Inter-American Development Bank

Banco Interamericano de Desarrollo

Latin American Research Network
Red de Centros de Investigación
Research Network Working Paper #R-509

Political Institutions, Policymaking Processes and

Policy Outcomes in Brazil

by

Lee J. Alston*
Marcus André Melo**
Bernardo Mueller***
Carlos Pereira****

*University of Colorado, NBER

**Universidade Federal de Pernambuco
***Universidade de Brasília
****Michigan State University

March 2006
Cataloging-in-Publication data provided by the
Inter-American Development Bank
Felipe Herrera Library

Political institutions, policymaking processes and policy outcomes in Brazil / by Lee J.

Alston … [et al.].

p. cm.
(Research Network Working papers ; R-509)
Includes bibliographical references.

1. Political planning—Brazil. 2. Fiscal policy—Brazil. 3. Policy sciences. I. Alston,

Lee J., 1951-. II. Inter-American Development Bank. Research Dept. III. Latin American
Research Network. IV. Title. V. Series.

320.62 P823--------dc22

©2006
Inter-American Development Bank
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The views and interpretations in this document are those of the authors and should not be
attributed to the Inter-American Development Bank, or to any individual acting on its behalf.

This paper may be freely reproduced provided credit is given to the Research Department, Inter-
American Development Bank.

The Research Department (RES) produces a quarterly newsletter, IDEA (Ideas for Development
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 Abstract

We found that the driving force behind policies in Brazil is the strong set of
powers given to the President by the Constitution of 1988. To have strong powers
does not mean unbridled powers. Several institutions constrain and check the
power of the President, in particular the legislature, the judiciary, the public
prosecutors, the auditing office, state governors and the Constitution itself. The
electorate of Brazil holds the President accountable for economic growth,
inflation and unemployment. Because of the electoral connection, and perhaps
reputational effects, presidents in Brazil have a strong incentive to pursue stable
fiscal and monetary policies as their first priority. At least for the past ten years,
and particularly in the new administration of Lula, executive power has been
aimed at pushing policy towards macro orthodoxy. Although orthodoxy may not
lead to short-term growth, international financial markets provide additional
incentives for discipline, as deviations are instantly punished, with unfavorable
consequences that are readily recognized by the electorate. Achieving stable
macro policies required constitutional amendments as well as considerable
legislation. To attain their goals, the past administrations (Cardoso and Lula in
particular) used their property rights over pork to trade for policy changes. The
rationale for members of Congress to exchange votes on policy for pork is that the
electorates reward or punish members of Congress based on the degree to which
pork lands in their district. With the exception of the devaluation of 1999, macro
policy has become more stable over time. We categorize macro policies in Brazil
as “stable but adaptable.”

The pursuit of macro orthodoxy comes at a cost; some policies in Brazil

are “volatile and unstable.” We found volatility and instability in policies that
have an ideological component (e.g. land reform, the environment, and poverty
alleviation), or whose gains accrue at the Congressional district level (e.g.,
infrastructure projects). The volatility on ideological policies is no surprise and
happens most when administrations change. For policies having a local rather
than national impact the volatility results from spending being based on the
residual left in the budget after the President takes care of hard-wired and pork
expenditures. The negative side of this is that many infrastructure projects (e.g.,
sanitation and local roads) have fallen into this residual category.

3
4
1. Introduction
The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 defined the political institutions in Brazil and the powers of
the political actors in the policymaking process following the end of the military government in
1985. As a result, 1988 is used as the point of departure for this analysis. In Brazil, strong
presidential powers drive the policymaking process, though they are checked by the
constitutionally defined powers of Congress, the Judiciary, state Governors, and the Ministerio
Público. Policymaking starts with an interaction between the President and members of
Congress, though it is always in the shadow of the other political actors. Significantly, the
President’s electoral connection relies on a strong economy that is perceived as satisfying the
goals of economic growth, economic opportunity, and the reduction of poverty. Members of
Congress generally care more about redistributing gains to their constituents, e.g., geographical
redistribution.
Given the different preferences and relative powers of the legislative and executive
branches, they can both benefit by exploiting the gains from trade. To achieve the goal of a
strong economy, presidents focus first on fiscal and monetary stability (e.g., the Real plan), as
well as on pension reform and tax reform. To achieve these ends, presidents have used pork as
well as other benefits as the mediums of exchange with members of Congress in return for their
votes on critical pieces of legislation. A key element in this exchange is the allocation of selected
ministerial positions and appointments in the bureaucracy. Given that a large proportion of the
budget is “hard-wired” with policies such as health and education, once the trades of pork-for-
policy reform on monetary and fiscal policies have been consummated, the surplus will be spent
on more ideological policies such as land reform and the environment. The residual policies have
different electoral effects on the President and members of Congress depending on the degree to
which they achieve national goals (whereby the President can claim more credit) or geographic
goals such as poverty reduction in the Northeast (in which case the Deputies and Senators
receive relatively more electoral benefits).
This “game” can be viewed as sequential, with veto players as well as external shocks
constraining the President and Congress. Constraints from the other political actors and external
shocks have budgetary implications, either positive or negative. This analysis views the
policymaking “game” as one in which the President has an overriding incentive to keep the
budget as a percentage of GDP within some target range, because greatly exceeding the budget-

5
to-GDP ratio can have serious monetary and fiscal penalties imposed through international
capital markets. This tendency to strive toward a target range of debt to GDP is called the
budgetary equilibrium. The dynamics of the policymaking game yield policy outcomes that are
classified as falling into four broad categories: “stable but adaptable,” pork, hard-wired, and
residual.
The next section describes the outer features of public policies in more detail. Section 3
discusses the political institutions and how they constrain the political actors. The Constitution is
viewed as a foundational moment from which the President, Congress, Judiciary, Governors,
Ministério Público and the TCU derive their powers. Section 3 will also illustrate how the
institutional players enter the game, constraining the Executive and Congress, and will provide
examples along with systematic evidence on the impact of the other players on policy outcomes.
Section 4, uses a specially developed framework to analyze specific policy outcomes: stable
monetary policy and the fiscal responsibility law, with stable but adaptable outcomes; land
reform and other social policies, with volatile outcomes; and health and education policies, with
rigid outcomes. Section 5, analyzes how the Brazilian policy process responded to two shocks:
the economic shock associated with devaluation in 1999 and the political shock associated with
the election of President Luis Inacio da Silva (Lula). In Section 6 offers some concluding
remarks about the overall policymaking process in Brazil since 1988.

2. Dependent Variable: Outer Features of Public Policies

The purpose of this paper is not to analyze the details of any specific policy adopted in Brazil,
but rather to explain the outer features of public policies, that is, the common characteristics that
systematically permeate those policies. These characteristics are qualities such as stability vs.
volatility, flexibility vs. rigidity, coordination vs. coherence, decisiveness vs. resoluteness
(Haggard and McCubbins, 2001), overall quality and investment-related qualities, private vs.
public regardedness, and balkanization. The analysis of these outer features follows the
framework developed in Spiller, Stein and Tommasi (2003); Scartascini and Oliveira (2003); and
Spiller and Tommasi (2003) in which a country’s political institutions, together with the features
of the specific policy issues are key determinants of the characteristics of public policies. In the
process of producing policy, political actors undertake complex inter-temporal transactions that
are often beset by political transaction costs. These costs are determined by the country’s

6
political institutions and by the nature of the policy being considered. The political institutions
determine the key players, the payoffs to the players, the forum in which they interact and the
frequency of their interaction. In addition, each policy area has its own features that can increase
or reduce those transaction costs, for example regional vs. national, spot vs. long term, complex
vs. transparent, etc. In the absence of political transaction costs, political actors would always
have an incentive to adapt to economic and political shocks in ways that maximize the greatest
gain from political exchange, with side-payments compensating those who could otherwise block
those changes. However, in political markets, even more so than in economic markets,
transaction costs are typically significant (Weingast and Moran, 1987). The higher the political
transaction costs, the more difficult it will be to make those side-payments and the more probable
that cooperation will not ensue, leading to sub-optimal policies. In other words, where political
institutions are well developed, political actors will be able to cooperate so as to better adapt to
economic and political shocks, resulting in policies with positive characteristics such as stability,
adaptability and public regardedness. Where political institutions promote high political
transaction costs, cooperation will be more difficult and policies will tend to have more
detrimental qualities, being either too rigid or too volatile, as well as being more private
regarding and incoherent.
The previous section introduced the basic game that characterizes the Brazilian political
system. The following section further elaborates upon that game, focusing on how Brazilian
political institutions and the features of various different policy areas map into the outer features
of public policies. Then, having presented the dependent variables and a basic model of their
determinants, each of the players and their role in that model will be described in greater detail.1
Starting with the dependent variable, the characteristics of policies in Brazil are observed
to vary markedly across specific policy issues. The policies have been separated into four
categories according to those characteristics. The first category consists of policies that are stable
and adaptable to shocks. These are basically macroeconomic policies, such as fiscal and
monetary policies, that is, those with a direct impact on stabilization and economic growth. The
second category involves policies used by the President to provide patronage to other political
actors in exchange for support in approving his agenda of reforms, that is, geographically
concentrated transfers, or “pork.” The third category includes policies that, having been hard-

1
The Appendix presents a formal model of the framework.

7
wired, cannot be easily changed and are consequently rigid and less susceptible to economic and
political shocks. In Brazil, policies such as education and health that have national purpose and
important second-round effects have been hard-wired. “Second-round effects” refers to the fact
that these policies generate important positive externalities for society that are realized not in the
short term but in future periods. Thus there is always a temptation for short-sighted policymakers
to postpone them in favor of policies in the first category, which is why at some point a
consensus was reached to insulate those expenditures. The final category consists of residual
policies, which include issues that are given priority only once the objectives of the policies in
the first category have been secured. These are policies related to issues such as security,
environment, poverty, land reform, etc. These policies tend to be volatile, oscillating according
to political shocks, such as when a new president comes to office. In general it is expected that
policies with a larger ideological component such as land reform and poverty alleviation will be
in this group. But infrastructure has also increasingly been treated as a residual policy. It is
significant to note that Brazil is pushing strongly for expenditures on infrastructure to count as
meeting fiscal targets.
Having described the dependent variable, the analytical task is now to show how the
same set of political institutions leads to political transactions that result in public policies with
the characteristics described in each of the three categories when mapping across specific policy
issues with different features.2 The key features of Brazilian political institutions can be
understood in terms of separation of power and separation of purpose (Huggard and McCubbins,
2001). Although the details changed, the Constitution of 1988 maintained the notion of strong
powers for the President inherited from the military dictatorship of 1964-1985.3 The details of

2
The point of departure of this analysis is the 1988 Constitution, which defined the current set of political
institutions that determines players and their powers. Although this analysis technically covers the entire period
since 1988, the fit is clearly stronger in the post-1994 period, which includes the two terms of President Fernando
Henrique Cardoso as well as Lula’s current term. It is more difficult to see a pattern in the period from 1988 to 1994,
since it covered the final year of the Sarney Presidency (1989), the impeachment of the Collor presidency (1990-
1992) and the interim years of Itamar Franco (1992-1993). During this time the new political institutions were still
in the process of being implemented and developed. Nevertheless, the model presented here already applies to this
period as well, since many of the subsequent changes were built on institutional changes that occurred during this
time, which was also an important period for political players to define and learn the rules of the game. Therefore
this claim of this paper that presidents have incentives to pursue sensible macroeconomic policy is not invalidated
by unorthodox behavior during this early period.
3
This is due to the fact that the transition from military dictatorship to civilian government in 1985 occurred
voluntarily and without rupture, so that the Constitution of 1988 was written by Congress, with intense interference
by President Sarney, who inherited strong presidential powers. It is logical that a strong military president would

8
the political institutions that underlie those powers (decree power, veto power, legislative rules,
budgetary process, etc.) and evidence of their effects will be provided in the next section. This
section simply states that strong presidential powers have generally allowed the President to
initiate, pursue and approve much of his policy agenda. Whereas such a scenario may seem
perilous given Latin America’s history with strong presidents, Brazilian political institutions
provide two sets of safeguards against abuse of those powers. The first is the fact that the
electoral connection for the President is such that he has incentives to pursue sensible
macroeconomic policies, as he is seen by the electorate as being responsible for outcomes related
to basic issues such a strong economy, economic growth and stabilization. Given the strong
presidential powers, failure in these areas cannot be credibly blamed on other political actors
such as Congress or the Judiciary. The second safeguard is the fact that although the separation
of powers is clearly biased towards the President, several other political actors with different
motivations (separation of purpose) are able to check the President’s actions in different ways.
Thus, if an incompetent or ill-intentioned president were to come to power, strong
presidentialism would not mean a blank check to pursue misguided policy. Section 3 will
describe in detail the roles played in this balance of power by the other main players, that is,
Congress, the Judiciary, state Governors, the Ministério Público, the bureaucracy, and regulatory
agencies, showing that they can and often do constrain the President’s actions.
The contention of this paper is that the end result of these interactions yields policies with
the characteristics mentioned in the four categories described above. The President uses his
powers to pursue an agenda of stable and adaptable policies and reforms. Because the separation
of purpose inherent in the political institutions has the President pursuing broad national public
goods, as opposed to other actors with a say in producing legislation (particularly Congress and
to a lesser degree governors), who have more narrow constituencies, there is the potential for
conflict. However, this conflict is diffused by legislative rules that result in trades of support for
patronage between Congress and the President (Alston and Mueller, 2003). The President is able
to use his powers to control the legislative agenda and to create a stable supporting coalition that
enables policy reform.4 Any other coalition not coordinated by the President would be inherently

want to assure that the new Constitution would not reduce those powers. In fact, one of his greatest concerns at the
time was to be granted an additional year in office by the Constitution, in goal in which he was successful.
4
This is necessary because, as described in Section 3, Brazilian electoral rules (open list proportional system) induce
a multi-party system where the President’s party will never hold a majority of the seats in Congress.

9
unstable, as it would not have any enforcement mechanism to ensure compliance and prevent
defections. In addition, the President possesses considerable discretion over patronage (such as
jobs and individual budget amendments), which, together with the career incentives of members
of Congress (discussed in Section 3), leads to the well-institutionalized trade of policy support
for patronage. Although these exchanges are often seen as being less than legitimate by the press
and much of society, they form the basis of Executive-legislative relations in Brazil, and this
paper argues that they lead to high levels of governability that allow important reforms to get
accomplished. Furthermore it can also be argued that this comes at relatively low cost to the
Executive since political institutions facilitate the trades (see discussion of individual budget
amendments in the next section), and the patronage that is dispensed is a very small part of the
budget (Pereira and Mueller, 2002 and 2003).5
The result is that Congress tends to approve much of the policy reforms proposed by the
Executive, yet Congress still holds checks on the powers of the President.6 It is this interaction
that determines the qualities of policies in the first and second categories discussed above: stable
macro policies on the one hand and pork on the other. Only when the divergence of preferences
over specific policy issues between the President and members of Congress is sufficiently high
will there be no gains to trade. That is, the cost of the patronage necessary to approve those
reforms is higher than the benefits to the President. This may lead to either; 1) gridlock over that
issue; 2) the President dropping the issue or significantly watering it down; or 3) attempts by the
Executive to get around Congress, for example through decree power (discussed in Section 3),
which may then prompt other political actors such as the Judiciary or the Ministério Público to
intervene. The next sections argue and present evidence, however, that except in a few high-
profile cases such as pension reform during the Cardoso presidency and tax reform during Lula’s
term, the President has generally gotten what he wanted, with these other outcomes being
exceptional.
Depending on his success in achieving the top priority policy objectives, the President
will decide which residual policies will be pursued, and how. This is the case because the
political institutions give the President control over the legislative agenda and because the

5
This notion is contrary to much of the received literature in Brazilian politics that states that the Executive’s need
to maintain the support of a coalition leads to high costs (Ames, 1995a, 1995b, and 2001).
6
This interaction between the President and Congress in Brazil is formally modeled in Alston and Mueller (2003).
See Melo (2002) for the Executive’s recent success in amending the constitution.

10
President will generally want to secure the national macro policies in the first place. Thus the
residual policies are contingent on there being space in the legislative agenda as well as on
budgetary availability. These in turn are affected by both economic and political shocks. Section
5 provides one example of each shock: the effect of the 1999 devaluation of the real; and the
uncertainty resulting from the election of Lula as president. In each of these cases it will be
shown how the budgetary process was bring about a recovery by reducing the execution of the
residual policies in the budget. This implies that many of these residual policies will be
characterized by high volatility. Whenever the economic and political conditions are favorable
they are given priority and get implemented. But when negative shocks occur they are suspended
or put on hold to help secure the first-category policies. Residual policies thus have a tendency to
oscillate unpredictably. Also, because these policies only produce results in the medium- and
long-term, politicians have more leeway to pursue their own visions of what is the right thing to
do than is the case with the first-category policies, where mistakes are more quickly perceived
and punished by internal and foreign markets. Thus, residual policies with a larger ideological
component will, ceteris paribus, tend to be more volatile. Additionally, political shocks where
new politicians come to office tend to result in policy reversals.
Given this inherent tendency towards volatility of the residual policies, political actors
may often choose to hard-wire some policies where it is considered that the volatility can be
particularly damaging. This is the especially the case with education and health policies that are
crucial for social and economic well-being, since some politicians may nevertheless be tempted
to withhold resources because the effects of these policies are not generally felt in the short-term.
Thus at some “constitutional moment,” politicians establish impediments to changing these
policies by tying the hands of future political actors. This results in rigid policies, which are
advantageous when this rigidity constrains opportunistic behavior but which comes at the cost of
reducing the ability to adapt to unforeseen future contingencies.
In summary, Section 2 has discussed this paper’s basic model of the Brazilian political
system, which describes the policymaking process and yields hypotheses about the
characteristics of the policies created. These hypotheses are based upon a mapping of the
country’s political institutions and take into account specific policy issues. The expected result is
to find stable and adaptable macro policy accompanied by geographically based transfers and
pork, with hard-wired polices as a constraint and other residual policies being put off until

11
economic and political conditions allow them to be implemented without harming the top-
priority macro policies. Section 4 provides examples of each of these policies as empirical
evidence against which to test the model. Before that, however, Section 3 provides more detail
on the political actors and political institutions so as to give more substance to the bare-bones
description of the model in this section.

3. Political Institutions
This section provides an overview of Brazilian political institutions and how they affect the
policymaking process. As suggested in Scartascini and Oliveira (2003), this can be done by
describing 1) the key political actors, 2) the payoffs for political cooperation, 3) where and how
frequently the political actors undertake their exchanges, and 4) the properties of the arenas in
which exchanges take place. The section begins with an analysis of the way in which the 1988
Constitution established the current political institutions and how it has endogenously changed as
an important mechanism for providing commitment for policy reform. Next it describes the
powers of the President and of Congress and analyzes how their interaction generates policies
and how the electoral and legislative rules influence the behavior of the President and members
of Congress. Finally the section concludes with an examination of other political actors that
shape the policymaking process in many different ways, constraining what the President can do.

