Governo presidencial condicionado: delegação e participação legislativa na Câmara dos Deputados.

Abstract

This thesis performs a descriptive and causal analysis of the presidents control over the agenda of the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies in the 1989-2016 period, specifically their legislative dominance and the use of provisional decrees (medidas provisórias MPs). Based on the rational choice institutionalism approach and the perspective that considers institutions as endogenous, it is proposed that important variations in the rates of presidential dominance and the use of MP were caused by changes in the incentives of the deputies to delegate agenda power to the president and to participate in the legislative process, in the sense of producing laws of their own and controlling those originating from the Executive; and also that those incentives are associated with characteristics of parliamentary preferences and to the opportunity costs of these activities. In order to empirically evaluate these propositions, multivariate statistical methods and a wide set of data on legislative production, parliamentary preferences, roll call votes on the floor, etc., are used. As a whole, the evidence is consistent with the propositions, the most relevant specific findings being that: presidential dominance varied positively with the ideological polarization between the governing majority and the opposition, negatively with the ideological bias of the president in relation to the median preference on the floor, and declined with the gradual loss of importance of representation of local interests (chapter 3); the degree of concentration of agenda power in the president was a mediating variable of the effects of polarization and the president s bias on dominance (chapter 4); the use of MPs in regulatory matters has diminished with the bias of the government in relation to the decisive preference in the Chamber, except when the legislative majority was organized around a popular president (chapter 5); and, finally, that the use of MPs in budget management grew due to the increase in the opportunity cost of deliberating bills for that purpose (chapter 6). Based on these results, the thesis concludes that the political interests of deputies condition the degree to which the president controls the agenda, and that this occurs through two mechanisms: the extent of the delegation of powers to the president and the intensity of parliamentary participation in the legislative process.