Distinguishing Between Influences on Brazilian Legislative Behavior

Abstract

Ideal point estimators hold the promise of identifying multiple dimensions of political disagreement as they are manifested in legislative voting. However, standard ideal point estimates do not distinguish between ideological motivations and voting inducements from parties, coalitions, or the executive. In this article we describe a general approach for hierarchically identifying an ideological dimension using an auxiliary source of data. In the case we consider, we use an anonymous survey of Brazilian legislators to identify party positions on a left‐right ideology dimension. We then use this data to distinguish ideological motivations from other determinants of roll‐call behavior for eight presidential‐legislative periods covering more than 20 years of Brazilian politics. We find that there exists an important nonideological government‐opposition dimension, with the entrance and exit of political parties from the governing coalition appearing as distinct shifts in ideal point on this second dimension. We conjecture that the Brazilian president's control over politically important resources is the source of this dimension of conflict, which has recently become far more important in explaining roll‐call voting than the ideological dimension.

Self-Selection and Misreporting in Legislative Surveys

“…In the last couple of years, several studies have conducted surveys in order to study legislative behavior (Aelst, Sehata, Dalen, 2010;Kam et al, 2010;Martin, 2010;Bowler and Farrell, 2011;Zucco and Lauderdale, 2011;Arnold, 2012;Scully, Hix and Farrell, 2012;Bailer et al, 2013;Deschouwer and Depauw, 2014;Bütikofer and Hug, 2015). Although legislative surveys are vulnerable to several methodological problems, they are rarely ever validated (Groves et al, 2011;Fowler Jr., 2013).…”

Measuring Political Positions from Legislative Speech

“…In the UK House of Commons, almost all voting behavior is explained by whether an MP's party is in government (Spirling and McLean 2007). In the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, voting behavior reflects a mixture of legislator ideology and membership in the governing coalition (Zucco and Lauderdale 2011). 3 on a single legislative act, such as a motion of confidence (Laver and Benoit 2002), contributions to the government's annual budget debate , or speeches on a particular bill (Schwarz, Traber and Benoit Forthcoming). While this approach (by assumption) holds topical variation constant, the resulting estimates are confined to the set of legislators who spoke and the topic on which they spoke.…”

Brazilian Congress, 2014 elections and governability challenges

“…Using the usual simplification of the spectrum into three positions-left, center, and right-and classifying the parties 7 The literature about ideological classification is vast even for Brazil. In terms of the most recent period and for a focus on the measuring problems considering the Chamber of Deputies, it is worthwhile to see Zucco, 2009;Zucco and Lauderdale, 2011;Lucas and Samuels, 2011;Zucco and Samuels, 2014. In this context, without the participation of PSB or of other currently nonaligned parties, Rousseff's second term will have difficulties in obtaining 60% majority necessary to approve constitutional amendments in the Chamber of Deputies.…”