3.1 The Constitution

The Constitution of 1988 established the rules of the current political game in Brazil. A
Constituent Assembly convened in 1987 drafted the Constitution. The Constituent Assembly was
set up by conferring special powers to the ordinary legislature rather than by holding new
elections for the purpose of writing a new constitution. The new constitution reflects a number of
principles long advocated by the opposition: decentralization, transparency, participation, social
control and redistribution. These principles produced a significant transformation in the patterns
of policymaking and implementation. In terms of fiscal and intergovernmental relations, the
Constitution devolved administrative autonomy to sub-national governments and mandated a
new redistribution of functional responsibilities. In addition, it mandated a new regime of tax
assignments whereby the states and municipalities were given not only new tax powers but also
managed to secure a larger share of federal tax revenues. The Constitution created new funds for

12
states and municipios by mandating automatic transfers of federal money. It also mandated the
decentralization of public policy in a great number of sectors ranging from health to education to
environmental policy. Furthermore, the Constitution mandated multi-level participatory
arrangements aimed at social control. They include an enhanced role for the Tribunais de Contas
(Court of Accounts), the decentralization of the Judiciary branch and the creation of the
Ministério Público (discussed in detail in the remainder of this section).
Although the new Constituent Assembly was characterized by the strong desire to break
away from a long period of authoritarian rule, a number of institutional innovations represented
an element of continuity. Although the new Constitution (by virtue of Article 2 of the provisional
clauses) mandated a plebiscite on the regime and system of government that was set to take place
in 1993, most of its features in fact presupposed a strong presidency. These include inter alia a
number of prerogatives enjoyed by the Executive (i.e., the power to issue medidas provisórias—
provisional measures, veto power, the power to initiate new legislation including constitutional
amendments, the exclusive right to initiate new legislation in certain areas such as budget and
administrative laws, and the prerogative to establish urgency time limits for voting procedures
and bills).
Constitution can be seen as a pivotal moment in time, with important path-dependent
developments. Because it was formulated during a unique historical juncture, it incorporated a
vast array of political, social and corporatist demands that had been kept silent under centralized
military rule. As a result, with 250 articles in the main text and an additional 75 provisional
articles, the Constitution is unusually long and covers many very specific non-constitutional
issues of policy. The decision to create such a wide-ranging and detailed constitution could be
attributed to the lack of any sort of political trust and credibility at that time. Thus, writing a
constitutional article was a ‘safe’ institutional method by which political players could undertake
political transactions with some degree of certainty that their arrangements and agreements
would be enforced. As a result the Constitution emerged with many policy issues hard-wired,
meaning that changes would require constitutional amendments. It is highly significant that
many subsequent reforms under Cardoso involved de-constitutionalizing certain issues, i.e.,
deleting articles from the Constitution and subsequently (but not always), legislating issues
through ordinary laws. The initial high level of constitutionalization of public policy produced

13
great rigidity in public policy in general. This did not preclude the Cardoso or Lula
administrations from passing their reform programs, however.
The previous paragraphs help explain why the Constitution of 1988 is the most amended
constitution in the country’s history. Brazil’s first constitution, passed in 1824, lasted 65 years
and was amended once, whereas Brazil’s second constitution, which established the republican
form of government, lasted from 1891 to 1930 and again was amended only once. The
Constitution of 1946 lasted 21 years and was amended 27 times. The military constitutions of
1967 and 1969 were amended 26 times in a period of 21 years. By contrast, the Constitution of
1988 has already been amended 37 times in 12 years. Between 1988 and February 2001, 2,424
constitutional amendments had been presented to Congress. Under President Lula da Silva, three
new constitutional amendments have been passed. The yearly average amendment rate for the
Constitution of 1988 through 2003 has reached 3.5. For the period from 1992 (when the first
amendment was approved) to 2003, the average yearly rate of amendment is 4.4—an extremely
high rate by any standard.
These rates are all the more significant because constitutional change requires approval in
two rounds of voting in each house by an absolute majority of three-fifths. Other procedural
requirements include the following: the Executive is not allowed to change the constitution by
medida provisória nor can it resort to special urgency procedures through which it can
unilaterally require a vote on a bill ahead of any other legislative proposals; and the vote has to
proceed by roll call (thus increasing the political costs of approving unpopular proposals). The
political transaction costs of securing legislative approval are therefore much higher for
constitutional amendments than for ordinary legislation. Comparatively speaking, however, the
requirements for approving constitutional amendments are not very strict; Brazil is in a cluster of
countries whose constitutions are the most easily amended (Melo, 1998).
In addition to the procedural difficulties, it should be noted that constitutionalization and
de-constitutionalization (i.e. inserting and deleting provisions from the constitution) are very
distinct and asymmetrical political processes. For consitutionalization, collective action problems
undermine the ability of the public to insert particularistic interests. For de-constitutionalization
the opposite holds; withdrawing benefits and rent-seeking privileges from the constitution

14
requires overcoming the resistance of organized and sectoral interests.7 Reforms that de-
constitutionalize issues generally lead to legislation regarding the issuing of a medida
provisória.8 In this climate, a lack of trust and opportunistic behavior have precluded some
welfare-enhancing deals from taking place. The lack of trust arose because the Executive holds
great agenda powers and decree authorities. Many members of Congress saw the deletion of
articles from the constitution as a mechanism by which the Executive can unilaterally impose its
preferences. In other words, some regard de-constitutionalization as the equivalent of giving a
blank check to the Executive.
Many constitutional issues have a direct bearing on fiscal and financial stability, and
therefore put the constitution in the center stage of the political game described earlier. These
include, inter alia, the rules defining social security benefits; the provisions stipulating levels of
pay and of hiring/dismissing personnel, the stipulation of areas not open to foreign ownership,
rules defining tax and fiscal matters of sub-national governments, and Central Bank
independence. Thus, this paper argues that the political game described herein is largely a
“constitutional change game.” Granting constitutional status to certain policy areas is an integral
part of hard wiring. As discussed in Section 4, this was the strategy pursued in the areas of
education and health. In these cases, hard wiring represented a strategy of pre-commitment on
the part of the Executive and the legislators.
In this game, the Supreme Court plays the role of a veto power because of the institution
of judicial review in the country. Two instruments can be used by players in the judicial review
game: the acão direta de inconstitucionalidade (ADIN, a petition for nullifying a decision or
legal norm because it is assumed to be unconstitutional) and the ação declaratória de
constitucionalidade (a petition for the confirmation of constitutionality of a decision or legal
norm).9 Both are to be decided by the Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal). The first one
can be initiated by the President; congressional parties; the Attorney-General; the secretariats
(mesas) of the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies and of the state Legislative Assemblies; the

7
It is hypothesized here that this may be the reason the drafters of the Constitution stipulated in its Provisional
Clause 3, as a precommitment device, that an ad hoc constitutional review process, taking place under special rules
in a number of joint Chamber/Senate sessions, should take place five years from the date of its enactment.
8
Constitutional Amendment 7/95 prohibited the practice of using medidas provisórias for specifying the enabling
legislation (regulamentação) for a constitutional article which had been amended as of 1995.
9
The ADIN was created by the Constitution of 1988, whereas the ação declatória de constitucinalidade was created
by Constitutional Amendment 3/93. The latter was a reaction to the large number of ADINs and consists of a pre-
emptive move on the part of the Executive and its coalition in Congress.

15
governors; the Bar Association; trade unions; and professional bodies. The second one can be
initiated by the President, the secretariats (mesas) of the Senate or Chamber of Deputies; and the
Attorney General.

3.2 The Executive, Congress, Parties, Committees, Electoral Rules

Since re-democratization, and especially after the new Constitution of 1988, all elected
presidents have been able to build reasonably stable post-electoral majority coalitions within
Congress with a high level of governability by means of strong party discipline of the governing
coalition (Figueiredo and Limongi, 1999; Pereira and Mueller, 2003). The only period without a
stable majority coalition was from March 1990 to October 1992 under President Collor.10
Although none of the elected presidents belonged to a party with a pre-electoral absolute
majority of the seats, they have, nevertheless, been able to achieve congressional support by use
of their extensive legislative and non-legislative powers.
Despite the presence of a decentralized electoral system and a fragmented party system,
the optimal electoral strategy in the Brazilian legislature has not been concentrated in personal
votes, but rather, the party vote in Congress (Figueiredo and Limongi, 1999; Pereira, 2000;
Nicolau, 2000). At first glance, this assertion seems paradoxical, given the premise that
legislators are subject to electoral incentives to behave individually. Indeed, Brazilian legislators
vote according to their party leader’s indication in order to accumulate greater benefits in the
congressional arena and thus to strengthen their electoral probability of political survival in the
local sphere (Pereira and Renno, 2003). This claim is also corroborated by Neto and Santos
(2001), who argue “party discipline was above all a function of the President’s legislative
coalition-building strategies based on dispersion of patronage to parties.”11
Scholars who analyze the Brazilian political system, especially its electoral rules and
political parties, usually affirm that they provide significant obstacles for the Executive to
approve its agenda, thus creating tremendous governance problems (Mainwaring and Scully,
1995; Mainwaring and Shugart, 1997; Haggard, 1995; Haggard and Kaufman, 1992; Ames,
1995a, 1995b, 2001). For these authors, the electoral rules offer strong incentives for candidates
10
Collor preferred to work through ad hoc coalitions and, perhaps as a consequence of this political choice, he was
subsequently impeached.
11 In 12 consecutive elections (from 1950 to 1998) for the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies, the great majority of
incumbents (on average 70 percent have decided to run for re-election and almost 70 percent of them have been
successful, more than most other countries in Latin America (Morgenstern, 2002: 416).This suggests that it is
incorrect to ignore static ambition as the main goal among Brazilian legislators.

16
to develop direct links with their constituency groups rather than mediating such relations
through political parties. Additionally, this institutional context generates incentives that lead to a
personalized vote, as opposed to voting for political parties, and to a high saliency of
constituency pressures in incumbents’ electoral calculus (Ames, 1995; Samuels, 2001).
By contrast, a second group of authors has strongly questioned this predominant view.
Rather than stressing the decentralizing effect of electoral rules, they emphasize the institutional
rules and structures that centralize the legislative process itself and the powers held by the
Executive (Figueiredo and Limongi, 1999, 1997, 1995; Pereira and Mueller, 2000; Meneguello,
1998). These authors attempt to explain how institutional variables internal to the decision-
making process (the distribution of power inside Congress) and the institutional legislative and
non-legislative powers held by the President (decree and veto powers, right to introduce new
legislation, permission to request urgency time-limit to certain bills, discretionary power on the
budget appropriation, etc.) work as key determinants for legislators to behave according to the
preferences of party leaders.
The Brazilian political system can be characterized neither as a purely decentralized nor
as a purely concentrated system (Pereira and Mueller, 2002 and 2004). While some features such
as electoral rules, a multiparty system, and federalism act towards decentralizing the political
system, other features such as the internal rules of the decision-making process in Congress, the
constitutional powers of the President, and his capacity to selectively distribute political and
financial resources (most of them locally allocated), act towards centralizing it. In fact, the
electoral rules provide incentives for politicians to behave individually, while the internal rules
of Congress, the President’s power to legislate, and the centralization of benefits by the President
render legislator behavior extremely dependent on loyalty to the party and on presidential
preferences. It is claimed that even a political system with incentives for opposing behaviors, like
the Brazilian one, provides equilibrium and stability. However, in this case it is a very dynamic
equilibrium that can change from one issue to another and it depends on the capacity of the
President and his party leaders to offer appropriate incentives (political and economic benefits)
that can ensure the best electoral returns to individual legislators. This combination of
institutional rules is key to understanding how it is possible for weak political parties in the
electoral arena to coexist with strong political parties inside Congress (Pereira and Mueller,
2003). Thus, a premise of this analysis is that there is no contradiction between party and

17
individual behavior in the Brazilian political system at the same time. In fact, the former is one
of the most important reasons to explain the latter. In other words, legislators behave according
to the preferences of party leaders within Congress so as to have access to benefits that will
increase their individual chance of surviving politically.
Party leaders hold important institutional prerogatives: the ability to appoint and
substitute members of committees at any time; to add or withdraw proposals in the legislative
agenda; to decide if a bill will have urgency procedure; to indicate the position of the party
regarding a bill on the floor; and fundamentally, to negotiate with the Executive the demands of
the members of his party. In other words, party leaders are the bridges that link individual
legislators with the preferences of the Executive. This is why political parties are so strong
within the legislative arena. It is not rational for legislators to act individually inside Congress
just as it is not rational for the Executive to individually negotiate or bargain for support with
each member of his coalition on every bill. The role of intermediary between the Executive and
the individual legislators cements the fragile links between voters and representatives in the
electoral sphere. Because the Brazilian political system works in the peculiar manner described
above, one might observe a false contradiction between the “personal vote” and “party vote”
approaches in the literature. But the two explanations are faces of the same coin. That is, neither
the “personal vote” model nor the “party vote” model can be totally transferred to the Brazilian
case, where the models are complementary.
The most striking proactive power (which enables presidents to legislate and to establish
a new status quo) in the Brazilian Constitution is the ability of the President to legislate through
provisional decrees (medidas provisórias). This institutional device allows the President to enact
new legislation promptly and without congressional approval. Provisional decrees not only give
the President the power to legislate, they also give him influence over the congressional agenda.
If Congress fails to act on a provisional decree within 30 days, it automatically goes to the top of
the legislative agenda, displacing issues that Congress may have been discussing. According to
the Constitution, a provisional decree should only be used in specific situations, although in
practice the Executive has made indiscriminate use of this device. Not only have a large number
of provisional decrees been edited in past legislatures, but individual decrees have typically been

18
re-edited a large number of times, since Congress rarely challenges them.12 The Supreme Court
tolerated this practice as long as presidents did not try to reintroduce any decree that Congress
had specifically rejected. In Congress, serious disagreements over the extent of decree authority
were not resolved until September 2001, when, via an accord with President Cardoso, Congress
amended Article 62 so as to limit presidents to a single reissue of a lapsed decree. The
amendment also reduced constitutional ambiguity by specifying a list of issue-areas in which the
Executive may not resort to decrees. The partial rollback of presidential decree authority in late
2001 has altered the game of Executive-legislative relations, and new patterns have yet to
emerge (Pereira, Renno and Power, 2005).
In terms of reactive power, the most common is the veto in the sense that it allows the
President to defend the status quo by reacting to the legislature’s attempt to change it. The most
common is the package veto with which the President can reject the entire legislation sent by
Congress. Besides allowing the President to veto entire bills, the Brazilian Constitution also
allows partial vetoes. The President may promulgate the articles of the bill with which he agrees
while, at the same time, vetoing and returning to Congress for reconsideration only the vetoed
portions. The 1988 Constitution makes it relatively easy for Congress to override a Presidential
veto given that it requires only an absolute majority of the joint chambers. Nevertheless the
Brazilian Congress has seldom used its veto power. This suggests that a majority of members of
Congress benefit from the status quo as compared to a counterfactual world of multiple parties
facing a severe collective action problem in the legislative arena.
In addition to provisional decree and veto power, the Brazilian Constitution defines some
policy areas where the Executive has exclusive power to initiate legislation. Only the President
can introduce bills concerning budgetary and public administration matters, as well as bills in an
array of other important policy areas. In terms of budgetary law, although the congressional
majority has the right to amend bills that were introduced by the President, it can only do so if
those amendments are compatible with the multi-year budget plan elaborated by the Executive as
well with the law on budgetary guidelines. In addition, Congress may not authorize expenditures

12
The overall rate of approval of Executive bills is high and rejections are rare, only 11 (2.4 percent of the total) in
the 1995-98 legislature. The opposite is the case for legislative proposals. According to Figueiredo and Limongi
(1997), “no provisional decree has been rejected since 1992…. Congress stopped considering the decrees and the
Executive has reissued them successively.”

19
that exceed the budgetary revenue. In practice these rules enable the President to preserve the
status quo on budgetary matters simply by not initiating a bill.
The internal rules of the Chamber of Deputies give party leaders in the Steering Body
(Mesa Diretora) and Board of Leaders (Colégio de Líderes) central roles in the legislative
process and in the definition of the committee system. Roughly speaking, it is the prerogative of
party leaders to appoint as well as substitute at any time a committee’s members (Art. 10). There
are no restrictions regarding how long a legislator can be a member of a committee. There may
be some extent of self-selection to committee appointments, but there is evidence of significant
interference by party leaders in the process of appointing and substituting committee members.
There has typically existed an extensive turnover of legislators from one committee to the next.
Legislators change committees frequently, not only between years but also within years.
Additionally the Executive, through party leaders in Congress, stacks certain committees with
loyal members.
Besides centralizing decision-making processes inside Congress and allocating huge
powers of legislating to the Executive, the Brazilian political system also allows the President to
control the distribution of political and financial resources. This provides colossal electoral
consequences for those who have the chance to exploit them appropriately. In Brazil, it is the
Executive that has exclusive power to initiate the annual budget. Although legislators have the
right to propose individual amendments to the annual budget, it is the Executive who determines
which amendment will really be appropriated, making the budget contingent on the amount of
available resources in the national treasury. As shown in Pereira (2000), Pereira and Mueller
(2002 and 2004), and Alston and Mueller (2003), the Brazilian President rewards those
legislators who most vote for his interests by executing their individual amendments to the
annual budget and, at the same time, punishes those who vote less frequently for his preferences.
This is done by selectively executing their individual amendments (pork barrel policies). By
controlling for other variables that may influence the Executive’s decision to appropriate a given
congressman’s amendments, Pereira and Mueller tested whether voting behavior influences that
choice.13

13
Instrumental variable estimation was used because one would not only expect voting to affect the appropriation of
the amendments, but also that a congressman that has had more amendments appropriated would, ceteris paribus,
tend to vote more favorably with the Executive.

20
 The variable Appropriationi is the percentage of all amendments proposed by a legislator
and approved in Congress that the Executive actually appropriated. The first right-hand side
variable is Votesi, which measures the percentage of all votes by a congressman that coincided
with the position of the Executive. A positive and significant coefficient for this variable would
suggest that the Executive takes into consideration the legislator’s voting behavior when
deciding which amendments to appropriate. The variable Seniorityi is the number of previous
terms a congressman has served in Congress.14 The final variable in the first equation is Positioni,
a dummy equal to one if congressman i was ever the president or vice-president of a permanent
or a special committee.15 The second equation has Votesi as the left-hand side variable and the
key explanatory variable is Appropriationi. If its coefficient is positive and significant, one can
conclude that the Executive can affect the voting behavior of the congressmen by strategically
selecting which amendments to appropriate and which to shelve. In order to control for other
determinants of voting behavior the following were included: Positioni, explained above, and
Concentrationi, which measures the number of votes received by legislator i in the 1994 election
in the municipality where the legislator got the most votes divided by the total number of votes
for this legislator in all municipalities.16 Finally the congressman’s party affiliation was
controlled through dummy variables for parties in the left and in the center, with the right-wing
parties being the left-out category. The second equation was also run with an interaction term of
Appropriationi and a dummy for members of the coalition. This allows for a test whether having
marginal amendments appropriated affect coalition and opposition members differently.17

14
It is included in the first equation so as to control for the effect that experience and a reputation may have in
helping to secure the appropriation of one’s amendments.
15
The purpose of this variable is to control for the possibility that congressmen who have what it takes to hold
special positions within the legislative hierarchy may also be better at getting their amendments appropriated.
16
This variable captures the effect of the direct influence the electoral constituencies have on the legislators’ pattern
of voting inside Congress.
17
A similar interaction term on votes in the first equation did not turn out statistically significant.

