Flying in Clear Skies: Technical Arguments Influencing ANAC Regulations

Abstract

Regulatory agencies possess the particularity of being controlled by non-elected politicians whose power is derived from delegations made by incumbent powers. There exists, however, a concern with the creation of institutional mechanisms that permit public participation, thus guaranteeing greater democratization and social control of the regulatory process. One of these participatory mechanisms is the public hearing, which was not given much attention by Brazilian literature on lobbying and interest groups.This article seeks to contribute to fill this gap, focusing on the impact of interest groups acting upon the National Civil Aviation Agency, ANAC. Analyzing comments sent to the public hearings, we identified the commentators and the intensity of their participation, the impact of their efforts as measured by the rate of comment incorporation, and we explained why some comments are incorporated and others are not. We organized an original data base of the comments made at all ANAC public hearings between 2007 and May 2012. We analyzed 518 comments concerning 48 regulations. To test participant influence, we classified the comments by degree of technicality, economic or legal argument, authorship, and request for regulation. To understand the incorporation process, we used regression models through which we presented evidence that a comment's incorporation is directly related to its degree of technicality. Technical comments, which effectively subsidize the resolution, have a higher chance of being incorporated. Even more than corporate power or its force of participation, the technical quality proved to be the main factor for comment incorporation.

O lobby na regulação da publicidade de alimentos da Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitária

“…Estudos mais recentes, no entanto, têm seguido a mesma linha das pesquisas norte-americanas, buscando compreender a participação dos grupos de interes-se nas consultas públicas e a influência daí resultante (Mattos 2004;Alves 2008;Silva 2012;Baird & Fernandes 2014).…”

The Organizational Consequences of Politics: A Research Agenda for the Study of Bureaucratic Politics in Latin America

“…From a policy perspective, articles address a broad range of policy or sector-specific areas, including aviation (Monteiro 2008;Baird and Fernandes 2014), criminal justice and the police (Davis 2006;Dewey 2012;Nunes 2015), education (Soifer 2009), electoral bodies (Hartlyn et al 2008;Gehlbach and Simpser 2015), energy (Pírez 2000), the environment (Brockett and Gottfried 2002;Orihuela 2014), industry and the private sector (Montero 2001;Schneider 2002Schneider , 2009Duvanova 2012;Ponce and McClintock 2014), labor (Amengual 2011a), public health (Rich 2013), science (Alcañiz 2010), transportation (Palermo 2006), and water and sanitation (Regalsky 2010;López-Murcia 2013;Rocca 2014). Unfortunately, only three articles deal with the intersection of bureaucratic agencies, corruption, and politics, and research analyzing bureaucratic formation and evolution is absent, along with its intersection with party politics and democratic development in the rest of the region.…”

“…As in other subfields, many of the surveyed pieces seek to enrich existing theory by applying models developed under idealized conditions from the United States and elsewhere to a Latin American context. These analyses have yielded some understanding of political oversight of public agencies under weak legislatures (Siavelis 2000;Eaton 2003;Ferraro 2008; Arana Araya 2013), regulatory development and diffusion in places with weak states (Jordana et al 2011;López-Murcia 2013;Baird and Fernandes 2014;Rocca 2014), and bureaucratic responses to budget shortfalls (Alcañiz 2010). Still, a large chunk of literature is not that ambitious.…”

Alimentação em jogo: o lobby na regulação da publicidade no Brasil

“…Essa lacuna vem sendo preenchida por uma crescente literatura no país que trata dos grupos de interesse, analisando sua ação política e capacidade de influência nas decisões de políticas públicas. Grande parte desses estudos, no entanto, focaliza apenas uma arena, como o Congresso Nacional (Mancuso, 2007;Santos, 2011) ou as agências reguladoras (Silva, 2012;Fernandes, 2014). Este livro buscou, ao acompanhar todo o processo político da regulação da publicidade de alimentos da Anvisa, alargar o rol de instituições contempladas, analisando todas as arenas políticas relevantes acionadas pelos grupos de interesse para a consecução de seus objetivos, como o Congresso Nacional, outras instâncias do Executivo (ministérios, Advocacia-Geral da União) e o Judiciário.…”