why does the Brazilian President veto bills proposed by herself?

Vetoes and agenda: why does the Brazilian President
veto bills proposed by herself?
Danilo Buscatto Medeiros
Univeristy of Virginia
Thirty Years of Democracy in Brazil: A Research Workshop
April 20, 2015
Abstract
The Brazilian Constitution authorizes the President to introduce bills and also to
veto partially (line-item) or totally the bills the legislature pass. Both prerogatives
have been largely used since the Constitution was enacted in 1988. The success and
dominance of the executive on legislative outcome can be partially explained by the
existence of both constitutional powers. The paradigmatic case is the legislation vetoed by the Brazilian President that was initiated by herself. To explain this puzzle,
this paper focuses on the role of the rapporteur, the actor who can be decisive in
negotiating modifications within the legislature. The policy preferences of the rapporteur are hypothesized as critical to the legislative outcome. The expected action of a
rapporteur who does not share the preferences with the President is the tentative to
approximate the bill to her own ideal point, which might result in a presidential veto.
The preliminary analysis points out that this argument does not hold. The spatial
distance between the President and the rapporteur is not associated with the incidence
of veto. Rapporteurs are important to the decision-making process, but as channels
for bargains on amendments. Vetoes are used by the President to promote coalition’s
goals that were not achieved in the legislature.
Introduction
The legislative powers of the executive are critical features of presidential democracies. The
constitutional prerogatives available to presidents define how they interact with legislatures
and whether gridlock is a threat to the regime stability. The capacity to initiate bills and
to veto partially (line-item) or totally the legislation passed in the Congress are crucial to
governability. The prerogative to propose bills reinforce the role of the president as an
agenda-setter in the law-making process. The veto power constrains the legislators to take
into account the presidential preferences when passing legislation, resulting in moderation
regarding the possibility of presidential veto. In systems where both prerogatives are guaranteed to the president, a bill may be initiated and - after passing in the legislature - vetoed
by the executive. In fact, this puzzling situation is more common than one would imagine.
For instance, in Brazil since the enactment of the constitution 23% of the bills initiated by
the president were vetoed.
Why do presidents veto bills proposed by themselves? This paper proposes a research agenda
to assess this political phenomenon. I analyze the Brazilian case aiming to offer an explanation for the vetoes which seriously take into account the decision-making process, the relationship between the President and Congress and the coalition management. Committees
play an important role in formating the legislation. The rapporteurs designated to evaluate
each bill have power to influence the committee decision (which can be a final report to
the floor indicating rejection or approval with or without modifications on the original bill)
and also the floor decision (by defending amendments before the other congressmen). The
rapporteur is an institutional channel to promote negotiations within the coalition (multiple
preferences are represented) and among parties of the coalition and the opposition.
Giving this scenario I develop the following hypothesis for the Brazilian case: the closer the
preferences of the rapporteur and the president, the lower the likelihood of the legislation
being vetoed by the latter. The argument is that when the spatial distance is high, the
rapporteur works to push the legislature to approve amendments that is considered by the
president and the government coalition as unacceptable. As a consequence of this kind of
1
modification in the original bill, the president reacts vetoing the legislation - it works as
a damage control. By contrast, when the spatial distance is low, the rapporteur works to
preclude modifications on the committee and on the floor, considerably decreasing the chance
of a presidential veto.
Preliminary results suggest that the hypothesis do not hold. The spatial distance does not
seem to be relevant to the legislative outcome. However, the results also indicate that bills
tend to be vetoed when they are amended in the legislature. By now, one answer could be
that the rapporteur plays a decisive role in this moment, which is related to the occurrence
of veto. We need a better understanding of how (and which) amendments are approved in
order to offer a complete explanation on presidential vetoes in presidential bills.
1
Vetoes and agenda
A general statement about the strategic interaction between political actors when making
laws is that the existence of presidential veto power forces the legislators to consider the
preferences of the executive when passing legislation, resulting in moderation. In the scenario
where the legislators do not have complete information about the preferences of the President,
veto occurs when the Congress does not correctly anticipate what are the boundaries for the
presidential acceptance. The interaction can be more complicated whereas vetoes are a
sequential game and political actors learn with each others actions (Cameron, 2000).