21
 Table 1. Relationship between a Legislator’s Support for the Executive and the
Proportion of the Legislator’s Amendments that are Appropriated (1995-1998)

Dep. Variable: Dep. Variable: Dep. Variable:

Appropriation Votes Votes
Constant 13.42*** 43.43*** 75.14***
(3.19) (2.76) (4.51)
Appropriation 0.89*** 0.80***
(2.75) (2.33)
Approp. x Coalition -0.64***
(-4.01)
Votes 0.328***
(6.62)
Position -0.559 1.55 2.71
(-0.33) (0.76) (1.34)
Concentration 0.18** 0.05
(2.25) (0.63)
Left -29.88*** -53.25***
(-6.31) (-7.44)
Center -1.73 -1.23
(-0.85) (-0.63)
Seniority 0.038
(0.52)
R2 0.10 0.28 0.31
N 402 402 402
Instrumental variables estimation
t-stat. In parentheses; significance 1 percent
***, 5 percent**, 10 percent *

As shown in Table 1, the key results in the regressions are the positive and significant
coefficients for the voting behavior variable and the amendment appropriation variable. These
coefficients show that even when controlling for other variables that may affect the Executive’s
decision whether to appropriate a congressman’s amendments, an increase in a legislator’s
voting loyalty increases the probability that her amendments will be appropriated. In the same
manner, the higher the proportion of amendments that a legislator has had appropriated, the more
she will vote with the Executive. The last column in Table 1 shows that this effect is larger on
members of the opposition (0.80) than on members of the coalition (0.80 – 0.64 = 0.16). This
result suggests that for coalition members, who already provide a high level of support, the gain
in votes for the Executive from a marginal increase in the amendment share appropriated is
smaller than the gain in votes that can be had from opposition members. In the third column,
Concentration presents a positive and statistically significant coefficient in the voting behavior
equation, which indicates that legislators, who received a more concentrated vote distribution in

22
the previous election, exhibited a higher probability of voting according to presidential
preferences. This result suggests that these legislators are more dependent on providing pork than
those who have a more dispersed electorate. Note, however, that this effect disappears when the
interaction term is added. As expected, the variable Left had a negative and significant
coefficient, confirming that those legislators are more likely to vote against presidential
preferences.18
The preceding arguments showed that the legislators who are most successful in
delivering pork barrel politics present a pattern of party behavior inside Congress consistently
favoring the preferences of the President. Nevertheless, to what extent has this legislative
strategy been producing electoral returns? In order to answer this question Pereira and Rennó
(2003a) ran a logistic regression, using as the dependent variable a dummy with the value of 1
for those legislators who ran for re-election and won and a value of 0 for those legislators who
ran for election and lost. The key explanatory variable is the amount of money (“pork”) in the
budget from 1995 to 1998 that originated from the individual amendments of legislators. The
model predicts a positive correlation between re-election and pork. Besides “pork,” the model
also takes into account the variable “Nº amendments,” which represents the number of individual
amendments approved by the legislature but not appropriated by the government. A negative
coefficient for this variable is expected, indicating that for legislators, merely claiming credit for
trying without delivering does not lead to recognition by their constituency; legislators have to
conceive and deliver the pork. The model also estimates the effect of legislators’ voting behavior
within the Chamber on the likelihood of re-election. “Votes” indicates how many times each
individual legislator voted with the President during the period from 1995 to 1998. This variable
is a measure of presidential loyalty. Hence, it was expected that the more legislators vote for the
President, the more they increase their probability of re-election, since the President has enjoyed
consistent popular approval during his whole first term. Finally, another variable was added,
“Spends98,” which represents the total amount of money each legislator claims to have spent
during his/her electoral campaign of 1998, as per his official declaration to the Electoral Court. It
is widely believed that the larger the amount of money spent, the greater the probability of
legislators’ re-election.19

18
Note that the Executive’s core coalition is on the right.
19
For a more sophisticated approach regarding the determinants of re-election in the Brazilian 1998 election, though
with similar results, see Pereira and Renno, 2004; and Leoni, Pereira, and Renno, 2003. Pereira and Rennó (2003)

23
 The key result in the logistic analysis is the coefficient on “Pork,” which is positive and
significant (see Table 2). This means that, ceteris paribus, the greater the amount of individual
legislator amendments appropriated by the president, the higher will be the probability of
legislator’s re-election. The marginal effect of the variable Pork is equal to 26 percent. That is, if
a legislator with other variables equal to the mean of the floor would have all individual
amendments appropriated, he would have a 26 percent greater probability of being re-elected
than if he did not have any amendments in the final expenditures on budget.
Another important finding was the negative coefficient on “Nº amendments.” This result
indicates that the greater the number of individual amendments approved (but not appropriated)
by the president, the lower is the probability that this legislator will be re-elected. In other words,
claiming credit is not enough to increase the chances of being re-elected. The money has to be
delivered. The marginal effect of having an individual amendment approved but not executed
decreases the probability of re-election by 14 percent.

Table 2. Logistic Estimation of the Re-election of 1998

Dep. Variable: Re- Coefficients
election
Constant .820
(.1317)
Pork 1.123
(.0225)**
Nº Amendments -.075
(.0339)**
Spends 98 .208x10-5
(.0942)*
Votes .218
(.7510)
P-values in parentheses
Percentage of Prediction: 79%
Log likelihood: -129.2009
Number of Observations: 288

The authors’ previous results provide strong evidence that the strategy of following
presidential preferences and the preferences of party leaders is a successful one. In short, the
Brazilian electoral connection functions well. The regression also indicates that spending money

demonstrate that the same pattern can also be found in the 2002 legislative election. In other words, the results
indicate that pork, all of the electoral variables and campaign expenditures are explanations of electoral success.

24
during electoral campaigning also improves the probability of re-election. An increase of 10,000
real in campaign expenditure, for a legislator with features equal to the mean of the floor,
increases the probability of re-election by 5 percent.
An additional result in the regression was the impact of support for the president (Votes).
Although the coefficient is positive, it is not significant. This suggests that there is no direct
effect of a legislator’s votes within the Chamber on his probability of being re-elected. The votes
matter for the indirect effect they have through pork. Furthermore, the result suggests that
constituencies do not directly constrain their representatives’ behavior inside Congress but rather
are more concerned with the capacity of their representatives to deliver pork. This leads to the
inference that, in the electoral arena, the great majority of voters do not care about their
representative’s legislative behavior overall. Therefore, when legislators are deciding how they
should vote on the floor they are less inclined to take into consideration their constituency’s
preference because it provides few benefits for their future political careers. Instead, their
strategy is to access the benefits controlled by party leaders and by the Executive. Party leaders
have a series of prerogatives that allow them to reward or punish legislators, such as determining
committee positions. This is why political parties are so strong inside the Brazilian Congress, but
at the same time, they are so weak on the electoral arena. Consequently, there is no contradiction
between expecting legislators to vote according to the preferences of party leaders inside
Congress and expecting them to behave personally in the electoral sphere by searching for pork
barrel benefits.

3.3 Judiciary
Eleven judges comprise the Supreme Court. The President nominates people for life terms,
though with compulsory retirement at 70, and the Senate confirms or denies nominations. The
composition of the Court has changed very slowly over time; the current Court has a judge who
was appointed in 1981. This means that each President typically has the chance to appoint only a
small number of judges, which makes it difficult to appoint the median voter in most issues, thus
limiting the influence of the Executive.20

20
Cardoso appointed only three Supreme Court justices in eight years in power, while Lula has already appointed
three in just six months because of a mandatory retirement age of 70. This has been a crucial point of consideration
by the Lula government in its efforts to pass reform measures similar to those attempted by Cardoso, which the
Supreme Court declared unconstitutional.

25
 The Constitution of 1988 further enhanced the independence of the Judiciary by
establishing that: 1) the Judiciary determines its own annual budget, and 2) the judicial courts
appoint lower court judges. Both of these rights removed potential instruments of control over
the Judiciary from other branches of government.21 If the Supreme Court was truly independent,
then it should be possible to observe occasions whereby it directly contradicted the interests of
the Executive and Congress, and in fact, there have been a few high-profile cases in which the
Court ruled against the Executive on issues that were of extreme importance to the Executive.
These are issues over which there can be no doubt of the Executive’s preferences and will to
prevail, so that if the Judiciary were not truly independent, the Executive would have used its
power to change the Court’s decision. The best example of this was the attempt by the Cardoso
government to tax retired workers. The Cardoso administration envisioned this as an important
component of the solution to the fiscal crisis of the government. The Social Security system in
Brazil was seen as one of the main sources of the country’s large internal deficit. Taxing the
transfers to retired workers proved highly controversial because it involved acquired rights and
entitlements, and the Executive was only able to pass this measure through Congress with much
effort (Alston and Mueller, 2003). The Supreme Court, however, declared the measure
unconstitutional. This decision enraged the government and its supporters in Congress. Initially,
Congress and the President threatened to deal with the Supreme Court’s decision by changing the
Constitution. The reversal of the pension reforms also prompted a return to the episodic debate
on the need for external control of the Judiciary. This debate is revived every time a ruling by
the Supreme Court or other parts of the Judiciary gets in the way of governmental policy.22
Despite its threats to change the Constitution, the Cardoso government abandoned the idea. The
Lula government has just passed the same pension-reform measure through Congress. Lula dealt
with the potential challenge of the Supreme Court by making exceptions in the pension rules for
the judicial branch and by counting on the support of the three members he had recently
appointed.
There are several other cases that provide evidence of judicial independence. In 1997 the
Court required the government to increase the wages of federal civil servants by 28.86 percent to

21
According to Castro (1997a, p. 243), the Judiciary actively lobbied for these rights during the Constitutional
Assembly in 1988.
22
The case for external control is usually made by mixing arguments about the Judiciary’s inefficiency (delays,
corruption, impunity, high salaries, etc.) with arguments concerning the political need for control. For a debate about
the issue of external control, see Konrad, Adenauer, and Stiftung (1999).

26
compensate for losses due to previous economic stabilization programs. This not only
significantly increased the government’s wage bill, but also demonstrated the Court’s restraint on
the discretion of policy makers. Another example is the role of the courts in land reform policy.
The Cardoso government put land reform high on its lists of priorities, given the pressure
provided by the MST (Landless Peasant Movement) and public opinion (Alston, Libecap and
Mueller, 1999). Through its land reform agency, the government attempted to expropriate
“unproductive” land, a discretionary judgment. Nevertheless, the courts often thwarted efforts to
expedite the transfer of land from large landowners to landless peasants. Landowners contested
expropriations through the courts, arguing either that their properties were not unproductive, or
that the compensation offered by the government was too low. As argued by Alston, Libecap,
and Mueller (1999), the Supreme Court often ruled against the government in these cases, not
because it was biased on the issue of land reform, but because it viewed the cases legalistically
and disapproved not of the expropriations themselves, but of the manner in which the
government pursued it, violating property rights and due process. For a list and discussion of
cases of Executive vs. Supreme Court confrontation involving administrations from 1988 to
1994, see Castro (1997a).
There is also evidence from a more systematically chosen sample of cases. Castro
(1997b) analyzed 1,240 Supreme Court judgments in the first semester of 1997.23 Castro
classified the cases into three categories: 1) public interests moving against private interests; 2)
private interests moving against public interest; and 3) others (both private versus private and
public versus public). The Supreme Court ruled in favor of private interests in 75 percent of the
cases when they were up against public interests (i.e. government interests). Castro interprets his
evidence as “indicating clearly that the Supreme Court, even in its routine order of business, has
ruled against the initiatives of the government” (Castro, 1997b, p. 153). It is important to note
that most of the private victories had to do with tax issues. Still, in considering only public-
policy issues (i.e., non-tax issues), the Court ruled in favor of the private interest in seven out of
31 cases. This evidence can be interpreted as supporting the assumption of an independent
Supreme Court.

23
In total the Supreme Court analyzed 7,855 cases in that year. The sample includes many different types of cases:
fiscal and tax matters, procedural issues, penal cases, issues regarding monetary correction and payments, decisions
of federal policy, electoral issues, amongst others.

27
 Given the independence of the Supreme Court, what can be said about its preferences and
how can it be expected to act? Mueller (2001) analyzed the existence of commitment
mechanisms for the government in the privatization and regulatory process in Brazil. His
working assumption was that the Court can be expected to act in a non-political and unbiased
manner in concession contracts, ruling closely to the letter of the contracts.24 The evidence is not
yet in, but the current political debate over tariffs (see the discussion of regulation below), is
clearly taking place “in the shadow of the courts.”
More generally, the main problem cited by companies, individuals and judges themselves
is the system’s slowness (Pinheiro, 2000b). Courts at all levels, including the Supreme Court, are
typically overloaded with cases, and decisions can take years. Companies often use this slowness
strategically, taking actions that they know will be struck down in the distant future. For the
government, this type of strategic behavior is even more appealing since the consequences of
actions taken today may be left for future administrations. Governments have used the expected
court delays successfully in tax legislation. If the courts rule against the government, it is future
governments who have to rebate taxes. In short, court delays act as a quick and cheap emergency
means of government financing.
Pinheiro (2000b) provides survey evidence from businessmen, judges and the general
population that shows that the biggest complaint, after slowness, is the access of the poorest
segments of the population to the courts. Predictability, on the other hand, is not seen as a
problem. In labor law, for example, the decision always favors the employee. Though this is
biased and often leads to injustice, at least employers know the outcome beforehand, which
reduces the cost of litigation and provides incentives for labor legislation to be respected. If the
Judiciary had no autonomy, one might certainly see a different picture. Moreover, if the Court
were not independent, Congress and the Executive would not be continually debating judicial
reform as a means of reigning in the Court.

3.4 Governors
Unlike the other actors discussed in this section, governors do not have an independent and
constitutionally defined power that can directly counter Executive preferences. Governors are not

24
This assumption does not mean that the Brazilian Judiciary functions well in other aspects. Indeed there is
evidence that the overall judicial system has a negative impact on the economy. See Pinheiro (1997) and Pinheiro
and Cabral (1998).

28
institutionally speaking veto players: their agreement is not necessary for approval of legislative
proposals, nor do they hold powers to reverse legislative decisions. They can, however, have
some indirect power over policy by their influence.
The Constitution does vest a number of policy domains (e.g., public safety) to the states,
which also enjoy tax, fiscal and administrative autonomy.25 The policy preferences of governors
and the Executive may diverge in the political game described in the preceding section.
Governors are not primarily concerned with fiscal stability at the national level and have a
preference for higher federal public spending and geographically concentrated investments.
Governors are also interested in more social transfers because these can be presented as state
government’s spending and local programs. The preferences of governors and the Executive
clash over fiscal policy.
It is necessary to distinguish two phases in the discussion of the ways in which governors,
and federalism at large, have constrained the Executive. The first phase was transitional, when
the rules of the political game were not yet fully institutionalized. In this period, governors
derived their power by virtue of the role they played in the democratic transition. The second
phase dates from the Cardoso administration, when the new constitutional rules of the game were
in place.
Governors have derived their powers from two sources. First, as previously mentioned,
they enjoyed great political power in the 1980s because of the role they played in the democratic
transition. In addition, while there is much dispute in the political science literature, governors
tend to have some, albeit declining, influence over the behavior of Federal Deputies and Senators
in Congress. The degree of influence they hold varies across areas, with governors playing a
crucial role in issues with important local (i.e., state-wide) effects such as tax and regional
infrastructure. Governors can also play an important role in the electoral career of legislators at
the state level. Samuels (2003), for example, claims that congressional candidates tend to
coordinate their campaigns around gubernatorial candidates and not presidential candidates. That
is what he calls the “gubernatorial coat-tails effect,” in which the race for governor shapes the
race for federal deputy because Brazilian politicians do not obtain much of the electoral

25
According to the Brazilian Constitution of 1988 (Article 25), the prerogatives of the states are residual; they have
jurisdiction over those areas that are not conferred to the federal government or the municipalities.

29
resources they need from national parties or presidential candidates, but from state-level
connections.
However, the broker’s role attributed to governors and their control over their state’s
legislative delegations have been greatly exaggerated by the media and by the literature,
especially during the Cardoso administration. It is true that governors can constrain the
Executive in indirect ways, but they do not wield veto power in any federal arena. There is no
evidence that state loyalties on the part of legislators undermine party lines or create trouble for
the Executive (Cheibub, Figueiredo, and Limongi, 2002). The indirect ways in which governors
influence policy formation range from inter-alia lobbying activities on specific issues affecting
states, such as tax policy, to control over specific appointments in the federal bureaucracy.
Governors can also resist the implementation of federal policy, such as when a number of state
governors refused to privatize state-owned energy firms. These episodes are unusual and have
become even more so because states have become less and less autonomous and dependent from
the federal government.
Another source of the governors’ power is the Brazilian Constitution, which vests the
states with substantial tax powers. The states collect Brazil’s version of the value-added tax (the
ICMS), which represents the single most important tax in the country, accounting for one-third
of the country’s total tax revenue. The Constitution of 1988, in effect, mandated a gradual
increase in the states and municipalities’ share of all public sector income. In 1994, the states’
share had increased by 5 percent and the municipalities’ by 11 percent. The inter-governmental
transfers from the federal government to the states increased significantly. The share of the FPE
(the states’ revenue share fund) generated from the income tax and from the tax on manufactured
goods climbed from 14 percent to 21.5 percent.
The fiscal decentralization created by the Constitution of 1988 prompted the federal
government to substantially raise taxation by raising the contribuições sociais (social security
and related taxes), which are not shared by the states and municipalities. Furthermore, to bypass
the rigidities of the federal budget, the federal government set up a special fund to be used
discretionarily. The Fundo Social de Emergência (FSE)26—which was renamed several times to
become the FEF and as of 2000, the Desvinculação dos Recursos da União (DRU)27—was

26
Constitutional Amendment EC 1/96 and Constitutional Revisional Amendment ECR 1/94.
27
Constitutional Amendment EC 27/2000.

