Presidential Decree-Making in Brazil for Divergent Policy Goals

• In Event: The Presidency and Unilateral Action

Abstract

In the present article, we develop a comprehensive analysis of presidential decree-making in Brasil by taking jointly the legislative and administrative unilateral decisions of the chief executive. The constitutional delegation of wider powers bases the vast discretion of the President in the law and policy-making processes in Brazil. Agenda-setting prerogatives – such as legislative initiative, decree and veto power, urgency provision - offer crucial incentives to Brazilian presidents to control the legislative agenda and motivate parties to take part in presidentially-led coalitions. Administrative powers give them the discretion to define the proper implementation of laws and enable the president to distribute budgets, (re)design executive portfolios and agencies, and politicize the ministerial positions administratively.

Studies on the executive toolbox highlight the strategic moves of the presidents, of what the president can do, but little is known about how they do it. The power to issue provisional measures (MPs), a type of decree having the force of law, is seen as the keystone resource available to Brazilian presidents.

Scholarly literature on presidential decree-making in Brazil mostly rates agenda powers as coalition goods, while administrative powers are rated as supplementary ways for the president to placate undercompensated parties and keep tabs on the overcompensated parties. To a large extent, this literature assumes that administrative decrees are less valuable to legislatively powerful presidents. However, little is known about whether presidents pursue different policy goals by choosing which type of decree, legislative or administrative, to issue. Constitutional constraints inform this choice. However, presidents have large discretion to shape their unilateral decisions. We assume that a costly ruling coalition works as an incentive to the president in any attempt to “presidentialize” the governing agenda. One way to do that is to resort to administrative decrees that do not require approval by a majority in both chambers of the Congress. In our model, we expect divergence in the policy goals pursued by legislative and administrative decrees; we also expect a high level of divergence when presidents face a hostile congress and lead a costly ruling coalition.

To model the policy goals pursued through the use of legislative (provisional measures) and administrative decrees, we use an unsupervised machine learning technique (structural topic models - STM) to uncover he topics of both presidential decrees, and to demonstrate that presidential attention lies in a great variety of policy areas with different potential goals driving their behavior. Based on the textual analysis done using the STM, we estimate the topics covered in all decrees and estimate a topic prevalence for each document and differentiated decrees. Making use of document metadata (document-level covariates) such as presidential mandate, type of decree, size of legislative opposition, and coalition costs, we can better estimate the topical prevalence and improve the overall quality of estimated topics. We use a novel and large dataset of legislative and administrative decrees, taking advantage of online repositories when available or using web scraping routines, that have been issued by Brazilian presidents. This dataset contains presidential decrees issued by seven presidents from 1990 to 2022. The initial findings support our hypotheses, providing evidence that presidential decree-making in Brazil makes use of both types of decrees, legislative and administrative. In particular, we find evidence that presidents facing hostile Congresses and leading costly coalitions have incentives to “presidentialize” their agenda by resorting to unilateral administrative decisions.

Authors

• Magna Inácio, Federal University of Minas Gerais

• Filipe Recch, University of Pittsburgh