Considering that the focus of my investigation is the vetoed bills initiated by the President,
it is given that the legislators can assume that the preferences is around the position of
the original bill. When analyzing the Brazilian case it is important to take into account
the flexibility and strength of the veto prerogative. As Shugart and Carey (1992, p. 134)
stress, the line-item veto is more powerful and flexible than the total veto once it allows the
President to interpose just the parts of the legislation that she disapproves - hence, the cost
of a partial veto is lower.
Vetoes do occur in Brazil. One may say that the legislators do not always anticipate the
2
preferences of the President. An alternative explanation is that the whole process - from
the introduction of the bill to the presidential decision to veto or not - is not characterized
by the conflict between Executive and Legislative, but it is the tentative to aggregate the
preferences of the majority around a common negotiated agenda (Figueiredo and Limongi,
2009). My argument is that the rapporteur (“relator”) plays a key role in organizing the
bargaining and his position is decisive to the legislative outcome (i.e. how distant the policy
is moved from the position of the President), which, in turn, affects the likelihood of a
presidential veto.
Therefore, this paper aims to address the following hypothesis: in the policy-making process,
the closer the preferences of the rapporteur of a bill proposed by the President are to the
President’s preferences, the lower the likelihood of the legislation being vetoed by her. The
dependent variable indicates whether the bill initiated by the President was vetoed by herself.
The independent variable is the spatial distance between the President’s and the rapporteur’s
preferences. The idea implicit in the hypothesis above is that a change in the distance
between the two political actors mentioned will affect the likelihood of a presidential veto.
The semantic definitions and the operationalization of both variables will be discussed in an
appropriate section bellow.
The proposed hypothesis can be applied to any separation of powers system where the
President has constitutional veto power and members of Congress are designated to work as
rapporteurs. However, regarding the motivation of this research - why do Presidents use the
veto power on bills initiated by themselves? - the scope of my hypothesis is bounded by two
factors: (1) the constitution has to authorize the President to veto and to propose ordinary
bills, and (2) the legislative process define that rapporteurs have a positive power.
The former basically restricts the scope of my hypothesis to a reduced number of countries.
According to Shugart (2008) Presidential democracies exist almost exclusively in the Americas (Cyprus, Indonesia, Philippines, South Korea, Benin, Ghana, Malawi and Nigeria are
some of the exceptions). Furthermore, strong presidential agenda power (the Executive’s capacity to direct influence the law-making process, introducing bills and changing the timing
od the legislative process, for example) is a fundamental characteristic of Latin American
3
separation of powers systems (Aleman and Tsebelis, 2005).
The second source of limitation, the existence of a rapporteur system, is even more restrictive. In general, rapporteurs are members of legislative committees selected to analyze bills,
debate their content, and legal and financial issues with other relevant actors (i.e., representatives in general, members of the Federal administration, interest groups, unions and other
organized groups), collect amendments and present a final report informing the committee if
she concluded that the bill should be rejected, approved as originally proposed or approved
with modifications - in this case, the rapporteur can add the amendments introduced by
other congressmen or reformulate the project with her own modifications. The committee
has the option to approve or not the report. The rapporteur may also have a role in the
debate on the floor, presenting his analysis of the bill to all members of Congress. In short,
although rapporteurs cannot control the agenda, they are endowed with powers to influence
whether the bill will become law and to what extent it will be modified.
