GEG WP 2011/62 Determinants of Oversight in a Reactive Legislature: The Case of Brazil, 1988-2005
Full Title: Determinants of Oversight in a Reactive Legislature: The Case of Brazil, 1988-2005
Author: Leany Lemos and Timothy J Power
Type: GEG Working Paper 2011/62
Abstract
Horizontal accountability is a key challenge to new democracies, and especially so in those regimes where “reactive” legislatures face dominant presidents. Although the 1988 Constitution gives impressive legislative and agenda-setting powers to the Brazilian president, it also equips the legislature with a set of oversight tools that can be used to monitor or scrutinize the powerful executive. In analysing a large database of oversight initiatives between 1988 and 2005, we trace broad trends and patterns in the overall usage of oversight tools and attempt to isolate the political and institutional conditions under which they are deployed. We find that the use of oversight mechanisms has risen in recent years; that oversight is mediated by measures of presidential popularity and by the size of the propresidential faction in Congress; and that oversight responds to the logic of Brazil’s coalitional politics, driven by the shifting context of the executive-legislative relationship under multiparty presidentialism.
Author
Leany Barreiro Lemos is currently the Chief of Staff of the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB) Caucus at the Brazilian Federal Senate. She has served in the senior staff of the Brazilian Federal Senate since 1993.
Timothy J. Power is director of the Latin American Centre and a fellow of St Cross College at the University of Oxford. A former president of the Brazilian Studies Association (BRASA), he conducts research on political institutions and democratization in Latin America. His most recent books are Democratic Brazil Revisited (co-edited with Peter R. Kingstone; University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), and Corruption and Democracy in Brazil: The Struggle for Accountability (co-edited with Matthew M. Taylor; University of Notre Dame Press, 2011).
