Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: According to a widely held view of Brazilian politics, part of the difficulties presidents find in governing the country stem from the fact that national legislators respond to state pressures rather than to partisan and national considerations. Owing to their institutional position, governors not only influence national debates, but are also able to determine outcomes via the control they exert over their states? legislative delegations. We investigate this view?s empirical validity through the analysis of two data sets. We first examine legislative behavior through roll call votes in the Brazilian Lower House on a set of measures that redefined the federalist pact established in 1988 in favor of the central government. We show that Brazilian legislators do not behave any differently when they vote on measures that are likely to generate a clash between governors and the central government, that is, the measures over which the governors are likely to exert the strongest pressure on their state delegations. We then examine the impact of several political and partisan variables on the distribution of the federal investment budget to the states. The argument we test is that the influence of governors on the behavior of legislators is stronger than the influence of the president and political parties, and that the source of this influence is eminently institutional. In other words, that the influence of governors over the behavior of national legislators is a product of the political, administrative and fiscal autonomy granted to the states by the 1988-constitution. We show that governors do indeed matter for the allocation of budgetary funds to the state. Yet, they matter not because of their institutional position, but because of their political and partisan identity. We conclude the paper with a discussion of the mechanisms that explain the ability of the central government to change the federal status quo in an environment that is, at the surface, completely hostile to any changes.
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