Power-sharing and control: government coalitions and their effect on the legislative branch

• Grant number: 17/11889-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: September 01, 2017
• End date: August 31, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Political Science - Political Behavior
• Principal Investigator: Andréa Marcondes de Freitas
• Grantee: Benjamin de Oliveira Magalhães
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 16/14525-6 - Political institutions, patterns of executive-legislative relations and government capacity, AP.TEM

Abstract

The Brazilian presidents systematically form coalitions, that is, they divide ministerial portfolios between the parties of the legislative branch. In the ministerial portfolio division, the party elected to the executive delegates power to the coalition partners on policy areas. Delegation involves risks, for example, that the agent distances himself from the preference of the actor he delegated. Studies of delegation risks and mechanisms to control such risks have identified, in some cases, the legislative branch as a sphere of control among coalition members. They were carried out mainly in parliamentary systems (Thies, 2001, Martin and Vanberg, 2005), but they also exist in presidential systems (Freitas, 2016). The present research seeks to find out how the members of the coalition deal with the inherent risks of the delegation, verifying that in the Brazilian case, the legislative branch also functions as a control instrument among the coalition partners. For this purpose, the ministers and rapporteurs of all projects by the executive that were approved in the period from 1995 to 2014 will be analyzed. (AU)