The Brazilian political news cycle has been dominated by the coalition-building hiccups that have marked the start of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s third administration.
The government’s hardships stem from the fact that, while Brazil’s traditional system of coalition presidentialism remains the rule of the game (as columnist Beatriz Rey argued in a recent op-ed), the balance of power has changed dramatically. The president, once an imperial figure, has lost power to Congress, which in the past merely rubber-stamped executive orders.
One way to assess this is to look at a simple measure of presidential strength: the proportion of government proposals that are approved in the House in the same year they are presented, relative to all legislative proposals approved by the chamber. As we can see in the chart below, there is a significant structural break after 2008 — in the latter half of Lula’s second term in office.
There are many ways to analyze this.
An institutionalist benchmark analysis would examine both the strategies and preferences of agents and institutions.
It is common in Brazilian political science to adopt the Downsian rational choice paradigm that politicians don’t really care about ideology when they vote, but rather that they are office-seekers. As such, they act according to their preferences, maximizing political and budgetary resources to appease their constituents and get re-elected. However, this does not mean that ideology plays no role in the political system or in the relationship between the Executive and Legislative branches, as members of Congress are beholden to their electorate.
Since former President Dilma Rousseff’s first term, there have been some dogfights between the presidential agenda and large congressional groups. While her...
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