Book Project
Legislative Effectiveness in Comparative Perspective: The Case of Brazil's Chamber of Deputies
What explains variation in legislative effectiveness where party systems are fragmented and not policy-oriented? This book project addresses these questions by examining the drivers of legislative effectiveness (i.e., the ability of lawmakers to move their agenda items through the legislative process and into law) in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies. Most Brazilian parties do not hold strong policy commitments and provide few incentives for effective lawmaking. Furthermore, Brazil's party system suffers from hyper-fragmentation: the average number of effective parties (Laakso & Taagepera, 1979) in the last two congressional sessions was 12.2, the highest in the world. Given these conditions, legislators have few incentives and face high barriers to propose and approve legislation, a task that has become ever more difficult in the context of increasing party system fragmentation. How is effective lawmaking viable under these circumstances?
I propose a theoretical framework that gives equal weight to formal and informal institutions as drivers of effectiveness in fragmented legislatures with less programmatic parties. As in the United States, legislators who occupy party leadership and committee chairmanship positions are more effective than their peers. However, the overall context makes association with legislative member organizations an equally important driver of effectiveness in Brazil. LMOs are cross-partisan caucuses focused on policy issues. The book provides evidence through a mixed-methods analysis of original data collected from nine months of in-country fieldwork. Quantitative evidence includes a new measure of effectiveness for legislators in Brazil’s lower house; this measure adapts the Legislative Effectiveness Score (LES) developed for the U.S. Congress by Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman. Qualitative evidence includes data from semi-structured interviews with 74 legislators, legislative staff, LMO members and coordinators, and civil society representatives.
Working Papers
Agribusiness Representation and Legislative Behavior in Brazil (with Daniela Campello, Olga Caldas and Fabiano Santos)
Recent scholarship has identified important cleavages in Brazilian agribusiness, with respect to the environment. In one extreme, groups deny climate change and demand that Brazil leave the Paris Agreement. On the other extreme, socio-environmental organizations propose zero deforestation in the Amazon and defend the rights of indigenous populations. It has been claimed that these cleavages are driven by different levels of integration of these firms in international markets, with the ones most integrated experiencing pressures from foreign consumers and governments with respect to environmental protection. This paper is a first effort to identify how different perspectives on the environment among Brazilian agribusiness groups are represented in the Brazilian Lower House. We rely on roll call data and novel data on legislator membership of the Agribusiness Parliamentary Front to analyze voting patterns related to environmental issues in the 2015-2018 legislature. Preliminary results suggest that the cleavages observed in the public discourse of Brazilian agribusinesses are not reflected on the floor of the House of Representatives. Not only do we find surprising homogeneity in the voting behavior of agribusiness representatives, but we also observed that this vote is far more attuned to denialists and conservatives than to more progressive perspectives. Next, we rely on biographies and campaign funding to test hypotheses about why progressive environmental views are not represented in the Brazilian Congress.
Black Representation and Agenda-Setting: Legislative Speeches and Racial Issues in Brazil (with Cristiano Rodrigues, Andre Felix and Fabiano Santos)
Recent scholarship has identified a trend towards increased Black representation in Brazil’s Congress due to institutional incentives and pressure from civil society. However, not much is known about the extent to which race has been incorporated into the congressional agenda. We test whether increased representation has been associated with higher levels of attention to racial issues in legislative speeches. We also explore the relationship between legislators’ race and party affiliation and speech valence. The paper relies on a novel dataset with all speeches given by Brazilian federal deputies and senators between 2000 and 2022. Speeches are coded by their content related to racial issues. We hope to incorporate these data into the Brazilian Policy Agendas Project in the future. Our findings suggest that Black and leftist legislators emphasize racial issues more frequently than White legislators, doing so in a positive manner. Racial issues are not salient among White legislators affiliated with center or right parties – when these lawmakers discuss the topic, they do so using neutral or negative frames. The paper expands our understanding about how race influences agenda-setting in multirracial/multicultural democracies. As such, it can guide future research linking racial cleavages to legislative production more broadly.
Financial Resources and Framing: The Case of the Gun Control Referendum in Brazil
In 2005, Brazil conducted a referendum that allowed citizens to decide whether the sale of guns and ammunition should be prohibited. In July of the same year, 80% of Brazilians declared they would vote “Yes”. After being exposed to propaganda and media coverage for three months, a surprising percentage of 63.9% of Brazilians voted “No”. Why did citizens abruptly change their minds? Using content analysis of advertisements and news articles, and data collected from the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court, this study proposes two explanations to this puzzle. First, the framing strategy of the “No” campaign was a powerful driver of this shift. “No” frames were recurrent, simple, negative, symbolic, and individual-focused. Furthermore, they were conveyed by a reliable framing source. Second, financial resources seem to be a critical explanatory variable for the success of the “No” campaign. I find that the “No” advocates had substantially more financial resources than the “Yes” supporters, receiving large donations from the gun industry and recreational gun users. These resources were used to “buy” framing expertise. These findings shed light on a theme that has not been explored by the existing literature: the relationship between financial resources and framing.
Publications
Legislative Effectiveness in Comparative Perspective: The Case of Brazil's Chamber of Deputies
What explains variation in legislative effectiveness where party systems are fragmented and not policy-oriented? This book project addresses these questions by examining the drivers of legislative effectiveness (i.e., the ability of lawmakers to move their agenda items through the legislative process and into law) in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies. Most Brazilian parties do not hold strong policy commitments and provide few incentives for effective lawmaking. Furthermore, Brazil's party system suffers from hyper-fragmentation: the average number of effective parties (Laakso & Taagepera, 1979) in the last two congressional sessions was 12.2, the highest in the world. Given these conditions, legislators have few incentives and face high barriers to propose and approve legislation, a task that has become ever more difficult in the context of increasing party system fragmentation. How is effective lawmaking viable under these circumstances?