Hence, rapporteurship is not an institution present in every legislature. However, our knowledge is limited about this institution because it does not exist in the American Congress
and the British Parliament: “The rapporteur has no direct parallel in the Anglo-American
experience but is a prominent device in the EP and many European legislatures, including
the Camera dei Deputati (Italy), the Bundestag (Germany), the Nationalrat (Austria), the
Tweede Kamer (Netherlands), the Chambre des Reprsentants (Belgium), and the Scottish
Parliament” (Yoshinaka, Mcelroy and Bowler, 2010, p. 458). Moreover, the literature about
this issue is limited to the European Parliament (Benedetto, 2005; Daniel, 2013; Hurka, 2013;
Kaeding, 2005; Yoshinaka, Mcelroy and Bowler, 2010). In general, this literature concludes
that rapporteurs are critical political actors within the European Parliament (EP) in shaping
the legislative outcome. The powers to draft reports on proposed legislation and negotiate
across political groups are the keys to understand the importance of the rapporteurs in the
EP policy-making. For now, the limited knowledge about rapporteurships in presidential
systems bounds our abilities to test the hypothesis to other countries than Brazil. However,
what do we know about Brazilian policy-making process?
In a nutshell, Brazil is a presidential multiparty system where the Executive is endowed
4
with agenda powers and the legislative process is concentrated in the hands of the speakers
and the party leaders. On the one hand, the President has constitutional prerogatives to
introduce ordinary bills, to request urgency to this bills, to veto totally and partially and
she is the only actor that is authorized to publish decree-law (“Medidas Provisorias”) and
to introduce the budgetary legislation (which can be changed by the legislative). On the
other hand, the ordinary legislative work is organized in two-steps: committees analyze the
bill and present a report indicating its approval or rejection1 ; if the decision is to support
the approval, the bill goes to the floor to be discussed and voted. This process occurs in
both houses, the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate. Nevertheless, the agenda is
determined by the speaker and the party leaders. They decide which committee will analyze
each bill and they also define the timing for modifications and discussion. Some bills are
never voted in the floor because those actors simply do not put them on the agenda. Party
leaders control offices and positions in the Congress. The combination of a strong president
that distributes offices in order to form a coalition in a highly fragmented political system
with a centralized legislative process guarantees stability and governability (Figueiredo and
Limongi, 1999, 2000). Hence, Brazil is a paradigmatic case of coalitional presidentialism
(Cheibub and Limongi, 2010).
That being said, one question has to be answered: what is the role of rapporteurs in Brazilian
policy-making? In short, “the committee’s rapporteur (‘relator’) is assigned the task of
collecting amendments and making a legislative recommendation. Rapporteurs incorporate
proposed amendments (their own as well as those proposed by other legislators)” and present
a final report to the committee or in some cases (especially when urgency is requested to the
bill) an oral report is made directly on the floor. Although other actors have mechanisms
to undermine the power of the rapporteur (i.e., the speaker and the political leaders control
the agenda), the latter can exert a decisive role controlling the modification process (Freitas,
Medeiros and Moura, 2008; Freitas, 2010). This power does not prevent other amendments
to be approved, but reduces their chances in a system of asymmetric information. Thus, we
build on the hypothesis developed by Hurka (2013, p. 279) for the European Parliament:
1
Another possibility is to simply do not make any decision until another actor, as the speaker for example,
request some action on that bill.
5
“Amendments of regular committee members are more likely to get adopted if they do not
have to compete with an amendment tabled by the rapporteur”. The distribution of powers
in the Brazilian Congress and the results for the policy-making in the European Parliament
provide basis to believe that despite the fact that Brazil is characterized by a centralized
legislative process, rapporteurs are important for the legislative outcome and the other actors
pay attention in their decisions and actions.
In some extent this work aims to discuss with a broad literature in the legislative studies field
regarding an important distinction about decision-making processes. On one hand, in decentralized systems the committees are the political actors responsible for the agenda-setting.
In this type of institutional arrangement the committees have the capacity and autonomy
to redefine the content of the policies and they also have prerogatives to exert veto power in
the legislative bargaining. On the other hand, in centralized decision-making processes the
majority leader (or the majority party, or the leader of the government coalition) assumes
this position. Party leaders are the actors responsible to organize the legislative agenda
and to identify the timing to modify the bills and the legislation. In centralized decisionmaking processes, the committees do not play a decisive role once party control is the key
for legislative outcome. Having said that, it seems that presidential systems with centralized
decision-making processes are not contemplated by the theoretical models. This is manifest
even in the work of Cox and McCubbins (1993, 1994) in which the President is not the
agenda-setter, but parties control the legislative actions by means of the committees.
