Indicações presidenciais para o Supremo Tribunal Federal e seus fins políticos: uma resposta a Mariana Prado e Cláudia Türner
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2010-09-01
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In a recent paper, Prado & Türner defend and test empirically the claim that Brazilian Presidents have tried to influence public policy by maximizing the number of people they appoint to the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and regulatory agencies, and by appointing increasingly young people to these positions. In the case of the STF, the authors' model assumes that there is a strong relationship between the political-constitutional preferences of the Justices and the President who appointed them to the Court. In this paper, we present two basic objections to this explanatory model of Presidential nominations to the STF. First, from the perspective of the President, making judicial decisions converge with her political preferences is not the only relevant political goal at stake. The STF appointment process can be used to foster both political goals that are internal to the Court (convergence between Presidential and judicial policy preferences, as recognized in the authors' model) and external political goals, which we identify as bargaining or signaling. The second objection is that the very utility of appointments aimed at what we label internal political goals depends on a host of factors and conditions that a model such as Prado & Türner's one cannot accommodate. Variables such as public opinion, the composition of Congress, the patterns of interaction between the existing STF Justices and the current composition of the Court often decrease the expected utility and effectiveness of appointments made to foster convergence between judicial decisions and Presidential preferences. These two points allow us to better explain why it is the case that Brazilian Presidents sometimes appoint to the Court individuals whose political preferences are not fully convergent with their own. In this scenario, the observable outcome of the STF appointment process reflects, in a complex way, Presidential attempts to integrate in a single decision these multiple political goals, resources, constraints and opportunities.