Partidos políticos e governadores como determinantes do comportamento legislativo na câmara dos Deputados, 1988-2006

According to a widely held view of Brazilian politics, part of the difficulty Presidents experience in governing the country stems from the fact that national legislators respond to pressures from the States rather than from the national government. Based on the argument, governors use their institutional position not only to influence national debates, but also to determine outcomes via the control they exert over their States' legislative delegations. In this paper we examine an extensive data set composed of all roll-call votes taken in the Chamber of Deputies from 1989 to 2006 in order to separate and evaluate the impact of local pressures on the behavior of national legislators. The data span five Presidencies and four different legislatures and show that, although present, the local influence is weaker than that of the national government in the voting decisions of individual legislators We argue that there are institutional resources that allow the central government to counter the centrifugal pressures exerted by federalism and other aspects of Brazil's current institutional system.