The results for the Brazilian case could be useful to offer insights about the reasons of presidential veto in multi-party presidential systems, especially in Latin America - as Aleman
and Schwartz (2006) remember “[f]amous for their long lists of presidential powers and their
elaborate bill-to-law procedures, the constitutions of Latin America all allow the President
to veto bills passed by Congress.”. The literature about why vetoes occur in multiparty
separation of powers systems is growing, but it is still limited by the same explanatory
variables: partisan affinities of the President and Congress and levels of significance of legislation. We are proposing a different hypothesis that can shed light in the study of the
executive-legislative relations and also in the literature about coalition management. We
6
intend to do this analyzing vetoes in a critical situation - when Presidents veto legislative
outcome which was initiated by herself. We follow (Palanza and Sin, 2014, p. 767) in the
understanding that “vetoes are a crucial bargaining element in separation of power systems,
influencing the complex relationship between the President and Congress”. That’s the main
reason to study presidential vetoes with the goal to assess the broad policy-making process.
The idea is to offer explanations for the vetoes within the legislative process. We developed
a hypothesis that focus in the affinities of the President and the rapporteurs.
To sum up, the argument elaborated is that when the spatial distance between the rapporteur
and the President is high, the former works to push the legislature to approve modifications
on the original bill which will be considered unacceptable or undesired by the President and
the government coalition. As a consequence of this kind of alteration in the Executive’s
initiative, the President reacts vetoing (line-item or totally) the legislation - it works as a
damage control that the President may have to set once the legislation passes. By contrast,
when the spatial distance is low, the rapporteur works to preclude modifications on the
committee and on the floor, considerably decreasing the chance of a presidential veto.The
assumption made here is that the Executive introduces bills close to her preferences and
the rapporteurs, given their crucial position, work to approximate the legislation in the
direction of their ideal points. However, the rapporteurs are constrained by the possibility
of a presidential veto and by the actions of party leaders. The rapporteurs have to take into
account the preferences represented on the floor. Although they are critical to the bargain
process and control some resources to negotiate amendments and influence other legislators’
positions, the floor commonly makes the final decision.
1.1
Who are the rapporteurs?
It is necessary to know how legislators are selected to work as a rapporteur. Formally, the
committee chair is responsible for choosing who will be the rapporteur. However, the factors
influencing the chair’s decision are almost unknown. The work of Santos and Almeida (2005)
concludes that the expertise of a legislator in a specific area is decisive to her selection as
rapporteur of a bill in the same area. They also demonstrate that when the President is
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the bill’s author and the chair of the committee is member of a party that is not in the
government coalition, she chooses a rapporteur whose ideal point is far (but not too far)
from the median of the coalition. However, they do not explain how the decision is made
- i.e., whether the chair take the decision by herself or other political leaders negotiate the
designation with the chair. The dependent variable in the study of Santos and Almeida
(2005) is the number of bills in which each legislator worked as a rapporteur. Thus, they
are not explaining the reason why a legislator is selected as a rapporteur, but why some
legislators are selected more frequently than others.
The idea that the chair of the committee randomly selects a legislator to work as a rapporteur
seems implausible. The chair of the committee is also selected and this process can encompass
another chain of factors and interactions. Although the chair of each committee is elected
every year, the party leaders previously bargain the chairs.
The most important finding made by Santos and Almeida (2005) is that at least in some
cases, the position of the legislator is important to her designation as a rapporteur of a bill
initiated by the Executive. The chair selects the rapporteur because of her position and this
decision is motivated by the role that the rapporteur may have in the legislative outcome.
Although we need to know more about the rapporteur selection process, endogeneity seems
a real threat.
Moreover, if Santos and Almeida (2005) were correct there is a considerable probability
of bias in the direction of high levels of spatial distance (at least when the chair of the
committee is a member of the opposition). On the other hand, if the President’s (direct or
indirect) participation in the rapporteur selection could be confirmed, the bias probably have
another direction: low spatial distance, once the President would work to have rapporteurs
that would not threaten her intentions regarding that bill. We still need more literature to
improve our knowledge on this issue.
