Trading Legislative Seats for National Hegemony in Brazil, 1889-2017

• In Event: Political Parties and Legislatures

Abstract

Did big states really lose in the national political context by accepting legislative underrepresentation? If so, why did they accept the losses? The literature on legislative malapportionment is keen on the small state advantages and big state disadvantages in federal resource allocation, policy biases, and political coalition formation arising from legislative malapportionment. In Brazil, whose political system was modeled after the US example upon the country’s transition to the Republic in 1889, legislative malapportionment in the national congress has been justified to avoid the tyranny of the majority, to reduce the federal disequilibrium, and to rectify enormous inter-regional inequalities in the country. Significant overrepresentation of less populous states and underrepresentation of populous states in both houses of the Congress, which is particularly pronounced in the Senate, has been considered to address these concerns.

However, a puzzle remains as to: Why did powerful states accept the arrangement that was expected to reduce their legislative power? In this paper we argue that large states like Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais traded their legislative seats for their continued national political and economic predominance. The existing studies of malapportionment tend to exclusively focus on the distributions of legislative seats, concluding that those large states have been losers in the federal arrangement. Our approach is to analyze malapportionment in an ampler context, examining the distribution of offices not only in the legislative branch but also in the executive branch. Our unique data on the most important public offices (presidents, vice presidents, ministers, central bank governors, presidents of national banks, and presidents of the lower and upper houses of the congress) in Brazil since 1889 refute the view that large states are the losers and small states are the winners. On the contrary, legislatively underrepresented large states have maintained their hegemony in controlling the most important offices of the country, especially those concerning macroeconomic policy, above and beyond the population equality standard.

Authors

• Taeko Hiroi, The University of Texas at El Paso

• Pedro Neiva, University of Brasilia