30
created by allocating part of the revenue from the IPI (the tax on manufactured goods) and from
the personal and corporate income tax, before they are distributed. As a result, this innovation
represented a reduction in sub-national resources because these taxes are not shared with the
states and municipalities.
In addition, the institutional source of a state’s power also has to do with the state’s
prerogative to own banks and public enterprises. The state banks were created in the 1960s as
part of the developmentalist strategies pursued by the military government. With the
democratization of the country in the 1980s, the governors became more autonomous from the
federal government and therefore were able to use the state banks for pork. This included
granting subsidized loans to the private sector and more importantly, financing state government
projects that are fiscally unsound. The state treasuries also issued bonds that were purchased by
the banks. Thus, during the Sarney, Collor and Itamar administrations, the states operated under
a ‘soft budget constraint’ because of their ability to undermine the Central Bank’s supervision. In
1994, prior to the establishment of the privatization program (PROES), there were 35 state
banks. In 2002, there were four small state banks.
In addition to the state banks, governors control a vast network of sources of pork,
ranging from public-sector jobs to infrastructural programs and state-owned enterprises. In the
latter, a pattern similar to what occurred in the banking sector can be observed. Most public
utilities companies in energy were privatized, leaving governors without an important instrument
of power. The resources controlled by the states are important assets that are instrumental to
winning elections, and they are coveted by the federal government. In the large states, the
administrative apparati are large machines that can be even larger than the federal government
machine itself, as in São Paulo.
Due to fiscal problems facing the states following monetary stabilization, the federal
government was able to impose the privatization of the banks and public enterprises, thereby
dramatically undercutting the power of governors. With inflation under control, the state banks
lost their principal source of revenue (i.e., the floating of financial assets), and a surge in interest
rates caused a rapid deterioration of the states’ fiscal situation. State debt reached a peak in 1997
(three years after the Plan Real was phased in) and represented a significant part of the GDP.
The Plan Real was therefore an exogenous shock that undermined the ability of the states to
resist the preferences of the Executive. The federal government implemented a program aimed at

31
renegotiating the states’ debts. It included debt swapping under favorable conditions, though it
was linked to a number of conditionalities.28 Prior to 1994, a number of incentives such as federal
bailouts encouraged states to behave fiscally irresponsibly and indulge in opportunistic behavior.
In sum, while it is clear that federalism matters and that governors play an important role,
throughout most of the last decade the Executive has been able to have its agenda implemented
by recentralizing the political game. This includes passing legislation that adversely affected the
state governors—as exemplified in the cases of the FSE, FEF and DRU—and initiating measures
that have led to a political recentralization of the country (Melo, 2002).29

3.5 Public Prosecutors (Ministério Público)

This subsection describes the role of the Ministério Público (MP - public prosecutors) as political
actors in the policymaking process. Although several countries have public prosecutors,30 the MP
plays a particularly important role in Brazil in shaping the outer features of public policy. This
subsection describes how the political institutions give the MP the independence, legal
instruments and resources that allow it to be an extremely active watchdog of the actions of the
other political actors. Because the MP is already intensely motivated to protect society from the
misconduct and/or oversight of the other political actors, this has made the MP a central figure in
the process of making and implementing policy.31
The Ministério Público has existed in Brazil since 1609 (Macedo Jr., 1999), although its
role and institutional organization have changed over time as different Constitutions have
redefined its structure. As in most countries, one of its purposes is to prosecute, in the name of
the State, those who commit crimes. However, in Brazil the MP has taken on an additional role
that has led it to turn much of its attention to the process of public policymaking. These changes
began in 1985 when a legal instrument known as the “public civil suit” (ação civil pública) was

28
This was accomplished by the Programa de Recuperação Fiscal e Financeira (RFF) and through Law 9496 in
1997. A stock of debts corresponding to 11 percent of the Brazilian GDP was renegotiated (Mora, 2002).
29
For a contrasting view that argues that resistance from the states and governors undermines much of Cardoso’s
reform efforts, see Samuels (2003).
30
For a database on the organization of Ministerios Públicos in the Americas, see: Base de Datos Políticos de las
Américas. 1998. “Designacion del Ministerio Publico.” Análisis comparativo de constituciones de los regímenes
presidenciales. Georgetown University y Organización de Estados Americanos.
http://www.georgetown.edu/pdba/Comp/Control/Publico/designacion.html. 15 de enero 2004.
31
This more active role played by the MP is recent, as it began with changes introduced in the 1988 Constitution
and has been evolving since. As such, there is very little academic work available on the MP, apart from the very
legalistic and biased work done by its own members (frequently dissertations for Master’s degrees.) Important
exceptions are Arrantes (1999 and 2004).

32
created, through which the MP could take to court any person or entity doing harm to the
environment, consumer rights, or the artistic, cultural, historical, tourist and landscape patrimony
of the nation.32 It was the 1988 Constitution, however, that amplified the scope of these public
civil suits by stating that it is the institutional role of the Ministério Público to “promote civil
inquiries and public civil suits for the protection of public and social patrimony, of the
environment and of other diffuse and collective interests.”33 This apparently innocuous article
has in effect allowed the MP to take under its jurisdiction the monitoring of all public policy,
since practically any act of public policymaking can be construed to affect “diffuse and
collective interests.” What the Constitution did, in effect, was to stipulate that a series of social
conflicts that previously would have been mediated only in the political arena could now also be
brought into the judicial arena.
Clearly, the establishment of a new role for the MP in the Constitution would have been
innocuous had it not been accompanied by other provisions that granted the MP the instruments
necessary to carry out that role. But the Constitution did in fact provide them, in terms of
independence, resources and legal instruments. Whereas before the Constitution the MP was part
of the Executive power, the new charter made the MP autonomous, not only in terms of
insulation from interference by the other powers but also in terms of budgets, which are fixed
and automatic. The Executive’s only prerogative is to choose the head of the federal MP from
one of its members at the start of the term, being immovable thereafter.34 This independence
extends to the level of the individual prosecutors. They enter the profession by taking a public
exam that is open to all citizens with the necessary qualifications, though the exams are difficult
and vacancies often remain unfilled. The 1988 Constitution establishes that prosecutors cannot
be fired, transferred or have their salaries reduced. In addition, each prosecutor is independent
within the profession, being immune from internal pressure, as in effect there is only
administrative and not functional hierarchy (Arantes, 1999: 90). Salaries are among the highest
in the country for public sector jobs, and as a consequence they attract highly competent people.
32
Public civil suits can be initiated by states, municipalities, public companies and even civil society. However in
practice it is mostly the MP that takes the initiative. Other entities have preferred to invoke the MP rather than do so
themselves.
33
1988 Constitution, Art. 129-III.
34
There is a federal MP and state level MPs in each of the 26 states plus the Federal District. Prosecutors are known
as promotores and procuradores. Promotores, the first stage of the career at the state level, act in specific
municipalities. They can eventually be promoted to state procuradores by seniority and merit. At the federal level
there are only procuradores. At the state level the head procurador is chosen by the governor from a list of three
names voted on by all members of the state’s MP.

33
 In addition to resources, the MP possesses a set of powerful legal and judicial
instruments. The first of these is the “Adjustment of Conduct” warrant, through which the MP
can request that an individual, firm or governmental entity cease or change a certain behavior or
be prosecuted. In practice this instrument has been a credible threat as it can result in significant
costs even if the case is struck down in court. The MP also has the right to request free expert
advice from police and other governmental organizations so as to investigate a given issue. It can
also impose daily fines until certain types of behavior cease. And most importantly, it can take to
court via public action suits those who harm collective and diffuse interests. In practice this has
proven to be a tremendously effective instrument since the prosecutors are highly trained and
know how to use the often tortuous Brazilian judicial system. Even though judges have the final
word and often strike down public civil action suits, many of those being prosecuted find it better
to negotiate.
Generous endowments of human and financial resources as well as an effective set of
instruments are not enough to explain the new role taken by the MP. There remains the issue of
motivation, that is, what this largely independent organization chooses to do with these
endowments. In part, the separation of the MP from the Executive meant that the MP was no
longer charged with being the Executive’s advocate, that is, with defending the Executive’s
interest before the Judiciary. This role was ascribed to a new governmental entity (the Union’s
General Advocacy), leaving the MP free to be the advocate of society, defending in particular
many diffuse and collective interests. Interestingly, what evolved was a very particular pattern of
preferences and motivations on the part of the (mostly young) prosecutors, who see themselves
as playing a messianic role in society: defending the weak and defenseless (hyposufficient in
their terminology). Importantly for the theme of this paper, these prosecutors see a large part of
their role as defending society from the government, which they consider to be responsible—by
omission and by commission—for many violations against diffuse and collective interests. For
example, rather than simply prosecuting a polluter, they will prosecute the environmental agency
for allowing the pollution to occur. The reasons for this zealotry are difficult to ascertain. It may
be due to a self-selection process whereby individuals with that view of the world are more
attracted to a job where they can “make a difference,” or it may be induced by an esprit de corp
that induces most members to adopt a common vision. A survey by Arantes (1999) of 763
members of the MP shows that they see the social and political performance of the Executive and

34
legislature, at all levels and among all political parties, as very poor. In addition, they see
themselves as the most important institution responsible for defending, broadening and
consolidating social rights.
Having described the evolution of the MP, it is useful to provide some examples of how
it can and does affect policymaking at the federal and local level in Brazil. The first example
involves the constitutional provision that a fixed proportion of the federal budget must be applied
to health-related expenditures. This is a typical hard-wiring of policy as discussed in other
sections of this paper. In late 2003, it was discovered that President Lula’s budgetary proposal
for 2004 included expenditures in sewage and anti-poverty programs in the R$35.8 billion that
should be devoted to health, so that in effect only R$32.5 billion would reach the actual health
system. The congressmen who represent health providers’ interests in Congress quickly
denounced this attempt to get around the constitutional limitation, even though presidential
powers could probably have easily gotten the proposal approved. The Executive argued that
sewage and anti-hunger expenditures were in effect closely related to health. However, when the
head of the federal MP officially recommended that the budgetary proposal be revised, the
President backed down and made the necessary changes. This is an example of the MP serving
as a check on the President and constraining the policymaking process.
A second example is the implementation of educational policy through the creation of a
fund to finance schools and improve teachers’ wages. This fund (FUNDEF) was created by a
Constitutional amendment in 1996 under the Cardoso administration and received earmarked
resources from a series of other constitutional funds as well as fixed proportions from a series of
tax revenue sources. The idea of the fund is that resources get credited directly to the bank
accounts of each state and municipality as soon as the money is received by each of those
sources, so that there are less hold-ups and delays. Furthermore the size of the transfer is
proportional to the number of students enrolled, guaranteeing a minimum amount per student,
thus giving incentives for schools to increase enrollment rates. The resources must be spent
entirely in fundamental public education and at least 60 percent of the resources must go to
teacher’s wages. Once again this is an example of hard-wiring policy so as to avoid any volatility
that might ensue and potentially seriously compromise the policy’s effectiveness.
The idea of the fund is that there are gains to decentralizing this type of expenditure.
However, the policy makers recognized at the same time the inherent difficulty involved

35
monitoring the use of resources in such a decentralized system. In order to deal with this, the
receipt of the funds is contingent on the creation of local councils composed of representatives
from the state, teachers, parents and school employees. These councils are independent from the
state and municipal governments and are in charge of exercising social control over the use of
the transferred resources. Despite all the merits of decentralized participatory monitoring, it was
clear that the councils alone could not sufficiently check the myriad forms of fraud and
corruption that this kind of transfer traditionally fostered in Brazil. The Ministry of Education
thus sought to involve the MP in the task of monitoring the program by signing an agreement of
cooperation. The Ministry created a manual and special courses for prosecutors, describing the
program and the main problem areas, such as fraud in school censuses, delaying wages, or not
using at least 60 percent of the resources for wages, unrepresentative councils, use of resources
for non-education related expenditures, etc. The MP would have monitored the program even
without the agreement, since it views the constitutional guarantee of universal public education
as an important diffuse and collective interest. However, by explicitly bringing the MP on board,
the Executive facilitated that monitoring and improved the working of its educational policy.
Whereas local councils and auditing offices can provide some check over improper use of
resources, they lack the independence, resources, legal instruments and motivation that make the
MP so much more effective in achieving this task. Although there is no systematic data on the
MPs participation, a cursory examination of the web sites of the various state MPs shows quite a
preponderance of FUNDEF-related cases. In the state of Bahia in 2203, for example, 92 of 415
counties were being investigated by the MP for misuse of FUNDEF resources. This example
shows that other political actors use the MP to ensure the proper functioning of policy. The MP
not only serves to ensure that the rules will be enforced, but it also serves to reinforce the
Executive’s commitment that this hard-wired policy will be followed at the state and local levels.
With the MP so closely involved, it becomes even more difficult for the Executive to skirt the
constitutional constraints on educational expenditures should such a need arise.
These examples show that the MP has been playing an important role in the
policymaking process in Brazil, not only by constraining other political actors, but also by
reinforcing policies by serving as arbitrators, mediators, coordination mechanisms and notaries.
By doing so, the MP has brought the judicial branch into political transactions. This
judicialization of politics implies that the MP is an increasingly important political actor in the

36
policymaking process. Its interference in the policymaking process has already aroused reactions
from the other political actors. A law was proposed by the Executive in 2001 seeking to forbid
prosecutors from releasing information on investigations before their conclusion, a strategy often
adopted as a means to buttress their cases since newspapers and other media can be used as
evidence in investigation and also to gain popular support. This law, informally known as the
Gag Law, was dropped due to the reaction it caused in the press, where it was construed as
arbitrary and equivalent to censorship. Nevertheless the dissatisfaction of many political actors
with the active role played by the MP, which they see as overstepping its bounds, remains and it
suggests that in the future there will be further clashes to determine more precisely what that role
will be.

3.6 Regulatory Agencies

Since 1997 Brazil has created more than 10 regulatory agencies. Before the new agencies were
created, the regulation of the sectors resided in specific ministries, or offices within the
ministries. There are two reasons why regulatory agencies are of interest to this project. The first
is because they are political actors with strong influence over the policymaking process in
important sectors of the economy. Secondly, and more importantly, the decision to adopt
regulatory agencies, the choice of how to design them, and the way in which that design has
evolved over time provide important examples of political transactions that reveal much about
the policymaking process in Brazil.
The switch to autonomous agencies represented a dramatic shift in the locus of power
since their design provided them with considerable policymaking clout and a high degree of
independence from the Executive and Congress. Congress and the Executive gave agencies
jurisdiction over decisions that were important to other political actors, including in particular the
power to set tariffs and the power to grant the concessions through which the right to provide a
public service is conferred to the private sector. The insulation resulted from the appointment
process of the directors of agencies and through hard-wiring budgetary resources. Most agencies
in Brazil have rules that provide the directors with stability, so that they can only be removed
under very exceptional circumstances, requiring corruption or malfeasance proved in a court of
law. The President nominates directors and the Senate confirms nominations. The terms of
directors are staggered and as a result policy is more stable.

37
 Mueller and Pereira (2002) and Melo (2001) argue that the most important motivation for
the creation of regulatory agencies in Brazil, as well as the main determinant for the specific
regulatory design chosen in each sector, was the issue of credibility. Brazil has a long history of
government opportunism: for example, debt payment moratoria, confiscation of savings, use of
utility tariffs to control inflation, several price freezes, manipulation of economic variables,
reneging of contracts, disrespect for intellectual property rights, and arbitrary rule changes.
Because of this, the government during the late 1990s had to signal to the market that it would
not act opportunistically once investors had undertaken their investments, especially in the
electricity and telecommunications sectors, which are particularly prone to administrative
expropriation (Levy and Spiller, 1996).
Getting this message through was important because the privatizations had the objective
not only of attracting investment and bringing more efficiency to these sectors, but also of
raising badly needed revenue for the State (Pinheiro, 2003). One way of doing this was to set the
concessions in the form of contracts, since despite all its shortcomings the Brazilian Judiciary
deals well with contract law. But the most important means by which the government signaled a
credible commitment to not act opportunistically was by designing the agencies so as to give
them a high degree of independence. By tying its hands in this way, the government assured
competitive auctions for the concessions, which generally resulted in high premiums above the
minimum prices. This is particularly true of the telecommunications and electricity sector.
Mueller and Pereira (2002) modeled the determinants of the government’s choice of agency
design and choice of regulators and showed that the de facto design of each agency varied
systematically with the level of credibility cost inherent in each specific sector. For example, in
those sectors where future investments were particularly important, such as electricity and
telecommunications, the government gave more autonomy to the regulatory agencies than in
those sectors where credibility was less crucial, such as health plans and food and drug
regulation.
The reason that a credible commitment was needed in the first place is because situations
are bound to arise in which the President will want to act opportunistically. Because this paper is
concerned with how actors accomplish political transactions, it is interesting to look at cases
where the government’s promise to not change the rules comes under strain. Regulation provides
several such examples. One which has confronted both the Cardoso and the Lula administrations

38
is the choice of the consumer price index used in the price-caps mechanism to set tariffs. In
December 1999, a controversy arose when several branches of the government, especially the
Finance Ministry, Central Bank and Presidency, expressed concern about the effect of utility
service tariffs on inflation as the market started to realize that the particular index used in the
price-cap formula, the IGPM calculated by Fundação Getúlio Vargas, was more than double that
of the IPCA, the official index calculated by the Brazilian Census Bureau IBGE.35 That is, while
the official rate of inflation for 1999 was approximately 9 percent, the inflation measured by the
IGPM was around 20 percent. This discrepancy was due to the different methodologies used to
compile each of the indexes. The IGPM is a general price index that covers a wide basket of
goods, including many tradables that were greatly affected by the large devaluation that occurred
earlier that year. The IPCA, on the other hand, is a consumer price index, which was less
affected by the devaluation, since a reduced aggregate demand kept the prices of many consumer
goods in check.36
Under normal circumstances the different price indices do not differ very much so that at
the time when the parties signed concession contracts, it would have been hard to predict that
this situation would arise. The main concern then was to move forward with the sectoral reforms
and the privatization program. But once the problem had arisen, the government realized the
potential danger that the use of the IGPM represented to price stability in the country. When the
time came for their yearly rate reviews, the concessionaires would have the contractual right to
increase their rates by the 20 percent measured by the IGPM, while the rest of society lived with
the official rate of 9 percent. This was not only a source of additional inflationary pressure, but
also allowed the companies a higher level of profit than that preferred by the government. Most
electric distribution companies, for example, had signed price-caps contracts with an X-factor of
zero for the first five years. This was done at the time of privatization so as to make the
companies more attractive to investors. However, these new developments led the government to
start questioning whether it would not be in its interest to change the contracts so as safeguard
against the problems noted above.
35
In Brazil there are a large number of different organizations calculating inflation indices. In part this is to be
expected in a country that has lived for nearly 30 years with a highly inflationary economy where contracts had to be
indexed. In several instances in the past, the government manipulated the indexes over which it had control, so that a
demand arose for "credible" indexes, such as the IGPM, which the government could not manipulate. This is the
main reason for the use of the IGPM in the concession contracts.
36
For an analysis of the behavior of the various price indexes in 1999, see Banco Central do Brasil. 2000. Relatório
da Inflação, http://www.bcb.gov.br/htms/relinf/frmder.asp.

39
 The controversy played out over the press and in official circles, with public officials and
pundits debating the need to modify the contracts and the effect this would have on the country’s
credibility. At first members of the Ministry of Finance defended changing the index used in the
contracts, but this idea was eventually dropped, as noted by the Minister of Communications: “If
the government changes the index unilaterally, the harmed companies will take it to the Courts
and will win” (Paul and Aguiar, 1999). Having been unable to address the problem by changing
the contract, sectors of the government considered the possibility of doing so through the X-
factor. The price-cap formula allows the regulator to determine that the tariff will rise at a rate
below inflation by a factor of X percent every year, thereby forcing the company to share part of
its efficiency gains with the consumers while still maintaining the incentive to reduce costs. The
contracts specify periods in which the level of the X-factor will be reviewed. The idea is that the
regulator will periodically have a chance to adjust the level of profit sharing by the company
with consumers. As noted above, most concession contracts in the electricity distribution sector
had adopted an X-factor of zero, with a rate review set for five years later, that is, in 2003 for
most companies. Unable to change the index in the contracts, the second attempt was to
anticipate the rate review and reduce prices by slapping a high X-factor (Rondino, 1999). The
government believed that it could do so by using loopholes in the concession contracts (Bautzer,
1999). However, in the end the government decided to do nothing. The next company to come
up for its rate review was the distribution company for the city of Rio de Janeiro, CERJ, which
received the full rate increase of IGPM minus zero (Paul, 2000). The same happened as
subsequent companies reached their date of review.

3.7 Bureaucracy
This section discusses the Brazilian bureaucracy as an important institutional constraint in the
political game presented in this paper. It should be noted that the changes in bureaucratic
structures following the enactment of the Constitution of 1988 exemplify policy outcomes that
are stable and adaptable. This paper views the bureaucracy as an important institutional player
and a political outcome that has been undergoing significant change in response to the changing
economic and political environment. The bureaucracy is an institutional actor that constrains the
Executive but at the same time is an integral part of the management of the government
coalition.

