Legislative behavior and foreign policy in Latin America

Author(s)

Pedro Feliú Ribeiro

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas (FFLCH/SBD)
• Defense date: 2012-11-27

Examining board members

Amâncio Jorge Silva Nunes de Oliveira; Rogério Bastos Arantes; Fernando Henrique Eduardo Guarnieri; Pedro Robson Pereira Neiva; Janina Onuki

• Advisor: Amâncio Jorge Silva Nunes de Oliveira

Abstract

How do Latin-American legislators vote in foreign policy issues? The question addresses a long debate in the specialized literature regarding foreign policy specificity among other public policies and its influence on legislative behavior. On one hand, unified behavior among political parties on international issues is argued to be the standard behavior, revealing low polarization in legislative foreign policy decisions. The high costs of opposing presidents foreign policy, the low electoral gains obtained from foreign policy activism and the greater capacity of Executive to conduct international issues are among the main arguments of this perspective. On the other hand, the importance of domestic institutions and coalitions are emphasized as important features of the foreign policy decision-making process, pointing out similarity between legislative behaviors in both arenas. The dilution between domestic and foreign boundaries, as well as the distributive effect from increasing internationalized economies derived from foreign policy choices are some of explanatory features from this theoretical perspective. Although there is a great amount of studies focusing on legislative behavior in foreign policy at the US Congress, there is a lack of empirical research regarding Latin-American countries, especially across cases. The present thesis investigates foreign policy roll call votes of six Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Paraguay and Peru. The main goals are two. First, to compare the legislative behavior in domestic and foreign policies regarding the level of party unity, dimensionality of voting and the level of inter-party conflict. Second, explaining legislative votes in foreign policy. We calculate the rice index for the major political parties of the six countries mentioned above, comparing the scores in both domestic and international arenas. We also apply technics of estimating legislator\'s ideal points to assess the level of inter-party polarization and the dimensionality of foreign policy votes. We argue that there is no significant difference between legislative behaviors regarding the domestic and foreign arenas. Party unity, the level of inter-party polarization and the dimensionality of policy are all quite similar in both domestic and international issues. Our findings also indicate low dimensionality in foreign policy votes interpreted as the ideological position of political parties and the government opposition dichotomy. Finally, the logistic models also indicate ideology and coalition as the main explanatory variables of legislators votes in trade policy. The specific nature of foreign policy does not impact significantly legislative behavior in Latin America. (AU)