The budgetary traction of ministries and legislative agenda control in Brazil, 2003-2024
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2025-12-18
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Amorim Neto, Octavio
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This dissertation investigates how Brazilian presidents manage to govern with fragmented and polarized Congresses, and what happens to this capacity when the rules of the budget change. It focuses on two core elements of that process. The first is a new measure of each party’s budgetary “traction” with the Executive — the Relative Budgetary Traction of Ministries (RBTM) — which captures how much a party’s rewards depend on controlling ministries rather than on individual parliamentary amendments. The second is a major institutional reform in 2015–2016 that made individual amendments largely mandatory and reduced the President’s discretion over budgetary resources. Together, these two elements are used to examine when the governing coalition is able to protect its members from defeat on the floor and how the burden of those defeats is distributed inside the coalition. Empirically, the study builds an original dataset that follows every party in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies, semester by semester, between 2003 and 2024. For each recorded roll-call vote in which the president’s position can be identified, the dissertation measures how often each party ends up on the losing side, and relates these patterns of defeat to cabinet participation, control of ministries, RBTM, ideological distance from the president and measures of presidential popularity. The results confirm that being part of the governing coalition substantially reduces a party’s risk of defeat in plenary, but they also show that this protection is not uniform: within the coalition, parties that control powerful ministries — those with high RBTM — are more likely to remain loyal in conflictive votes and therefore accumulate a disproportionate share of the defeats that still occur. The dissertation further shows that this pattern changes sharply after the introduction of mandatory individual amendments in 2015–2016, which guaranteed deputies and parties a sizeable share of spending independently of day-to-day bargaining with the Executive. After this reform, the link between controlling ministries and being the main “shock absorber” for government defeats becomes much weaker, the president’s capacity to use ministries as instruments of discipline declines, and agenda power becomes more fragmented.