40
 Brazil has been discussed in the literature on comparative bureaucracy as a fairly
successful case. During the so-called Estado Novo (1937-1945), Vargas implemented a
significant administrative reform. It set up the Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público
(DASP, or Administrative Department for the Civil Service) in 1938 as the key administrative
agency responsible for the competitive selection of federal personnel and for the rationalization
of administrative practices and procedures. The DASP reforms led to the formation of a hybrid
administrative structure in Brazil consisting of two levels. The first level consisted of the core
developmentalist bureaucracies in agencies in state-owned enterprises, state-owned banks, and in
planning, taxation and budgeting. The second level consisted of the administrative structures of
the line ministries, particularly in the social sectors. Whereas the first level was insulated from
competitive politics, the second level was part and parcel of patronage games and highly
clientelistic arrangements (Nunes, 1997; Geddes, 1995). Examples of the first type of insulated
bureaucracies in the 1950s include the National Bank for Economic Development (BNDES), the
Bank for the Brazilian Northeast (BNB), the Bank of Brazil, the Brazilian Institute for
Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the Northeast Development Agency (SUDENE), and the
Ministry of Foreign Relations (Itamaraty).
Itamaraty has been a noticeable example of institution-building. It managed to
professionalize its bureaucracy much earlier than the rest of the sectoral agencies on account of
two developments. The first one is that lateral entry into the diplomatic career was severely
restricted as a result of the introduction of public competitive examinations in 1918, and as the
result of the establishment of the Instituto Rio Branco, the second oldest public diplomatic
training institute in the world (Cheibub, 1985). The second development has been the increasing
prevalence of meritocratic mechanisms for promotion since the 1940s. Drawing on an extensive
data set on the careers of cohorts of top-rank Brazilian diplomats between the 1920s and 1980s
(ministros de primeira and segunda classe, and secretarios gerais), Cheibub (1989) showed that,
controlling for social background, profession, state/regional origin, profession of father, kinship
ties to diplomats, among other factors, the score/rank in the admission exam and the academic
record at the Instituto Rio Branco were the key determinants of promotion.
The second comprehensive administrative reform in Brazil was implemented by the
military regime in 1967. Decree-law 200 created a new tier in the Brazilian administrative state
consisting of the so-called public foundations and mixed capital public companies. The rapid

41
economic expansion-cum-modernization of the country under the military was accompanied by a
great expansion of the bureaucratic apparatus. This new tier was freed from the cumbersome
procedures regulating the so-called administração direta, the ordinary public service. These
included the free recruitment of personnel and some financial and budgetary autonomy.
In the 1980s, the Brazilian bureaucracy consisted of a vast hybrid structure encompassing
a number of insulated ilhas de excelência as they came to be called (literally, islands of
excellence), coupled with large sectors of non-professionalized staff. In addition to those cited
above, the key insulated bureaucracies were the state development banks and state-owned
enterprises in oil, petrochemicals, mining and energy sector (Petrobras, Vale do Rio Doce, Chesf,
Itaipu, and Banco Central, among many others).
Schneider (1993) examined the career patterns of elite bureaucrats in Brazil in the 1970s
and 1980s, compared with their counterparts in Mexico, France, US and Japan, and argues that
Brazil and Mexico have a much higher circulation of elites within different agencies and
ministries than do the other countries. Unlike Japan and France, this has produced more
bureaucratic autonomy vis-à-vis interest groups and more loyalty to the various Presidents and
their inner circles (Schneider, 1991). This circulation intensified during the transition to
democracy in 1985. This is so because in the political game discussed in this report, the
assignment of bureaucrat posts is a key element of Brazil’s coalition presidentialism.
In this game, as noted before, the President allocates cabinet portfolios more or less
according to the share of Congressional seats held by the coalition members. In order to obtain
his preferences for fiscal stability, the President faces the dilemma of delegating bureaucratic
discretion to coalition party members while reducing the associated agency losses. The
institutional rules governing the bureaucracy have enabled presidents to successfully play this
game. The President can resort to 18,000 political appointments (known as DAS posts), a
considerable number of which are low-rank posts. The key high-rank posts (approximately
3,000) are filled by the DAS 4, 5 and 6 appointments representing less than 2 percent of federal
public employees. Presidents have recruited personnel for these positions from within the civil
service, from non-tenured but highly qualified professionals currently holding positions in the
bureaucracy, from public universities, and from the private sector.
The President delegates less in the areas of taxation, budgeting, and planning in the
Ministries of Finance and Planning. Top-rank bureaucrats in these ministries are typically

42
appointed from a pool of career civil servants in the Central Bank, the Internal Revenue Service,
and the Itamaraty, among other institutions, and less frequently from outside government. Unlike
countries such as the United States or France, appointments are made across career lines
(Loureiro and Abrucio, 1999). The President can then combine distinct criteria while making
these appointments. These include personal loyalty and technical expertise. The latter is assured
in these careers by extremely competitive entrance examinations and subsequent training in a
number of civil service schools including the Escola de Administração Fazendária and Escola
Nacional de Administração Pública.37
The rest of the ministries have a less endogenous source of recruitment, and ministerial
posts are assigned on a partisan basis. Presidents have usually kept the prerogative of appointing
the ministries’ secretary-general—second in line to the minister himself, and in charge of
managing the ministries’ positions – as a mechanism for reducing agency losses. The Ministry of
Finance, however, is a key institution in this regard. By controlling budget execution and the
cash flow of government expenditures, presidential control over the Ministry is crucial (Loureiro
and Abrucio, 1999).
Crucial factors that explain the ability of bureaucratic executives to ensure a reasonable
level of technical expertise in the Brazilian federal bureaucracy include the following: 1) The
widespread use of competitive entrance examinations in the areas of tax administration,
budgeting, control, economic planning, accounting, central banking, social security, and legal
positions within the Executive; and 2) favorable employment conditions in the public sector.
These include tenure and reasonably competitive salaries. In the 1990s there occurred an erosion
of public employees’ real salaries, but they were raised significantly during the Cardoso
administration.
The government also managed to change the civil service rules enshrined in the
Constitution of 1988. The Constitution introduced important changes in the Brazilian
administrative state. The extension of tenure to all state employees (formerly called CLT
workers) through Regime Juridico Unico (the Unified Legal System RGU) created a rigid system
of personnel that exacerbated state inefficiency. The RGU prohibited different pay levels for
distinct performance levels by state employees. It established the principle of equal pay for

37
Established in 1945 as a training department, ESAF was transformed in 1973 into a highly professionalized
institution specialized in preparing entrance examinations and providing hundreds of training programs for civil
servants in tax, finance and budgeting.

43
categories of functions at the state, municipality, and federal government levels. It also granted
tenure and a secured 100 percent (in several cases up to 130 percent) replacement rate for civil-
servant pensions. The 1988 Constitution also created or strengthened bureaucratic and time-
consuming mechanisms for competitive biddings and personnel recruitment, thereby creating an
incentive structure that encouraged inefficiency.
The administrative reform package was approved in 1998 and included revamping the
RGU; setting up the legal foundations for social organizations and executive agencies—
institutions with managerial autonomy and with social control mechanisms; establishing
performance contracts within the public sector; and making tenure more flexible. A number of
measures also boosted the attractiveness of public employment: the ratio between initial pay and
top grade pay within specific civil-service career tracks was expanded significantly. The reform
aimed at the low and middle ranks of the bureaucracy, where the pay is high, performance poor,
and the fiscal costs very significant as a result of the sheer numbers involved.
Another important positive development under Cardoso was the extension of
professionalization outside the core of the economic, planning, finance and infrastructure
ministries. The ministries for the social sectors, particularly the Ministry of Health and
Education, also underwent important changes. For the first time, the ministers, secretary general
and key managers were economists and were much more qualified than their predecessors.38 As a
result, the political game described in this paper has been severely circumscribed by the core
bureaucratic ministries.
Overall, the Brazilian bureaucracy ranks well in international comparisons of social
control over public sector employees, accountability and perception of corruption. Brazil ranks
significantly ahead of Argentina and Mexico in these three counts (Heredia and Gaetani, 2002).
In Evans and Rauch (1999)’s Weberianess scale, Brazil’s score is 7.6, which compares favorably
with Argentina’s 3.80, Uruguay’s 4.5, and Chile’s 5.0.39 Arguably, considering that the data refer
to the public sector as a whole, these indicators would be much better if the data referred only to
the federal bureaucracy. Personnel expenditure as a percentage of public expenditure has been
about 35-38 percent and is close to the Latin American average. As for public employment, it
accounts for less than 8 percent of the economically active population, slightly below the Latin

38
For the larger trends in Brazil and Latin America, see Loureiro (1997).
39
The Weberianess scale is a simple measure of the degree to which these agencies employ meritocratic recruitment
and offer predictable, rewarding long-term careers, with higher numbers indicating a more professional bureaucracy.

44
American average. The Executive’s ability to politically manage the bureaucracy while at the
same time securing its preferences for fiscal stability and social spending demonstrates that the
bureaucracy is an enabling constraint that has been used, shaped and reformed.

4. Policy Outcomes
Having presented the main political actors in the Brazilian policymaking process and described
how they relate to the general framework of this paper, this section now turns to an examination
of the different types of policy outcomes. Rather than generating consistent policy outcomes, the
political institutions in Brazil generate policies in three broad but distinct categories: 1) stable but
adaptable, 2) volatile and unstable, and 3) rigid and hard-wired. Consistent with this paper’s
claims that the government has incentives and instruments to pursue sound fiscal and monetary
policy, the first subsection below describes those policies and the recent Fiscal Responsibility
Law. Then it examines the residual policies mentioned in the framework, including social and
poverty policies as well as land reform, which tend to be volatile. Subsequently education and
health policy is analyzed. These are all examples of policies that are hard-wired given the long
lag that exists between spending and outcomes in these sectors, which may tempt policymakers
to divert spending to other, less fundamental areas that have more immediate dividends.

4.1 Stable and Adaptable

Stable but adaptable means that, should outside conditions be stable, policy in these areas would
be on cruise control. But exogenous events always happen and the government adapts to the
events so as to minimize the damage to fiscal and monetary stability. The policies that best fit
into this category relate to economic growth, inflation and unemployment. The following
subsections first discuss why macroeconomic policy is considered to be generally stable and
adaptable when economic performance has been so poor. The Fiscal Responsibility Law, which
reigned in state government debt, is then examined.

4.1.1 Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Performance

The framework presented in this paper states that political institutions give the Executive
incentives to be primarily concerned with macroeconomic policy. In addition, strong presidential
powers give the Executive the means to pursue those policies, which and when combined with
the incentives and checks by other political actors, result in stable and adaptable policy.

45
Meanwhile other policies, described in the next section, remain contingent on the success of
macroeconomic policies to be executed.
The framework presents a rather positive picture of the Brazilian policymaking process,
especially when compared to most other Latin American countries. Although there are clearly
several problems with this policymaking process, all in all this paper claims that it provides
reasonably good means for intertemporal political transaction to be realized. The result is a
system of checks and balances where a strong president achieves high levels of governability
positively constrained by several other political actors. These claims, however, may seem to
many observers to clash with actual facts. An examination of real GDP growth rates shows
economic growth has been less than spectacular: 0.7 percent on average for Brazil from 1990 to
1999, less than the average of 1.4 percent for Latin America as a whole. In addition, the public
sector’s debt, which is a key variable for gauging the sustainability of public policy, presents an
evolution over time that is a serious cause for concern: since 1999 the Government Debt/GDP
has been above 50 percent.
This paper does not claim that economic outcomes have been as positive as can be
desired, but rather that the underlying policymaking process has some very positive
characteristics. Clearly a functional policymaking process should lead on average to good
economics outcomes, although the fundamental link between these two is not immediate since
history (path-dependence) and other intervening factors may delay the effect of new political
institutions on economic outcomes. The policymaking process portrayed here has evolved
gradually over time and is still evolving. Many of the positive incentives tied to that
policymaking process, which enable political transactions to be realized, have only been
functioning for a relatively short period of time. To see this, note that the major process of
institutional change that has lead to this system started in 1985 with re-democratization, and
especially with the new Constitution of 1988. However, these changes did not come into effect
immediately. Even after the promulgation of the Constitution, there was still a long period in
which complementary laws were being created and voted on in Congress. More importantly a
process of gradual changes has occurred, as analyzed in Section 3.1. Furthermore, in the first
years after the Constitution, the political process underwent a convoluted period due to shocks
not directly influenced by the new institutions.

46
 Most of the important institutional changes only began in 1995, which is why most of this
analysis focuses on the Cardoso and Lula administrations. It has been during the period since
1995 that many of the formal and informal rules that currently permeate Executive-Legislative
relations (see section 3.2) were consolidated and became routine. In addition, several important
reforms began to be implemented, representing not only important policy outcomes, but also
altering the nature of the policymaking process by changing the political actors’ incentives and
constraints, that is shaping the political institutions themselves. The following changes have been
among the most important: 1) administrative reform, which changed the rules governing civil
servants (see Section 3.8 on the bureaucracy); 2) privatization and the creation of regulatory
agencies in several sectors (see Section 3.7); 3) passage of the Fiscal Responsibility Law, which
constrains political actors, especially governors (see Section 4.1.2); 4) the evolution of the role of
the Ministério Público, which has become an important veto player (see Section 3.5). Yet to
come are a reform of the Judiciary, already initiated by the Lula government, and a political
reform, still on the drawing board.
The point here is that the evolution of the policymaking process in Brazil has been a
gradual and ongoing transformation that is changing political institutions in important ways. This
paper argues that these changes will lead to political institutions that will generally result in
positive policy outcomes. That these positive outcomes have not yet fully materialized can be
ascribed to three factors. First, the underlying institutions are young and are still evolving, and
institutional change takes time to translate into effective outcomes. Pension reform, for example,
initiated by Cardoso and completed by Lula, will play an important role in improving the
government’s fiscal accounts. But even these effects will only be realized in the future, since
most changes apply to those who enter the system after the changes were made, with current
rights and entitlements being “grandfathered.” Secondly, Brazil, like most other Latin American
countries, has had a convoluted recent history including coups, dictatorships, high inflation,
failed economic plans, moratoria, etc., which have strong inertial elements, especially in the
belief and confidence of the population and outside investors. Finally, it should be noted that
recent years have been particularly troublesome for the world economy as a whole, and for
emerging markets in particular, with several external shocks to different countries as the global
financial system consolidates to a new, more integrated world order. In other words, the
mediocre economic outcomes in Brazil in recent years are not caused by the current incentives

47
and constraints on the political institutions that determine the policymaking process. On the
contrary, this analysis sees the process as providing good conditions for intertemporal political
transactions to be realized. If it is correct, more positive economic outcomes should eventually
materialize.

4.1.2 Fiscal Responsibility Law (FRL)

Congress and the President enacted the FRL in 2000. The FRL represented the apex of a
relatively successful set of measures to control the state governments’ indebtedness.40 The FRL
illustrates the kinds of policy outcomes that reflect the Executive’s ability to implement its policy
preferences in the political game discussed in the previous sections. Furthermore, it reflects a
learning process arising from a repeated game between the federal government and the states. As
Braun and Tommasi (2004) point out, fiscal rules to be enforced require self-enforcement by the
players (states) or an external enforcer with the power to ensure compliance. This paper argues
that the Brazilian case approximates the second case and not the first. As discussed at length in
this paper, the current depiction of the Brazilian political system as a federal structure in which
governors wield vast powers is inaccurate. In fact, the circumstances that produced the status quo
that favored the states were unprecedented and extraordinary: a Constituent Assembly in which
the Executive played a minor role; the political conjuncture of the transition to democratic rule,
in which fiscal decentralization and increased social spending were important banners; and the
specific sequence through which the political transition (democratic elections) occurred first at
the state level (1982) and subsequently at the national level, converting the governors into key
political figures in the transition. However, unlike pre-1994 Argentina, the political survival of
the President or of the Senators does not depend on sub-national institutions such as the Electoral
College in provincial assemblies in which governors play a key role.41 Because there was no
constitutional basis for the power of governors, the Real Plan represented a shock that restored
the President’s preponderance. Among other things, it a) laid bare the states’ fiscal imbalances;
b) made it impossible for the states to resort to floating and other financial mechanisms to
finance their fiscal deficits; and c) caused a further deterioration of the deficits because of the

40
At the end of 2003, the states were producing a surplus of 9 percent of their net revenue and representing 1
percent of GDP (Afonso, 2004).
41
Current views on fiscal rules fail to recognize these crucial differences and instead categorize Brazil and
Argentina as examples of the same perverse fiscal federal game (Melo, 2004a). These contributions fail to recognize
the great preponderance of the Executive in the fiscal game. For analyses of the Brazilian case along these lines, see
Braun and Tommasi (2004), Webb (2004), and Rodden (2003).

48
sharp increase in interest rates. The Executive was able to impose its fiscal preferences because:
a) it could offer BNDES advancements in exchange for fiscal reforms, including privatization of
state banks and utilities; b) it had agenda powers and other legislative prerogatives to implement
its agenda; an c) it was also helped by the approval of the re-election amendment, which
strengthened not only the President vis-a-vis the governors, but also helped extend the
governors’ time horizons (19 governors ran for re-election), thus introducing some element of
self-enforcement in the fiscal game.42 In addition, due to the devastating impact of hyperinflation
in the mid-1990s, the President’s policies were viewed favorably by a great majority of the
public, which became strongly inflation averse.
The sustainability of the current fiscal situation is therefore not dependent on the states’
cooperation. Although the FRL could be reversed, there is some rigidity in it since a three-fifths
majority of in two rounds of voting in the two chambers is required for a change in the law. The
FRL specifies in great detail the fiscal rules governing public sector indebtedness, credit
operations, and public account’s reporting. The Law prohibits the federal government from
financing sub-national governments, therefore eliminating the possibility of bailouts as well as
any changes in the financial clauses of the existing debt-restructuring agreement. The FRL
imposes debt ceilings for each level of government. The Executive branch proposes the ceilings
and the Senate must approve. The Law stipulates that in the context of economic instability or
drastic changes in monetary or exchange rate policy, the federal government can submit to the
Senate a proposal for changing these limits.43 Any excesses to the limits are to be eliminated
within one year, otherwise new financing and voluntary transfers from the central government
are prohibited. Other sanctions include withholding federal transfers by the federal government,
denial of credit guarantees and banning of new debt (Nascimento and Debus, n.d.).44 In addition,
the FRL contains a golden-rule provision for capital spending (i.e., annual credit disbursement
cannot exceed capital spending).

42
Without the re-election amendment, incumbent governors would have an incentive to exacerbate the common
pool problem by leaving the fiscal problem to future governors.
43
The Law stipulates that changes in monetary or exchange rate policy affecting fiscal performance will trigger an
extension in the time limit for debt adjustment. The conditions are: a) if the economy contracts by 1 percent or more
over the last four quarters; b) if a state of siege is declared or a condition of national catastrophe is approved by
Congress.
44
In order to guarantee transparency in the implementation of the rules, a list of the sub-national governments that
exceed the limit has to be published by the Treasury Secretariat (STN) on a monthly basis.

49
 The Fiscal Responsibility Law also granted constitutional status to a number of existing
rules and introduced new ones. These include the following: a) personnel expenditures
(including pensions), capped at 50 percent of net revenues for the federal government and at 60
percent for sub-national governments; b) new, recurrent expenditure commitments require
specification of their full funding for the year in which they become effective and for the two
consecutive years; c) a prohibition of spending commitments that exceed one budgetary period
during the last year of tenure of the executives at any level of government d) tax and fiscal
exemptions and abatements have to be specified in the budget together along with the
instruments to offset their impact on the budget for two consecutive years; and e) public financial
institutions at all levels of government are not allowed to lend to their main shareholders.
It would be misleading to conclude that the impressive fiscal costs to the central
government meant that the initiatives were in the interest of sub-national governments.
Furthermore, the fact that most of the fiscal adjustment was generated by raising tax revenue
rather than by significant cuts in expenditure does not mean that there has not been a radical
change in the intergovernmental balance of power. The states had to privatize or close their
banks; embark on a program of fiscal modernization; reduce the relative importance of payroll
(for which governors were required at least to refrain from hiring more personnel); sell
enterprises; as well as to adapt their pension regimes to the federal rules (in addition to being
prohibited from creating new pension institutions or legislating in this area). In sum, the states
lost significant degrees of autonomy. As Mora (2002) argues, the states have become more and
more dependent on the federal government because voluntary (i.e., discretionary) transfers from
the federal government have become essential for their fiscal survival.45 This is so because the
states’ own revenues (tax and automatic constitutional transfers from the federal government)
have been devoted to producing the surpluses required to honor the refinancing contracts. As
Mora argues, the states’ indebtedness and their subsequent loss of autonomy have highlighted the
autonomy they enjoyed in the past, particularly that of the large states, which had the ability to
issue public securities—precisely the kind of debt most sensitive to escalating inflation rates.
Currently, the most vulnerable and dependent states are ironically the large and powerful Rio de
Janeiro, Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais. Many observers have praised the FRL because it

45
The recent behavior of the governors of Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro toward Lula’s government provides
graphic evidence of this connection. The governing coalition appears to be trading political support for voluntary
transfers.

