relation to the total of Legislative seats and the other caucuses.

In the newly elected House, the effective party number was over 16. Between 1989 and 2010, it was close to 9. This indicator is usually between 3 and 6 in other democracies. In their parliaments, the leading party median vote is 40%. In Brazil, since 1989 it doesn't go beyond 21%. In this election, it was around 11%.

^{Translated by NATASHA MADOV}

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