I propose a theoretical framework that gives equal weight to formal and informal institutions as drivers of effectiveness in fragmented legislatures with less programmatic parties. As in the United States, legislators who occupy party leadership and committee chairmanship positions are more effective than their peers. However, the overall context makes association with legislative member organizations an equally important driver of effectiveness in Brazil. LMOs are cross-partisan caucuses focused on policy issues. The book provides evidence through a mixed-methods analysis of original data collected from nine months of in-country fieldwork. Quantitative evidence includes a new measure of effectiveness for legislators in Brazil’s lower house; this measure adapts the Legislative Effectiveness Score (LES) developed for the U.S. Congress by Craig Volden and Alan Wiseman. Qualitative evidence includes data from semi-structured interviews with 74 legislators, legislative staff, LMO members and coordinators, and civil society representatives.
Working Papers
Agribusiness Representation and Legislative Behavior in Brazil (with Daniela Campello, Olga Caldas and Fabiano Santos)
Recent scholarship has identified important cleavages in Brazilian agribusiness, with respect to the environment. In one extreme, groups deny climate change and demand that Brazil leave the Paris Agreement. On the other extreme, socio-environmental organizations propose zero deforestation in the Amazon and defend the rights of indigenous populations. It has been claimed that these cleavages are driven by different levels of integration of these firms in international markets, with the ones most integrated experiencing pressures from foreign consumers and governments with respect to environmental protection. This paper is a first effort to identify how different perspectives on the environment among Brazilian agribusiness groups are represented in the Brazilian Lower House. We rely on roll call data and novel data on legislator membership of the Agribusiness Parliamentary Front to analyze voting patterns related to environmental issues in the 2015-2018 legislature. Preliminary results suggest that the cleavages observed in the public discourse of Brazilian agribusinesses are not reflected on the floor of the House of Representatives. Not only do we find surprising homogeneity in the voting behavior of agribusiness representatives, but we also observed that this vote is far more attuned to denialists and conservatives than to more progressive perspectives. Next, we rely on biographies and campaign funding to test hypotheses about why progressive environmental views are not represented in the Brazilian Congress.
Black Representation and Agenda-Setting: Legislative Speeches and Racial Issues in Brazil (with Cristiano Rodrigues, Andre Felix and Fabiano Santos)
Recent scholarship has identified a trend towards increased Black representation in Brazil’s Congress due to institutional incentives and pressure from civil society. However, not much is known about the extent to which race has been incorporated into the congressional agenda. We test whether increased representation has been associated with higher levels of attention to racial issues in legislative speeches. We also explore the relationship between legislators’ race and party affiliation and speech valence. The paper relies on a novel dataset with all speeches given by Brazilian federal deputies and senators between 2000 and 2022. Speeches are coded by their content related to racial issues. We hope to incorporate these data into the Brazilian Policy Agendas Project in the future. Our findings suggest that Black and leftist legislators emphasize racial issues more frequently than White legislators, doing so in a positive manner. Racial issues are not salient among White legislators affiliated with center or right parties – when these lawmakers discuss the topic, they do so using neutral or negative frames. The paper expands our understanding about how race influences agenda-setting in multirracial/multicultural democracies. As such, it can guide future research linking racial cleavages to legislative production more broadly.
Financial Resources and Framing: The Case of the Gun Control Referendum in Brazil
In 2005, Brazil conducted a referendum that allowed citizens to decide whether the sale of guns and ammunition should be prohibited. In July of the same year, 80% of Brazilians declared they would vote “Yes”. After being exposed to propaganda and media coverage for three months, a surprising percentage of 63.9% of Brazilians voted “No”. Why did citizens abruptly change their minds? Using content analysis of advertisements and news articles, and data collected from the Brazilian Superior Electoral Court, this study proposes two explanations to this puzzle. First, the framing strategy of the “No” campaign was a powerful driver of this shift. “No” frames were recurrent, simple, negative, symbolic, and individual-focused. Furthermore, they were conveyed by a reliable framing source. Second, financial resources seem to be a critical explanatory variable for the success of the “No” campaign. I find that the “No” advocates had substantially more financial resources than the “Yes” supporters, receiving large donations from the gun industry and recreational gun users. These resources were used to “buy” framing expertise. These findings shed light on a theme that has not been explored by the existing literature: the relationship between financial resources and framing.
Publications
- Brasil, Felipe Gonçalves and Beatriz Rey. 2022. "A Teoria do Equilíbrio Pontuado: Incrementalismo e Pontuações na Dinâmica das Políticas Públicas," in Abordagens Contemporâneas para a Análise de Políticas Públicas, edited by Ana Cláudia Niedhardt Capella and Felipe Gonçalves Brasil, Rio de Janeiro: Eduerj.
- Baumgartner, Frank R., Marcello Carammia, Derek A. Epp, Ben Noble, Beatriz Rey, and Tevfik Murat Yildirim. 2017. "Budgetary change in authoritarian and democratic regimes." Journal of European Public Policy 24, no. 6: 792-808.
- Rey, Beatriz. 2016. "Horizontal social movements and agenda-setting: evidence from Brazil." Agenda Política 4, no. 1: 130-151.