50
laid the foundation for a new formidable system of rules for fiscal management. The IMF
described the new fiscal institutions as follows:

In the last few years Brazil has achieved a high degree of fiscal transparency,
together with major improvements in the management of its public finances. This
was done against the background of an international and domestic
macroeconomic environment which has posed substantial challenges to the
country’s economic policymakers. The cornerstone of these achievements has
been the enactment in May 2000 of the Fiscal Responsibility Law which sets out
for all levels of government fiscal rules designed to ensure medium-term fiscal
sustainability, and strict transparency requirements to underpin the effectiveness
and credibility of such rules. Another pillar of the improved fiscal management
has been the medium-term expenditure framework aimed at better aligning the
allocation of budgetary resources over time to the government’s priorities and
regional development strategy. Also instrumental in promoting sustained fiscal
adjustment of sub-national governments has been the firm enforcement by the
federal government of the debt restructuring agreements with most states and
many municipalities (IMF, 2001:1).

4.2 Volatile and Unstable Policy

This paper categorizes certain policies as being volatile and unstable. Policies are unstable
because: 1) some have a strong ideological component and as such will oscillate with changes in
the Executive branch in particular; and 2) some are residual in that the appropriations are
determined so as to meet a budgetary target that does not upset the overarching goal of stable
monetary and fiscal policy. The mechanism by which receipts and expenditures are balanced by
the government throughout the budgetary year so as to achieve the target primary surplus is
known as contingenciamento. What happens is that at the beginning of each fiscal year the
government passes a decree impounding part of the discretionary expenditures in the budget, that
is, those that are not hard-wired. As the year proceeds, these resources can be “unimpounded” if
tax receipts are greater than expected and if hard-wired expenditure have not been greater than
expected.
The size of the cuts are set for each ministry and it is then up to each minister—together
together with the Executive, but without consulting Congress—to determine which programs
and projects will be hit. Because these are necessarily in the “investment” part of the budget,
which is the only part that is not hard-wired, these projects typically affect the policies that have
been labeled volatile residual policies. They become volatile precisely because they undergo this

51
process where they will be executed more fully in good years than in bad years. The following
two subsections will discuss two sets of policies that fall into this category: land reform and
poverty alleviation.

4.2.1 Land Reform Policies

Land reform is the prototypical social policy. It is perhaps the most ideologically charged policy
issue in all of Latin America. In addition, it is the kind of issue where the economic benefits of
well-conducted policy materialize only in the long run. That is, land reform has those
characteristics that the framework presented here predicts will lead to volatile policy, with
changes in emphasis, design and implementation coming about with each change in government.
In Brazil, this is clearly a predominant characteristic of land reform policies. Since the 1960s
every government has had a specific land reform program, although more than 40 years of effort
have not managed to budge the indices of land ownership concentration.46
Each new administration has created a new land reform program with a different name
and set ambitious targets of how many families it planned to settle. The Executive includes
resources in his budget proposal to Congress and Congress typically adds amendments to
increase expenditures. But at the beginning of each fiscal year, the Executive issues a decree that
impounds (contingenciamento) part of the resources from several areas, so as to assure that the
government’s expenditures and receipts are compatible with the primary fiscal surplus target, as
described in Section 4.1.1.47 This impounding cannot touch the hard-wired items and so has to
concentrate on that part of the budget that can be manipulated. The policies that are subject to
this contingenciamento are the ones that tend to be volatile because they depend on meeting the
primary surplus target.
The budget of 2001, for example, originally specified R$1.847 billion for land reform
(Texeira, 2001). When the budget passed through Congress this amount was increased by 4.3
percent to R$1.927 billion. Part of this total was composed of hard-wired expenditures over
which the Executive had no discretion and which it had to execute regardless of any contingency.
However, R$1.013 billion remained discretionary. On February 7, 2001, President Cardoso

46
The Gini index of land concentration in Brazil has increased from 0.827 in 1960 to 0.856 today.
47
As noted previously, the impounding of resources may be later reverted if the fiscal situation evolves favorably.
However, the decision is wholly up to the Executive, who uses this power strategically. Since a large part of the
impounded resources represent individual budget amendments sponsored by congressmen, the Executive impounds
and releases resources with one eye on the fiscal surplus and the other on congressional voting behavior.

52
issued a decree impounding 12.57 percent of all the non-hard-wired items in the total budget for
that year. The contribution of land reform to this fiscal effort was a cut of R$113.9 million from
the R$1.013 billion non-hard-wired resources in the budget for land reform, that is 11.2 percent
of the total. The fraction impounded in the following years was 24.75 percent in 2002, 36.47
percent in 2003 and 5.98 percent in 2004.48 Despite its historic identification with the cause of
land reform, which had always been a major campaign issue, note that the Lula administration,
cut expenditures on land reform to an even greater extent than had the Cardoso government.
Lula’s most recent cut produced one of the lowest budgets for land reform in the recent past. The
cuts on land reform led to the government’s target of 60,000 settled families falling short by
23,200—more than one third.49 As predicted by this paper’s model, the government cut
expenditures on land reform, a residual ideological issue, despite its ideological preferences for
greater spending on land reform. The rationale for the cut was to meet the fiscal imperatives of a
particularly troublesome year (see Section 5.2). It is possible to conclude that land reform fits
neatly in the category of volatile residual policies described in this framework. One can speculate
that the volatility would be even greater were land reform not pushed so effectively by the MST.
Other residual policies where the government is less constrained, such as anti-poverty policy, are
even more prone to fluctuations than land reform.

4.2.2 Poverty Alleviation

Brazilian anti-poverty programs exemplify the kinds of policy areas that have exhibited highly
unstable patterns in the last decade. According to the political game discussed earlier, they are
residual policies.. There is ample evidence of instability in the period from 1988 up until the end
of the Cardoso government. The evidence during Lula’s reign is more mixed and hinges on the
interpretation of the high visibility received by the flagship program Fome Zero (zero hunger).
The Brazilian Constitution stipulates a clear role for the state in terms of poverty
alleviation. According to Article 23 of the Constitution, poverty alleviation is the joint mandate
48
Budgetary data including that on impoundments comes from several technical notes of the Consultoria de
Orçamento e Fiscalização Financeira of the House of Representatives,
(http://www.camara.gov.br/internet/orcament/Principal/exibe.asp?idePai=16&cadeia=0@).
49
Of the 36,800families settled in 2003, the government only settled 9,217 in new settlement projects. The
remaining 75 percent of the families were settled in pre-existing projects created by the Cardoso government. To
save expenditures, the Lula government settled many in the Amazon region where the cost of settling is lower but so
too are success rates. The controversy over these numbers is typical of the war over statistics in the politics of land
reform in Brazil. These events also exemplify how the use of the number of settled families as a measure of the
government’s effort for land reform is illusory. When necessary, the government can settle a greater number of
families at a lower cost by reducing the “quality” of the settlement projects.

53
of the federal Government, the states and the municipal governments. In the 1980s there were
two federal institutions aimed at reducing poverty: the Legião Brasileira de Assistência (LBA)
and the Centro Brasileiro para a Infância e Adolescência (CEBIA). The LBA was in charge of a
network of institutions for the elderly and children in poverty. The LBA operated through
agreements with a number of philanthropic institutions, both private and public, which provided
funding. Before the decentralization mandated by the Constitution, the LBA oversaw more than
7,000 agreements with municipalities and other institutions. Within the Ministry of Planning, the
Secretaria Especial de Ação Comunitária implemented a myriad of highly politicized small
programs of social assistance.50 The Collor Administration (1990-92) transferred many of these
programs to a newly created Ministério do Bem Estar Social and also closed a large number of
programs. In the area of food and nutrition, the administration terminated the eight sub-programs
that had existed in the 1980s and from which children and expectant mothers had benefited
(Resende, 2000: 15).51 At the same time, Collor phased out the Programa de Alimentação do
Trabalhador (PAT), a food program for low-income workers.
Upon taking office, President Itamar Franco announced poverty alleviation as one of his
top priorities. Following a large country-wide mobilization led by IBASE, one of Brazil’s largest
NGOs, the Franco administration made poverty a top-priority issue. Ipea, the Planning
Ministry’s economic think tank, prepared a “map of hunger.” The announcement of the map and
the publication of figures pointing to the existence of 32 million people living in extreme poverty
led Franco to declare the country to be in a “state of social calamity.” The next step was the
announcement of a number of emergency measures and the setting up, in 1993, of the Conselho
Nacional de Segurança Alimentar (CONSEA, the national council for food security), consisting
of eight ministers and 21 representatives from civil society.
Under Cardoso, Comunidade Solidária became the main anti-poverty initiative. Set up in
1995, the initiative consisted of an intersectoral administrative structure that was directly linked
to the Presidency. Although it was in charge of a small number of programs (including the
alfabetização solidária, capacitação solidária and Universidade solidária), citizens viewed the
Comunidade Solidária as an alternative to a World Bank-style social fund.52 The programs

50
These ranged from self-help housing programs to schemes for milk and food baskets distribution.
51
Several institutions and ministries [including the Instituto Nacional de Alimentação Nutrição (INAN), the LBA,
the Ministry of Education’s special fund (FAE), and the Ministry of Planning] operated the programs.
52
For the design of the government’s strategy, see the discussion by its chief architect Vilmar Faria, in Faria (2002).

54
consisted of public and private partnerships and included volunteer groups. Overall, Comunidade
Solidária functioned as coordination mechanism designed to take place on two levels: 1) it
would encourage and facilitate the participation of civil society institutions in the formulation
and implementation of social assistance programs; and 2) it would identify current social-
spending programs that had a higher impact on poverty and channel resources to those programs.
The identified programs received the “priority seal,” which protected them from expenditure
cuts.
The Lula administration initiated a reversal of Cardoso’s anti-poverty programs, at least
on paper. The Lula administration phased out Comunidade Solidária and launched a new anti-
poverty program, under the auspices of the Ministério Extraordinário para a Segurança
Alimentar e Combate a Fome(MESA, an ad-hoc ministry for food security). The Fome Zero
program became the centerpiece of the new ministry. This program would also operate on the
basis of geographical targeting. Those municipalities with the lowest HDI would be selected for
priority implementation over time, and households with per capita incomes of less than half the
minimum wage would receive a food bonus of R$ 50.53
Ten months after its announcement, the Fome Zero program was still not fully
implemented. Lula reduced the resources earmarked for the program because of its fiscal
targets.54 It is interesting, however, that Lula protected Fome Zero when a drastic rescheduling
(contingenciamento) of the federal budget occurred in 2003. But mounting criticism from several
sectors including policy circles and NGOs regarding the program’s assistencialista nature and
technical flaws in the design of the bonus scheme prompted the government to phase it out. The
government dismissed Fome Zero mentor José Graziano and created a new “superministry” for
the social sectors, the Ministério para o Desenvolvimento Social e Combate à Fome. At the same
time, the government decided to introduce a single card, the cartão família, which was to be used
by families to receive the food benefit plus three other current conditional income transfer
benefits. To receive the benefits, families must engage in a number of activities including
vaccination and school attendance. In practice, the government discontinued its initiatives and
promoted the merger of cash transfer programs created under Cardoso: the school attendance

53
Equivalent to US$ 18. This bonus is operationalized via the cartão alimentação, a debit card that is to be used in
registered shops and vendors.
54
The budget law for 2003 contained R$ 1.8 billion for the Fome Zero, whereas the budget estimate for its full
implementation was R$ 5.0 billion.

55
program (bolsa escola), food aid (bolsa alimentação), and the gas benefit. The idea of creating a
single card was not new. It was developed much earlier in 2001, when the Caixa Econômica
Federal (national savings bank) started working on the Cadastro Único, a unified registry of
social programs(FAO, World Bank and IDB, 2002). By creating the card, the Lula government
could present the achievements of Fome Zero—i.e., the number of families that received the
card—in the same package with the figures for the much larger existing programs. The same
applies to the funds allocated to the family card. The net result was that the political visibility of
the modest resources allocated to the food benefit was reduced.
Prior to Lula’s administration there was an attempt to hard wire funds for poverty
alleviation during Cardoso’s second term. Following the intense mobilization around poverty
alleviation, a congressional special committee, set up in 1999, became an important platform for
opposition politicians to criticize Cardoso’s policies in general and his macroeconomic policy in
particular. The poverty issue was highly politicized and led to several legislative proposals for
hard-wiring anti-poverty funds. Conservative and opposition politicians fought fiercely for
authorship of the proposals.55 While acknowledging the gravity of the poverty situation, the
Cardoso administration opposed the idea of a fund because it would imply “budget rigidity.”
Significantly, the committee was called the “Committee for the study of the structural and
conjunctural causes of social inequality and for presenting legislative solutions to eradicate
poverty and social marginalization and for the reduction of regional and social inequality.” The
title of the committee signaled its concerns not only with poverty as such but also with regional
inequality. The Committee prepared a constitutional amendment creating a Fundo de Combate à
Pobreza (Fund to Eradicate Poverty). The original proposal contained several sources of revenue
for the fund, including bill that would tax individual wealth and assets that Cardoso had proposed
when he was a senator. The proposal, which became Constitutional Amendment 31, was
approved in a compromise. The main source of income would come from the existing tax on
financial transactions (CPMF). This tax was introduced by “sunset legislation,” a transitional
clause in the constitution that was legally valid for two years. The government endorsed the
Committee’s proposal and accepted that an increase in the tax rate would be earmarked for the
fund.56 The Cardoso government approved the constitutional amendment and extended the time

55
See National Congress (1999).
56
Constitutional Amendment 12/1996 created the CPMF with a rate of 0.25 percent. The tax was earmarked for
health care and was valid for only two years. Constitutional Amendment 21 extended the validity for three

56
for expiration of the tax by additional two years. Because the fund would last for 10 years,
further extensions would be “locked in.”
The prima facie attempt to introduce rigidity in the budget for the purposes of poverty
alleviation can be understood as part of the logrolling between the Executive and Legislative
branches. The Executive maintained fiscal stability by increasing taxes at the sub-national level
and in return, Congress received some poverty-alleviation programs sheltered from discretionary
Executive budget cuts.57 This is consistent with the political game described in this paper. The
Executive prefers hard wiring sub-national spending so as to allow for fiscal discretion at the
national level.

4.3 Rigid or Hard-Wired Policy

This section provides examples of hard-wired policies. These are policies specified in the
Constitution over which the Executive has no discretion. In 2003, approximately 94 percent of
the expenditures in the budget were “rigid,” i.e., they could not be changed. The largest portion
of these expenditures included types of expenditures whose shares grew over time and whose
amounts were most probably not foreseen at the time of hard-wiring. The best example is
pensions, which now accounts for 33 percent of the budget. Other types of hard-wired
expenditures occurred intentionally: they are the outcomes of the deals between the legislature
and the Executive. They include transfers to states and municipalities (18 percent), social
assistance (1 percent), Kandir Law (export tax breaks) (1 percent), subsidies (2 percent), the
health system or SUS (7 percent), and other expenditures (11 percent). Only 6 percent of the
expenditures were subject to being withheld by the Executive to reach fiscal targets. However,
the total value, which is approximately R$20 billion, is still significant. There has been much
debate over what powers the Constitution and the Fiscal Responsibility Law actually confer to
the President in terms of discretion to execute the budget (Lima, 2004). There has also been
much debate on whether and how hard-wired items should be “flexibilized.” As the rigidities
imposed in the past on current public expenditures become more constraining and impede
efficient adjustment to current circumstances, the pressure for decoupling some expenditures has

additional years. The rate was raised to 0.38 in the first year and to 0.30 in the remaining two years, but the proceeds
would be earmarked for social security. The Fund for Poverty Eradication guaranteed that the 0.38 percent rate was
maintained. The fund created some rigidity because should the yearly proceeds collected not reach 4 billion reais,
the national government was to provide the difference with general tax revenue.
57
The amendment prohibits the desvinculação (withdrawal of earmarking) of the fund’s resources.

57
increased. Also, as more expenditures become hard-wired, there are less resources left over for
use as pork by the President for trades with Congress. The only mechanism that remains largely
unaffected by these fiscal trends is the political allocation of bureaucratic agencies to members of
the governing coalition. But as indicated before, the increasing professionalization of the line
ministries of the social sectors (the largest bureaucracies of the state machinery) has also
restricted to a certain extent job politics and political favoritism in the allocation of public
contracts in these areas. This has created an incentive for the President to try to find creative
ways to increase his leeway for determining expenditures, although he is constrained by the
courts and the Ministerio Publico (see Section 3.5). It can be expected that these pressures will
most probably lead to important changes in the rules in the coming years.
Hard-wired policies generally include those with little ideological content, and are
perceived in society as entitlements. The two that best fit this description and that will be
discussed in the next two subsections are education and health policies.

4.3.1 Health Policy

According to the model presented in this paper, health policy exemplifies the type of area in
which there would be attempts to hard wire institutional innovations as a pre-commitment device
to ensure that they are preserved. These policy innovations are viewed by the governing coalition
as crucial, thereby requiring insulation from political logrolls. The key issue here for the
Executive is guaranteeing resources for the sector.
The Constitution of 1988 created a unified budget for pensions, social assistance benefits
and health care—the so-called social security budget. This was part of the demand for a
universalistic social protection system advanced by the opposition during the military regime and
an important sectoral banner during the Constituent Assembly. A diversified source of funding
was set up. This institutional arrangement was viewed by the groups supporting the idea as a
mechanism that would de-link contributions and access to the system, making it more democratic
and redistributive. It was also with this purpose that the Constitution gave universal access to
health care through the newly created Unified Health System (SUS). It also introduced generous
social assistance benefits. The social security budget was made up of the CSLL, the contribution
on net profits paid by corporations (Cofins), and the employers’ and employees’ payroll
contributions.

