Judicializando a Federação?: o Supremo Tribunal Federal e os atos normativos estaduais

Abstract

In which conditions Governors, political parties, civil society organizations and the Attorney General's appeal to the Supreme Court to challenge the results of state legislative decision-making process in Brazil? How these cases are decided and how they differ from federal ones? The dissertation discusses the rationale of Constitutional Actions related to state rules, its decision patterns and its impacts on public policy, on the federative organization of the country, and on legislative decision-making. Theoretically, after discuss the institutional placement of the Supreme Court and its historical trajectory, I examine the interactions between powers at state-level and the use of an external arena, the Supreme Court. Empirically, two approaches are employed: 1) analysis of Constitutional Actions's processing and judgment, in the Supreme Court, between 1989 and 2015, especially to compare patterns among cases dealing with state and federal rules; 2) analysis of state level institutional, political and economic variables, as well as legislative production, between 1991-2014, in nine states, to investigate judicial activation as a way to contest state-level legislative process outputs. The main hypothesis is that the appeal to Supreme Court is associated with political players antecipation of judicial behavior, in uenced by institutional and political state-level variables. The Court is not only a potencial veto point that favors a centralizing federalism, but also as a player that can bring infornational gains to decision-making. In this context, STF performance before state rules allows local players to learn about the limits of the countries' federative organization.