Brazilian Political Science Review

40-73

Authors: Marta Arretche

The article analyses the veto power of territorial governments in Brazil, by examining the parliamentary behaviour of state caucuses (bancadas) as well as their institutional veto opportunities when it comes to matters related to sub-national governments’ revenues and decision-making authority over their own taxes, policy responsibilities and expenditures. The “imposition of losses” upon territorial governments characterized legislative production during the 1989-2006 period, even though these decisions were intensely negotiated. The article concludes that the decision-making centralization at the central arenas, the absence of additional veto arenas and the ease with which constitutional amendments may be approved characterize decision-making on federal issues in Brazil. Furthermore, state caucuses (bancadas) do not act as collective players, since they vote divided along party lines. These institutional factors limit the veto power of territorial governments in Brazil.

108-136

Authors: André Borges

Research on Brazilian federalism and state politics has focused mainly on the impact of federal arrangements on national political systems, whereas comparative analyses of the workings of state political institutions and patterns of political competition and decision-making have often been neglected. The article contributes to an emerging comparative literature on state politics by developing a typology that systematizes the variation in political competitiveness and the extent of state elites’ control over the electoral arena across Brazilian states. It relies on factor analysis to create an index of “electoral dominance”, comprised of a set of indicators of party and electoral competitiveness at the state level, which measures state elites’ capacity to control the state electoral arena over time. Based on this composite index and on available case-study evidence, the article applies the typological classificatory scheme to all 27 Brazilian states. Further, the article relies on the typological classification to assess the recent evolution of state-level political competitiveness. The empirical analysis demonstrates that state politics is becoming more competitive and fragmented, including in those states that have been characterized as bastions of oligarchism and political bossism. In view of these findings, the article argues that the power of state political machines rests on fragile foundations: in Brazil’s multiparty federalism, vertical competition between the federal and state governments in the provision of social policies works as a constraint on state bosses’ machine-building strategies. It is concluded that our previous views on state political dynamics are in serious need of re-evaluation.

25-52

Authors: Sonia Camargo

In this article, I propose to examine the issue that at present most mobilizes the European states and public opinion within them: the modification of the insti- tutional-political model, in the form of a Constitutional Treaty for Europe, requir- ing parliamentary or popular ratification by its twenty-five member States, within a period that remains undecided. Events surrounding the consultation proposed to the European governments and their citizens, indicate – particularly if we take into account the negative votes in France and Holland, and others that may yet occur – that the European Union is divided, raising the concern that its process of regional integration could suffer interruption or even reversal. My analysis of the reasons European citizens and European states find themselves divided, with em- phasis on those that separate the bureaucracy in Brussels from the EU’s citizens and national governments, will revolve on two basic axes: the enlargement of the EU, recently grown from fifteen states to twenty-five, and the transformation of the EU’s political-institutional model, which in securing itself to a constitutional anchor modifies both symbolically and substantively the degrees of sovereignty and autonomy of Europe’s numerous political actors. So doing, this analysis will seek support in theoretical currents that, stimulated by the importance and singu- larity of the process of European construction, have been brought to bear on the examination of the political instruments and procedures involved, their determi- nants, and their consequences. Beginning with the matter of enlargement, this article will look at the recurrent problems arising from admission of the ten new member countries from the Center and East of the continent – that is, the “other Europe” – formally incorporated in May 2004, and at the decisive weight this had in the decision to formulate a Constitution for Europe. Arriving thus at my second topic, I will reconstruct the debate between a “Europe-Union of States” and a “Super-State Europe,” discussing issues directly connected to this classic dichotomy – democracy, legitimacy, formation of a collective identity, division of sovereignty, and others – which, having direct impact on European citizens, will determine the acceptance or rejection of what is being proposed to them in the Constitutional Treaty.

70-101

Authors: Yan Carreirão

The article investigates some of the most relevant factors for the voting de- cision in the 2002 presidential election by testing some of the main hypotheses about electoral behaviour in the country by means of logistic regression analyses based on data from the ESEB (Brazilian Electoral Study), a post-electoral survey conducted on a national sample of voters. In the models, taken as a whole, politi- cal opinions did not have much weight in the voting decision. Furthermore, they are unable to “explain” a very large share of voters’ positioning on a left-right scale or on a scale of voters’ “party sentiments”. All these “political” variables taken as a whole, in turn, “explain” only part of the evaluations that voters make of the government’s performance. The analysis shows that Brazilian voters’ voting deci- sion seems rather varied, since some variables were shown to be relevant to “ex- plain” the vote for a candidate, but not for the others. The variables shown to be more frequent (for all four candidates analysed) and with more considerable weight were: voters’ religion, their “party sentiments”, their positioning on a left-right scale, the evaluations made of the then current government (in actual fact impor- tant only for the vote for Serra, the government’s candidate) and the candidates’ attributes (especially “reliability” and “preparedness/competence”).

125-135

Authors: Jairo Nicolau

The 2002 elections were a watershed in Brazilian electoral history. Three aspects of the process in particular have been amply stressed in several analyses. The first is the symbolic dimension of Lula’s personal victory, the biography of a man of the people who rises to the country’s most important office. The second is the victory of PT, the main leftwing party in the country, winning federal office 22 years after being founded. The third is the dimension of the victory, with the president obtaining a resounding vote (61% of the valid votes), which surpassed that of any other Brazilian president since 1945. Despite this, the efforts made by political science to analyse the 2002 elections remain limited, in articular regarding the use of opinion poll results.