58
 The fusion of expenditures for health care and pensions in the same budget produced over
time a dynamic that is highly detrimental to health care. This resulted from the fact that pensions
are contractual disbursements and are not compressible. They are a flux of future commitments
that finishes only with the death of the pensioners. By contrast, health expenditures are mostly
current expenditures that are by definition vulnerable in the context of fiscal management. Over
time, social security commitments crowded out health expenditures. It did not take long before
this process became critical. This occurred because fiscal imbalances in the pension schemes
were not very significant prior to the Constitution of 1988, and, more importantly, pensions were
not indexed. This gradually resulted in a sharp reduction in the real values of pensions. By
mandating that pensions were to keep their real value, the Constitution of 1988 prohibited this
practice. In addition, it expanded dramatically the mass of workers under the civil service regime
(Regime Jurídico Único, in which benefits are related to the average of last pay checks),
upgraded rural non-contributory pensions and social benefits to the level of urban pensions, and
finally set the lowest value of pensions at the minimum salary level. This produced a shock in the
system and caused the crowding out of health expenditures shortly after its implementation.
This mechanism took place at the same time as the decentralization of health care. The
starting point was the Lei Orgânica da Saúde (1990), which furnished the enabling legislation for
constitutional provisions mandating decentralization. The decentralization was very significant:
The municipalities were responsible for 9.6 percent of total spending in health care in 1985
(Arretche 2003: 1-2). This share reached 35 percent in 1996 and 43 percent in 2000. The change
in terms of the source of resources for health care was equally impressive. It jumped from 9.3
percent in 1985 to 28 percent in 1996. In its turn, the federal Government’s share declined from
73 percent to 53 percent in the same period (Arretche, 2003: 1-2).
The recurrent crisis in the health sector enhanced the visibility of health issues in the
country. Brazil exhibits infant mortality rates that are far above countries with comparable levels
of development, measured in terms of per capita income. Policy elites have increasingly been
sensitive to the need to address health issues as a precondition for development. Many proposals
were advanced for earmarking resources for the health sector. These were criticized by the
finance and planning circles as a move backwards that would caused more fiscal rigidities in a
context of rapidly declining degrees of liberty in the budget. The argument that more resources
would be secured to the health sector was even used in negotiations leading to the Fundo Social

59
de Emergência, which was created in 1994. The fund would consist essentially of “de-freezing”
20 percent of taxes and contributions, which could then be freely allocated by the Executive. By
year 2000, the municipalities were responsible for 89 percent of basic care procedures, up from
65 percent in 1995.
The measures to secure financing for the health sector culminated in a proposal to create
the CPMF, the provisional contribution on financial transactions. The CPMF was created by
Constitutional Amendment 3 in 1993 and was a “sunset” provision that would be valid for only
two years. In 1996, Constitutional Amendment 12 reinstated the CPMF and earmarked it for the
health sector. Subsequently, in 2000, Constitutional Amendment 29 stipulated minimum values
for investments in the health sector for the three tiers of government. For the federal government,
the budget for 2000 is set at the 1999 level plus 5 percent. As for the period 2001-2004, the value
of health expenditures is to be readjusted by the annual variation of the nominal GDP. Of these,
15 percent should be spent in the municipalities on basic health care, and distributed according to
their population. In the case of the states, 12 percent of the revenue (after legal transfers to the
municipalities) is to be spent in the health sector. In turn the municipalities are required to spend
15 percent of their budget on health care. The states and municipalities, which in 2000 had
expenditures levels inferior to those stipulated, should reduce the difference at the rate of one-
fifth per annum. Non-compliance would allow federal intervention in sub-national governments.
The law stipulated that all transfers would be channeled to a fund and subject to auditing.
The initiatives aiming to hard-wire health care resources may be interpreted as attempts
at controlling and securing sub-national spending in a context of rapid decentralization and
consequently high uncertainty over outcomes in an increasingly salient issue for the Executive. It
is significant that in the context of fiscal adjustment, voluntary health transfers, which are by far
the largest of their kind in the country, have become crucial for the fiscal survival of sub-national
governments. This made the control of sub-national spending all the more critical for the Central
Executive.

4.3.2 Education Policy

Education policy is another area that illustrates the use of institutional innovations as a pre-
commitment device to ensure that they are preserved. As in the case of health care, primary
(ensino fundamental) and secondary education is viewed by the governing coalition as crucial

60
thereby requiring insulation from political logrolls. Similarly, the key issue here for the
Executive is guaranteeing that the resources earmarked for primary and secondary education are
in fact applied by the sub-national governments in the sector and in specific ways. It is worth
noting that primary and secondary education is not a functional competence of any specific level
of government. Primary education is to be provided by the municipalities with the financial and
technical assistance of the federal government and of the state (Article 30 of the Constitution).
Constitutional Amendment 14 contains articles calling for priorities to be given by each level of
government but does not mandate specialization of competence. This definition provides an
incentive structure that discourages efficiency because it diffuses responsibility and
accountability.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, the centrality of education to development became a
recurrent issue in the public agenda. From business interests to social movements, there emerged
a consensus that was reflected in the Executive’s preference for insulation of the educational
sector. This was combined with the increasing need to enhance control mechanisms in the
context of an accelerated program of decentralization. For example, in 1989 there was a
Parliamentary Inquiry Commission on the Calmon amendment. The commission found that
states spent less than 20 percent of the constitutionally required educational expenditures on
teachers’ salaries. It was widely agreed that teachers’ exceedingly low pay and lack of training at
the sub-national level was one of the main reasons for the low quality of education.
The furor over education finally resulted in the passage of Constitutional Amendment 14
in 1996 and the approval of the LDB (the complementary law of basic guidelines for education)
in the same year. Constitutional Amendment 14 required that for 10 years, at least 60 percent of
the 25 percent of the sub-national resources mandated for education was to be spent on the
payment of teachers actively involved in classroom activities. The resources required for raising
pay and training were to come from a specific Fund, the Fundo de Manutenção e
Desenvolvimento do Ensino Fundamental e Valorização do Magistério (FUNDEF). The Fund
consists of 15 percent of intergovernmental transfers from states to the municipalities (FPM) and
of the state’s revenue from the ICMS. The resources from the Fund are distributed according to
the number of enrollments at each level of government. The federal government was to play an
equalization role. It should pay the difference between the resulting per capita spending in each
municipality and a national minimum per capita level that is set in the annual budget law. It is

61
interesting that this has become the Achilles’ heel of the new arrangements. Consistent with their
preferences for fiscal expansion at the local level, sub-national governments have pressured the
government to raise the national universal per capita level. However, fiscal needs have led the
national government to not readjust it. Interestingly, the current Lula administration has not
increased its level for 2004, notwithstanding the intense criticism by the Workers’ Party (PT) of
inadequate funding by the Cardoso government. The federal government’s desire is to control
sub-national priorities and spending while keeping its own preferred federal fiscal targets as the
ultimate adjustment variable.
The incentive structure led mayors to actively engage in attracting pupils because this
would lead to more transfers from the fund. In addition, it encouraged decentralization from
states to municipalities because there would be negative transfers in some municipalities if the
educational services were provided by the states. The rationale for the education initiatives by
the federal government is similar to those that underly the health care system: attempts to control
and secure sub-national spending in a context of rapid decentralization and consequently high
uncertainty over outcomes. Control by the federal government over sub-national spending is
therefore critical to ensure that federal government meets its preferences.

5. Shocks and Recovery

The previous section described representative policies in each of the policy categories mentioned
in this paper’s framework of the policymaking process in Brazil. This section provides a further
perspective on this process by analyzing two specific events where the system was hit by
political and economic shocks. It describes the reaction of the players involved each of these
events, shows how these were conditioned by the political institutions, and argues that the
response conforms to that expected by this analysis’ model of the Brazilian policymaking
process. In general, the response to shocks is to manage spending and taxes in order to maintain
a certain equilibrium. In a sense, fiscal and monetary policy is the equilibrating mechanism. The
first shock to be examined is an economic one: the strong devaluation of the real in January
1999, which threatened to bring back inflation and forced important changes in macroeconomic
policy. It is followed by an examination of a political shock: the election of President Lula,
which also led to a devaluation of the real, but also to a drop in investment, a rise in country risk
and general uncertainty. This section will describe how the government’s successful reaction to
each of these shocks conforms to the political institutions and incentives as described in the

62
framework presented here, for example, by reducing the execution of the budget related to
residual policies.

5.1 Recovering from a Monetary Shock: The Devaluation of 1999

In October of 1998 Fernando Henrique Cardoso was re-elected for a second term as President,
without even the need for a second round run-off. This electoral triumph was based on the
success of the Real plan in achieving monetary stability and increased incomes, as well as on a
record of important structural reforms. Despite the apparent ease of the victory, the economic
situation had been deteriorating in several ways in the months before the election. The exchange
rate was recognizably overvalued, which led to large current account deficits that had been partly
financed by strong inflows of foreign direct investment. This situation required high levels of
real interest rates which, together with fiscal profligacy, led to a public sector deficit of
approximately 8 percent of GDP. The government planned a gradual process whereby the
currency would be devalued 7 to 8 percent per year, although in the wake of the Mexican, Asian
and Russian crises, markets were not willing to wait and several speculative attacks had to be
fended off. As pressure increased, it became clear that a devaluation would eventually arrive,
though in the midst of several successful defenses of the currency, on the part of the Central
Bank, it was not evident how soon it would be.58
In hindsight, the events of 1998 and 1999 can be interpreted as a clear case of electoral
cycle behavior. Unsustainable exchange rates, and current-account and fiscal deficits were made
to endure without collapse until the election, after which the government could take the harsh
measures necessary to correct the situation. Sustaining the status quo in the midst of growing
market distrust was not a trivial task. In part this was achieved by a loan of US$41.5 billion from
the IMF and other institutions. Increased capital flight also made it necessary to sharply increase
interest rates twice in 1998 and for the President to announce that harsh austerity measures were
being elaborated, all of which may have reduced the margin in the electoral victory (The
Economist, 1998).
The devaluation came on January 13, 1999 shortly after the official start of Cardoso’s
new term. The head of the Central Bank was replaced and the real was allowed to devalue by 8
percent. At the time, this created great uncertainty in international financial markets and fueled

58
Most banks had already hedged themselves for the case of devaluation and many profited handsomely.

63
speculation as to the fate of the Brazilian economy and its impact on the financial global system
and especially on other Latin American countries.59
At this point the government faced its most difficult test to date. Its main electoral trump,
the Real Plan and monetary stability, were under severe threat. Specialists disagreed as to how
big the pass-through from the exchange rate to prices would be, but the general expectation was
that it would be large (McHale, 2000). The lax fiscal behavior of the previous years seemed to
indicate that the government would not be able to institute the tax increases and spending cuts
that were seen as being key to riding out the crisis. In particular, there were doubts as to its
ability to co-opt or circumvent Congress and the state governors in the implementation of the
unpopular measures that would be necessary, for as noted in The Economist (1998), “neither
group has shown much enthusiasm for austerity in the past four years.”
As it turned out, despite the general mistrust, the government’s reaction was remarkably
swift and effective. With the election out of the way and given the several instruments afforded
by strong presidential powers, the government was able to take the necessary measures to control
the situation and stem the crisis. The outcomes following the forced devaluation were described
by Cardoso and Helwege (1999: 23) in the following terms:

By any standard, Brazil has negotiated its way through the Real Crisis with
extraordinary ease and speed. By May 1999, the real had risen to 1 US$:1.67,
compared to a low of 1 US$:2.21 on March 31. Short-term interest rates had
fallen from 45 percent in March to just 23 by May 25, and inflation, measured
by the national consumer index, had declined from an annualized rate of 16
percent in March to 6 percent in April. Far from slipping into a deep recession,
the Brazilian economy actually grew by 1 percent in the first quarter of 1999,
and forecasts of a serious decline in output were being revised.

While some positive circumstances, such as low interest rates in the US and a record
harvest, can be seen as contributing to this remarkable turn-around, the key causal factor was
clearly the ability of the government to gain control of fiscal policy in a way that credibly
signaled to the markets that it would do what had to be done in order to restore a sustainable

59
An article in the Economist regarding the devaluation put it in the following terms: “At this point a single question
haunts investors and policymakers alike. Will a Brazilian devaluation precipitate global financial meltdown?
Scarcely three months ago, when markets were at their most jittery, that seemed a strong possibility. Whether it
remains so depends on two other questions: Will Brazil be able to control this devaluation, to regain investor
confidence and to continue with its economic reforms—or will it descend into Asian-style chaos? And will the rest
of the world react calmly or in panic?” (Economist, 1999)

64
situation no matter how stringent those policies had to be. That the government was able to
successfully pass this message and follow through with the promise is not trivial. It was only
made possible by the strong presidential powers which political institutions afford the Executive.
While some analysts ascribe the government’s ability to pass crucial legislation in this period to
an “(a)wareness of the risk of a grave collapse among even intransigent legislators and
governors” (Cardoso and Helwege, 1999: 23) or the realization of the “urgency of Brazil’s fiscal
condition” (The Economist, 1998), closer examination shows that the Executive really had to
resort to its powers in order to assure that the necessary policies got approved and instituted.
One example is the moratoria on Minas Gerais’s debt with the federal government
announced by the governor of the third-largest state in Brazil just a few days after the
devaluation. Other states followed suit, announcing that they too had the intention of
renegotiating their debts. This event created additional uncertainty at a time when the
government’s credibility was at its most vulnerable. The answer was the blocking of all
Constitutional transfers from the federal government to the state, a measure that proved to be
extremely effective in persuading the rebellious governors to get back in line. The ability to
control these transfers to the states is an extremely powerful instrument held by the President and
one that has been actively employed since the devaluation crisis to force the states and
municipios to comply with the new fiscal effort. In fact, these events are part of the federal
government’s successful reform of sub-national fiscal policy, which culminated in the Fiscal
Responsibility Law of 2000, as described in detail in Section 4.1.2. The point here is that once
the exchange-rate anchor was gone and the election had been successfully won, making it no
longer possible or necessary to persist with the unsustainable fiscal behavior of the first term, it
became crucial for the government to make drastic changes that were achieved through the use
of its strong presidential powers. If the Brazilian President had not had such leverage over sub-
national entities, as was the case in Argentina, it would probably not have been possible to deal
so effectively with the crisis.
Other examples of the government’s use of its powers to assure a swift emergence from
the crisis are the approval of important legislation such as pension reform (Alston and Mueller,
2003) and the renewal of a temporary tax (Melo, 2002). These were policies that were seen as
crucial to the new fiscal effort and they had to be forcefully passed through Congress, which
convened extraordinarily for the purpose in the weeks following the devaluation. The case of

65
pension reform involved the imposition of a new tax on the benefits of retired civil servants, a
law that was extremely unpopular and that had been rejected in Congress just a few months
earlier.60 As described by Alston and Mueller (2003), the severity of the situation led the
government to employ all its legislative powers to assure that this time the proposal would not be
defeated. This involved the intense use of patronage and granting of jobs in the federal structure,
on a level even above the usual use of these instruments of persuasion.61 As Melo (2004b) argues,
the fact that the government did not embark on a radical pension reform should be understood
not as a signal of Executive weakness but rather as an example of a cautious policy choice in a
context of high uncertainty. Policy makers reached the conclusion that Brazil’s extremely high
implicit pension debt made the transition costs to such a system a highly risky move, and opted
instead for a parametric reform.
More generally, since the devaluation crisis, the government has consistently set and
reached tough primary surplus targets accorded with the IMF (see Sections 4.1.2 and 4.2). It has
done so by employing all of its presidential powers, and in particular those which give it extreme
control of drafting, approving and executing the budget, to turn Brazil from a country where
fiscal deficits seemed to be endemic, to a country where an unsustainable path to collapse is no
longer being followed, despite some lingering problems.

5.2 Recovering from a Political Shock: The Election of Lula

The model of the Brazilian policymaking process presented here asserts that the country’s
political institutions provide incentives for the President to prioritize macroeconomic stability
over other policies. This implies that whatever an individual’s set of preferences over policy
issues before coming to power (which can be thought of as “ideology”), once in power the
preferences that are acted upon are those shaped by the political institutions.62 The President
realizes that whatever his final objectives, achieving them requires first reaching a minimum

60
Though the Supreme Court would go on to declare this taxing of pensions as unconstitutional at the end of 1999,
the event nevertheless shows the government employing its powers to achieve its new fiscal objectives.
61
Alston and Mueller (2003) analyze pension reform through a model similar to that presented in Appendix 1. The
argument being made here is that in the wake of the devaluation, the government’s utility function changed, making
it more imperative that certain policies be approved. This is represented by a steepening of the government’s utility
curves in Figure 1 in the Appendix or an elongation of its indifference curves in Figure A2 in the Appendix, with the
result that the final policy would be closer to the President’s preferred point and more patronage would be employed
in equilibrium.
62
In the model presented in Figure A1 in the Appendix, the elliptical indifference curves postulated for the President
are shaped by political institutions, such as electoral incentives. On the difference between the treatment of
preferences in economic and political models, see Ordeshook (1986), Chapter 1.

66
level of macroeconomic stability and credibility. A corollary that emerges from this model is that
any President who comes to power will pursue a similar set of “sensible” macroeconomic
policies, irrespective of his ideology.
This section explores the recent change in presidency from Cardoso to Lula in January
2003 as a test of this corollary and other implications of the Brazilian policymaking process. This
event provides a natural experiment that yields insights into the policymaking process and policy
features because of the markedly different political preferences held by each administration.
Whereas previous transitions represented relatively smooth changes in the political positions
held by the President (all on the center-right), the substitution of Cardoso with Lula was a clear
and extreme shift from the right to the left, with Lula and his Workers’ Party (PT) having been
some of the sternest critics of both Cardoso’s policy objectives and his means of reaching them.
The change is illuminating because it holds constant all political institutions and the rules of the
policymaking game, and varies greatly the preferences of some of the major players. This creates
several situations where the nature of political institutions and their effect on the policymaking
process, as well as the effect of that process on the features of policies, become much more
salient. For example, it has been a big surprise to most observers that the Lula government has
pursued many of the main reforms and other policies that were pursued by Cardoso. Particularly
telling has been the decision to focus first on pension reform in basically identical terms as those
undertaken by Cardoso as well as the observation of a strict rectitude in fiscal matters that more
than surpasses the surplus agreed upon with the IMF. These choices represent extreme departures
from everything that Lula and the PT have always preached and represented, and have created
fissures in the party and the governing coalition, as well as antagonized many of the President’s
most important supporting groups, such as unions and civil servants.
It is noteworthy that the test proposed for our model is a particularly tough one. To
expect that a Lula/PT government would come to office after almost 20 years of radical
opposition and make an about-face by adopting the very same policies it criticized for so long, is
no trivial test. Whereas many Brazilian political parties are known to be fickle and lack a clear
programmatic line, this is not the case with the Worker’s Party. Scholars, the public and the press
had viewed the PT as the only true political party in Brazil, with a well-organized grass-roots
base and a clear set of beliefs. Both the press and financial markets expected that Lula would
bring about significant change in policies. Figure 1 shows the Emerging Market Bond Index

67
(EMBI+) for Brazil from December 2001 to February 2004, which provides a measure of
country risk. The Lula effect is easily perceptible. As the election approached and the probability
of his victory increased, country risk more than doubled. The index remained at stratospheric
levels after the election and during the first months of the new President’s term, but converged
towards previous levels as the new government made clear commitments that its macroeconomic
policies would continue along the lines of the previous government. A similar story is told by the
exchange rate (also in Figure 1), which rose sharply several months before the election and only
retreated to a new level at around 3 R$/US$ after the Lula government clearly signaled its
intentions of maintaining stable monetary and fiscal policies.

Figure 1. Country Risk for Brazil during the 2002 Presidential Election

Exchange Rate and Country Risk Brazil Risk

R$/US$

3000 4.5
4
2500
3.5
Country Risk (EMBI+)

R$/US$
2000 3
2.5
1500
2
1000 1.5
1
500
Election Lula takes 0.5
office
0 0
Feb-02

Aug-02

Feb-03

Aug-03

Feb-04
Dec-01

Apr-02

Jun-02

Dec-02

Apr-03

Jun-03

Dec-03
Oct-02

Oct-03

Source: Country Risk: EMBI, J.P. Morgan; Exchange rate: Banco Central do Brasil.

