Abstract The legislative success of presidential agendas in Brazil has traditionally been attributed to formal coalitions formed by the Executive. While the centrality of these coalitions is widely recognized, a key question remains: do formal governing coalitions secure sufficient votes to guarantee this success? To explore this question, the study develops a Legislative Performance Index (LPI) that measures the contribution of each party’s votes to the approval of Executive-backed bills. Drawing on data from 2,030 roll-call votes in the Chamber […]

In this study, we explore novel data concerning party affiliations within ministries to characterize political-party appointments in high and mid-level bureaucracy from 1999 to 2018. We argue that party cleavages within these organizations hold significant importance. To scrutinize the variance among ministries, we propose an index of intra-ministerial party fractionalization. By emphasizing the distinction between party politicization and fractionalization as separate dimensions that vary significantly among ministries, our argument underscores the importance of intra-ministerial party cleavages in understanding government dynamics […]

This paper focuses on the evolution of the institutional presidency – meaning the cluster of agencies that directly support the chief of the executive – in Argentina and Brazil since their redemocratization in the 1980s. It investigates what explains the changes that have come about regarding the size of the institutional presidency and the types of agency that form it. Following the specialized literature, we argue that the growth of the institutional presidency is connected to developments occurring in the […]