Objective/context: The article develops the concept of socio-partisan activism to explain how activists simultaneously engage with both political parties and social movements through Brazil’s collective mandates, examining the conditions under which this dual engagement can democratize political representation. Methodology: A qualitative multiple-case study analyzes 33 collective mandates—29 elected in Brazil’s 2020 municipal elections, two municipal precursors from 2016, and two state-level mandates from 2018—drawing on 64 semi-structured interviews with 74 individuals, extensive documentary research, and inductive-deductive content analysis using Atlas.ti. Conclusions: Multiple affiliations between movements and parties are widespread across collective mandates, enabling the transfer of participatory repertoires and activist knowledge into legislative practice through horizontal office structures, expanded political councils, and sustained engagement in committees, hearings, territories, and protests both inside and outside institutions. Conflicts stem from party organizational constraints and legal ambiguity surrounding collective candidacies, legislatures’ vertical and weakly deliberative routines, factional disputes within the Workers’ Party (PT) and the Socialism and Freedom Party (PSOL), and uneven internal alignment—pressures that can fragment collectives even as they broaden inclusion of historically excluded groups. Three conditions shape both success and conflict: party and legislative organization, shared affinities and programmatic alignment among co-councilors, and micro-relations within parties. Together, these factors condition how socio-partisan activism can recalibrate representation. Originality: By shifting the analytical focus from organizations to activists, the article introduces a generalizable framework—socio-partisan activism—that expands party–movement research beyond episodic alliances to everyday dual engagement, mapping how collective mandates adapt movement repertoires to representative institutions while reinforcing civil-society networks and proposing a comprehensive view of the universe of elected collective mandates at the time of study.
Debora Rezende de Almeida (Tue,) studied this question.