The “credibility shock,” through which the Lula government sought to counter the
markets’ expectations, involved making clear commitments that macroeconomic policy would
remain austere. The first signal was the appointment of Henrique Meirelles as head of the Central
Bank, an appointment endorsed by Arminio Fraga, the former head of the Central Bank under
Cardoso. On the fiscal side, the Lula government voluntarily raised the primary surplus target

68
accorded with the IMF from 3.75 percent to 4.25 percent, quite an unexpected move for a party
that customarily decried the IMF as responsible for many of the country’s problems. In order to
achieve this, Lula cut R$14.1 billion from the budget, affecting all areas of government,
especially social programs. Further evidence of the new government’s responsible fiscal stance
was the increase of interest rates during the first months in office and cautious reductions
thereafter, resisting severe pressure from allies and opposition, as well as business and the media
to undertake bolder reductions. Once again, this responsible management of interest rates
represented an unexpected change in posture for a party that had always been one of the main
voices decrying the perverse effects of high interest rates on economic growth and
unemployment.
Further evidence of the government’s newfound zeal came when it chose pension reform
as its first major policy objective in Congress. The previous government had managed to pass
several changes to the pension system, but halted its attempts to complete the reform when the
Supreme Court declared unconstitutional parts of the changes that were painstakingly pushed
through Congress (Alston and Mueller, 2003; Melo, 2002). This issue was highly contentious as
it involved the need to eliminate acquired rights and entitlements. In fact, the PT had been one of
the main sources of opposition to the previous government’s efforts at reforming the pension
system. Nevertheless, once in power not only did the Lula government re-open pension reform,
but did so along much the same lines as that of the previous government. The unpopular taxation
of the pensions of retired workers, which had been barred by the Supreme Court, was
reintroduced and passed in Congress.63 The Lula government also undertook tax reform in 2003,
though half-heartedly because the government was reluctant to introduce changes that could
reduce its high levels of tax receipts.
According to the model of the Brazilian policymaking process presented here, the
counterpart to sober macroeconomic policies in a context of political and economic shock is the
reduction of expenditures on other types of policies. Here once again the behavior of Lula’s
government in 2003 fits squarely with this analysis. Besides its reputation for ethical integrity,
the PT’s main comparative advantage in the eyes of the electorate had always been its concern
for social issues such as poverty and land reform. The PT had consistently argued that previous

63
Lula appointed three new Supreme Court Justices in 2003, so the reforms have a greater chance of being
considered constitutional by the Court.

69
governments had ruled for the rich and that a Lula government would make ending poverty a top
priority. Once in power, Lula dismantled many of the previous government’s highly successful
social programs and substituted them with new programs with basically the same purpose.64 With
much fanfare and publicity Lula created new ministries (Ministry of Cities, Ministry of
Assistance and Social Promotion, and Ministry of Food Security), new programs and new
campaigns. Nearly a year and a half into the new President’s term, most of these ministries and
programs are in complete oblivion or have been merged.65 Even the much-touted Zero Hunger
Campaign, the centerpiece of the government’s social program, has been slow to produce results
despite massive popular support from individuals, celebrities and businesses voluntarily donating
money and aid to the campaign. As expected by this paper’s analysis, the main cause of this
disappointing performance in the social area is the fact that many of the budget cuts necessary
for achieving the fiscal surplus fell precisely in these areas. Among the ministries suffering the
greatest cuts were those of National Integration (that is, regional policy) and land reform.
The Lula government not only pursued much the same policies as the previous
government, but also did so using many of the same instruments. This is important because the
basic premise of this analysis is that political institutions are crucial determinants of how
politicians undertake political transactions. Since the political institutions remained basically
unchanged, it can be expected that the new government would use the same means to engage in
those transactions as the previous government, despite very different initial preferences
(ideology). This provides another test of the model because the PT had always questioned the
legitimacy and the morality of other governments’ use of strong presidential powers. It first
became apparent that the new government would follow old ways when it quickly forged a broad
coalition in Congress that assured a majority of the seats and thus control over much of the
legislative machinery. In order to achieve a comfortable majority, the government had to reach
far across the spectrum to entice parties, making for strange bedfellows. The consolidation of the
coalition came about when the large but amorphous PMDB joined the coalition after intense
64
Shortly before the change in presidency, Cardoso won a prize organized by the United Nations as the world leader
who most contributed to fighting poverty. One of his government’s most important innovations was to distribute
benefits directly to the beneficiaries through individual bank cards, thus getting around local politicians who
traditionally hijacked most of benefits meant for recipients.
65
One of the problems with the government’s entire social strategy has been a lack of coordination of the various
ministries working on these issues. Interestingly, Spiller, Stein and Tommasi (2003) indicate that in Argentina there
existed the same tendency of each new government to alter social policy, as well as problems of lack of
coordination. This suggests that there may be certain characteristics of political transactions over social policies that
lead to unstable and poorly coordinated (balkanized) policies.

70
negotiation over cabinet positions and other key government jobs, a form of doing politics the PT
always derided. This brought about bizarre situations unimaginable a few years ago, such as
having ex-President Sarney (PMDB), an old enemy, now head of the Senate, become a key
defender of the PT’s interest in Congress. Although this is only to be expected from parties such
as the PMDB, it sits awkwardly with the PT’s reputation. Examples of other controversial
political instruments that the new government wielded as dexterously as the previous one
include: strategic use of congressmen’s individual budget amendments as a currency to buy
support (see Section 3.2); the strategic reshuffling of recalcitrant committee members to assure
approval of its proposals; and a high degree of reliance on decree power, often considered an
undemocratic form of policymaking. The payoff to adopting these institutional but less-than-
noble means was clear: the government did not lose a single important vote in Congress in 2003.
The apparent contradiction of a Lula government resorting to similar ends and means as
previous governments, though no surprise to scholars of political institutions, perplexed not only
much of society, but also the opposition and many of the government’s own allies. Whereas the
opposition faced the dilemma of having the government espouse issues that they themselves
defended, such as pension reform, many of the allies and in particular members of the PT itself
were reluctant to vote for issues they had traditionally opposed. One of the government’s main
political problems has been to deal with friendly fire from within its coalition and from some of
its traditional supporting groups, such as unions and civil servants. After much criticism, the
Lula government expelled four radical members from the PT for voting disobedience as a sign of
the party’s determination and strength. Nevertheless, every time negative economic numbers
surface, such as the lack of growth in 2003 (-0.22 percent), discontent from within the rank arises
(for example from the vice-president and several ministers), and forces the President to reiterate
his resolve to adhere to the current line of economic policy.
There exists in the country a notion that there is a “Plan B” waiting in the wings, which
would be adopted if the costs of the current strategy get too large. That is, if economic growth,
unemployment and living conditions fail to improve, especially as the new presidential election
approaches in 2006, the government may feel inclined to resort to populist policies, relaxing
fiscal policy and accepting higher levels of inflation. Lula, however, has repeatedly denied the
possibility of this scenario. Instead he insists that as economic fundamentals and the
government’s credibility strengthen, and as economic and political shocks permit, the budget

71
constraint will ease and allow greater social spending and economic growth. With the midterm
elections for mayors to be held in Brazil in October 2005, a crucial test for the maintenance of
the current macroeconomic policies is rapidly approaching. If candidates who gave support to the
Lula’s administration meet defeat, especially in the most important municipalities, the costs of
maintaining stable macro and fiscal policies increase, though it is anticipated that Lula will stay
the course despite the temptation to switch to populist appeals.

6. Conclusion
This paper has found that the driving force behind policies in Brazil is the strong set of powers
given to the President by the Constitution of 1988. To have strong powers does not mean
unbridled powers. Several institutions constrain and check the power of the President, in
particular the legislature, the Judiciary, the public prosecutors, the auditing office, the state
governors and the Constitution itself. The electorate of Brazil holds the President accountable for
economic growth, inflation and unemployment. Because of the electoral connection, and perhaps
because of reputational effects, presidents in Brazil have a strong incentive to pursue stable fiscal
and monetary policies as their first priority. At least for the past 10 years and especially during
Lula’s administration, Executive power has been aimed at pushing policy towards macro
orthodoxy. Although orthodoxy may not lead to short-term growth, international financial
markets provide additional incentives for discipline, as deviations are instantly punished with
unfavorable consequences that are readily recognized by the electorate. Achieving stable macro
policies required constitutional amendments as well as considerable legislation. To attain their
goals, the past administrations (Cardoso and Lula in particular) used their property rights to pork
to trade for policy changes. The rationale for members of Congress to exchange votes on policy
for pork is that the electorates reward or punish members of Congress based on the degree to
which pork lands in their district. With the exception of the devaluation of 1999, macro policy
has become more stable over time. Macro policies in Brazil can be characterized as “stable but
adaptable.”
The pursuit of macro orthodoxy comes at a cost; some policies in Brazil are “volatile and
unstable.” This analysis has found volatility and instability in policies that have an ideological
component, such as land reform and poverty alleviation, or whose gains accrue at the
Congressional district level, such as infrastructure projects. The volatility on ideological policies

72
is no surprise and happens most when administrations change. For policies having a local rather
than national impact, the volatility results from spending being based on the residual left in the
budget after the President takes care of hard-wired and pork expenditures. The negative side of
this is that many infrastructure projects (i.e., sanitation and local roads) have fallen into this
residual category.
The Constitution of 1988 is a detailed political document rather than a set of principles. It
has constrained and still constrains policymaking. Its biggest constraint comes from hard-wiring
expenditures in certain policy areas, most importantly those in health and education. The
constraints from the Constitution bind because the Judiciary has been relatively independent in
ruling on issues of constitutionality. This has lead to a perception that the constitutional
amendments will be permanent. Reinforcing the role of the Judiciary is the independent and
increasingly powerful role played by the MP. Public prosecutors have been most active in
enforcing social policies, such as legislation concerning education, health and the environment.
Despite the perception in the press, the power of governors to influence national policies
was found to be relatively weak and becoming weaker. In large part this resulted from the
enforcement of a law on fiscal responsibility. There is still a role played by the state and local
political actors that affects economic performance. Considerable federal and state funds are
diverted from public spending intended for public goods and infrastructure towards campaign
finance. Future research will investigate the role of the courts and auditors’ offices in allowing
corruption (the misuse of public funds for private gain) to persist.
Overall, this paper has painted a relatively rosy picture of the policymaking process in
Brazil. Importantly, pork was found to be a relatively cheap and effective means to ensure stable
but adaptable macro policy. The actions to date of the Lula administration bolster this view. Of
course there are deficiencies, most prominently in the inflexibility of health and education
policies, the volatility of social programs and infrastructure investments, and the persistence of
corruption. But social programs can only be advanced in a permanent fashion once the
government ensures stable macro policy and the confidence of world capital markets. Brazil is
currently in a relatively stable political equilibrium, but this equilibrium can be upset by a
sufficiently large exogenous shock. A shock of sufficient magnitude could tip Brazil back to its
former populist ways.

73
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Appendix 1. A Model of Executive-Legislative Exchange
This description of the Brazilian policymaking process foresees three categories of policies:
macroeconomic policies, pork, and residual policies. In order to show how these policies evolve
as the result of the interaction of the political players under the extant political institutions, a
model is presented here that captures the transactions between the President and his/her coalition
in Congress over a single policy dimension. It is then expanded to include an additional policy
dimension, thus capturing the trade-off between the macroeconomic and residual policy
categories.
Suppose that the horizontal line in Figure A1 represents a single policy dimension, for
example the level of surplus written into the budget. Let P, K and O be the preferred points for
the President, governmental coalition and the opposition respectively. The highest utility is
obtained at the preferred point and declines as the actual policy moves away from that point as
represented by the diagonal lines. The President’s utility is UP(-β|P–x|, C(R)), where β is the
preference intensity, x is the approved policy, R is the amount of patronage provided to the
congressmen, and C(R) is the cost of that patronage. The utility function of coalition party i is
UiK (−α i Ki − x , Vi (Ri )) , where αi is a parameter that measures the intensity of party i’s

preferences regarding policy outcomes, Ri is the amount of patronage received, and Vi(Ri) is a
function that measures the value of the patronage to the party.66 With policy at the status quo
point, SQ, the coalition’s utility is at point I and the President’s at point II. This is a low utility
for the President since the status quo is far from his preferred point. Given the strong presidential
powers discussed earlier, it is assumed that the President has control over the agenda so he is
able to choose which proposals get put to a vote. The President can improve on this situation by
initiating a proposal to move policy to point x0. Because the party’s utility at this point, III, is the
same as at the status quo, I, it will support the proposal.
With policy at x0 the President is better off than at the status quo, an improvement in
utility from II to IV. He doesn’t have to be content with x0, however, because he can use his
control over patronage to try to move policy even closer to P. Suppose, for example, that the
President tried to achieve a policy to the right of x0, such as x1. At this point the coalition would

66
In order to simplify the analysis, assume that the coalition is composed of a single party and has a majority of the
votes in Congress. For a more complete analysis where the coalition is composed on N parties, see Alston and
Mueller (2003).

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receive the utility represented by point VI, which is worse than III, the utility from policy x0, so it
would block the proposal. But by offering patronage, the President can compensate the party for
the loss represented by the vertical distance from III to VI, thus convincing it to pass the proposal
moving policy to x1.
If the trade offered by the President were costless to him, then his utility would pass from
point IV to point VII. However, providing patronage involves a series of costs represented by
the function C(Ri). Figure 1 incorporates the cost of providing patronage as a downward shift in
the President’s utility curve. The more patronage that the President needs to offer to the party for
it to agree to pass the proposal, the greater will be the downward shift in the President’s utility
curve. The magnitudes of the utility loss to the President and the utility gain to the party from the
provision of patronage are determined by the C(Ri) and Vi(Ri) functions, respectively.
Opportunity for gains from trade exist as long as the utility gained from a more preferred policy
by the President is greater than the utility lost from the patronage that he must provide the
coalition to approve that policy.

Figure A1. Political Transactions in One Policy Dimension

O SQ Ki x0 x1 x2 P

I V
III
VI
IX
VII

X
IV VIII
UP(x)
UK(x)

UP(x,C(Rx1))

UP(x,C(Rx2))
II

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 Figure A1 shows the effect of the cost of patronage on the President’s utility. The middle
utility curve for the President includes the cost of pulling the policy from x0 to x1, and the bottom
utility curve includes the cost from x0 to x2. The total gain for the President from moving from x0
to x1 is the vertical distance from IV to VII, although this also entails the cost equivalent to the
vertical distance from VII to X. Therefore, the net gain is the vertical distance from IV to X.
Because this is positive, at least as far right as x1 there are gains from trade to be realized. If the
President opted instead to submit a proposal for policy x2, then he would end up with utility at
VIII, which is slightly worse than IV, the utility he would receive from policy x0. Therefore the
President would not propose the change from x0 to x2. The equilibrium policy would be a point x*
in between x1 and x2, where the marginal benefit of pulling the outcome towards P would equal
the marginal cost of doing so.67
So far, the model has incorporated only two of the three policy categories described
earlier: macroeconomic policies and pork, or patronage. In order to incorporate residual policies,
an additional dimension to the diagram must be added. This is shown in Figure A2 where the
horizontal axis measures macroeconomic policies and the vertical axis measures residual
policies, for example expenditures in anti-poverty policies. Whereas in Figure 1 utility functions
could be shown, in Figure A2 it is only possible to show the indifference curves that portray all
the points that provide equivalent utilities to a given actor. An important element of this analysis
is the assumed shape of the President’s utility function. Assuming that the electoral connection is
such that the President internalizes national goals, his/her indifference curves are drawn as
ellipses, so that the trade-off between macroeconomic policies and residual policies is such that
the former are given a preponderant weight.68 In addition, there is a budget constraint so that
resources used for residual policies cannot be simultaneously used by for macroeconomic
policies.
67
The President’s problem is (assuming K ≤ xo ≤ P):
Max - β ( P - x ) − C ( R ( x )) subject to − α ( K − x ) + V ( R ( x )) ≥ − α ( K − x 0 )
x

The constraint forces the President to compensate the coalition with patronage up to the point where it will be
just as well off in terms of utility as it was at the status quo. It is assumed that VR>0, VRR≤0, CR>0 and CRR≥0. Note
that the President’s choice variable is where he chooses to put the new policy x. The amount of patronage, R(x), is
set so as to satisfy the constraint at that point.
The first order condition is β = CRRx , where β is the marginal benefit to the President from moving the policy
one unit closer to P, and CRRx is the marginal cost. Rx measures how much extra patronage the President must give
the coalition to move policy one unit closer to P, and CR is the cost to the President of that marginal patronage.
68
An example of a functional form with these properties is U(x,y) = -[a1(x1 – y1)2 + a2(x2 – y2)2]1/2, where y1 and y2
are the coordinates of the agents’s preferred point and a1 and a2 are issue weights that give the indifference curves
the elliptical shape. It is assumed that a1 > a2 for the President.

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 The equilibrium policy can be derived similarly to the one-dimensional case. If policy is
at the status quo point, the President can use his agenda power to propose x0 which is indifferent
to the coalition, but will increase the President’s utility from UP(SQ) to UP(x0). Once again the
President can do better than x0. If he proposes a policy even closer to P than x0, yet still
respecting the budget constraint, such as x1, this will make the coalition worse off than at the
status quo, so the coalition can be expected to block the change. However, the President can
offer the coalition patronage to make up the difference between UK(x1) - UK(x0) thus leaving the
coalition just as well of as at x0. This will only be of interest to the President while the marginal
cost of this patronage is lower than the marginal benefit derived from moving the policy closer to
P.

Figure A2. Political Transaction in Two Policy Dimensions

Residual
Policies

SQ K

x0 P
PR UK(x0)
x1
x2
UK(x1)

UP(x0) UP(x2)
Budget
UP(SQ)
UP(x1) Constriant

PM Macroeconomic Policies

If the move from x0 to x1 leaves the President better off, after having compensated the
coalition for losses bellow UK(SQ), then he may try to move policy even closer to P, still
respecting the budget constraint, for example point x2. If this move from x1 to x2 requires
compensation to the coalition whose cost is greater than the utility gain to the President, then the
equilibrium policies will be those represented by x1. The greater the weight given by the
President to macroeconomic policies, the more elongated will be his utility function and
consequently the closer will be the equilibrium policy to his/her preferred level of

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macroeconomic policies. Clearly the shape of the utility function is given by the actors’
preferences and cannot simply be asserted. What this paper argues is that the preferences are
shaped by the political incentives that emanate from the political institutions, such as the
electoral rules. The argument is that the incentives for the President in Brazil are for a primordial
concern of macroeconomic over other policy so that the indifference curves are elongated as in
Figure A2, which leads to an equilibrium outcome where horizontal moves are given more
weight than vertical moves.
The model can also be used to portray the two different categories of residual polices
discussed in the text; volatile and hard-wired. Some policies will tend to be hard-wired so as to
prevent them from being traded-off against macroeconomic policies. Doing so implies fixing the
level of residual policy at a pre-determined level. In this case the model collapses to the one-
dimensional case of Figure 1, where the only choice is the level of macro policies and how much
pork is necessary to achieve it. Those residual policies that are not hard-wired will tend to be
volatile since they are dependant on budgetary conditions. When these conditions are favorable
they are implemented, but are suspended when political or economic shocks endanger the
macroeconomic policies. These policies tend to be volatile because they have a greater
ideological component. This can be represented in Figure A2 by having political incentives such
that any new President’s utility function will tend to have its peak fairly rigidly in the PM range
(macroeconomic policy dimension) whereas there is more leeway in the PR range (residual
policy dimension). In this case each new President will follow similar macroeconomic policies
but will change the non-hard-wired residual policies. Evidence that this representation conforms
to facts of Brazilian politics is presented in the text.

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