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2
Concept Formation and Measurement
In this section I discuss the theoretical constructs of the research hypothesis presented above
and I explain how they are operationalized.
2.1
Presidential veto
The concept of presidential veto is defined as the constitutional right of the President to
not enact - or in some systems, to partially enact - a bill approved by the legislature. Our
conceptualization build on the definition of Aleman and Schwartz (2006, 100) “A veto is
a formal act of rejection, in effect a contrary vote. So a presidential veto is a vote by the
President against a bill that has been passed by the legislative branch but not yet enacted
though enactment was a presidential option”.
The operationalization of this concept is straightforward: the indicator of presidential veto
is a dichotomous variable that points out the final decision of the President for each bill that
the legislature passed. The President has three options: full enactment, partial enactment
(line-item veto) or total rejection. President is here interpreted not as an individual but as
the Executive’s chief. Thereafter, if the President A proposes one bill that is vetoed by the
President B, I classify this bill as initiated and vetoed by the President herself.
To be clear: I’m collapsing partial and total vetoes in the same category (vetoed). I’m
aware that they can have different implications to the legislative bargaining in multiparty
separation of power systems and the President may have different reasons to resort to one
or the other (Aleman and Schwartz, 2006; Tsebelis and Aleman, 2005; Palanza and Sin,
2014). However, total vetoes in bills initiated by the Brazilian President are rare events. We
just have eight total vetoes since 1988 and te last one was in 1995, during the first year of
Cardoso’s administration. Moreover, I am not interested in evaluating the motivations that
lead the President to resort to one type of veto or to the other; my goal is to test what can
affect the likelihood of veto in general.
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2.2
Spatial distance and preferences
Spatial distance is the theoretical construct that backs the independent variable of this study.
The concept of spatial distance is defined as the difference between two actors’ preferences - in
my case, the President and the rapporteur. Thus, preferences are conceptualized as summary
of the choices made (and also the potential choices on future or hypothetical decisions) by
an actor over policy alternatives. For instance, actors who have close preferences will choose
the same alternative in almost all policy decisions; by contrast, actors who have distant
preferences will frequently choose divergent alternatives. This definition assumes that these
preferences can be measured and compared.
Preferences are operationalized here as ideal points, which will be estimated using roll calls.
In any given roll call each legislator will decide her vote comparing the distance of the
two alternatives, ”yay” or ”nay”, to her most preferred policy (Zucco Jr. and Lauderdale,
2011). This definition is rooted in the spatial model of voting, which assumes that policy
alternatives can be represented as points in a Euclidean space and political actors choose
between these alternatives based on a defined position (Enelow and Hinich, 1984; Hinich and
Munger, 1997).This allows us to localize actors in the space and compare positions. Spatial
models assume that actors have single-peakedness preferences, namely only one alternative
will be the most preferred one. Thus, this decision can be interpreted as a point in a space.
This point is the ideal point. With the information of each decision is possible to form a
spatial map that summarizes the votes. Ideal point estimation using roll calls is a statistical
method, which means that although it is assumed that legislators will choose the closer
alternative to their position it is also assumed that voting is probabilistic (Poole, 2005). In
other words, the legislative behavior in real world roll calls has a stochastic component and
the ideal point is an estimator of that behavior.
This idea of an ideal point that summarizes the policy positions of a legislator is embedded
in the belief system proposed by Converse (1964, p. 207): “a configuration of ideas and
attitudes in which the elements are bound together by some form of constraint or functional
interdependence”. Poole and Rosenthal (1985) build on Converse’s concept to theorize that
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once one know how a legislator voted in a couple of roll calls it is possible to predict how
the same legislator will behavior in other issues.
To estimate the ideal points I adopt the Optimal Classification (OC) method (Poole, 2000,
2005; Rosenthal and Voeten, 2004), which is different from the parametric methods, as the
more famous W-NOMINATE (Poole and Rosenthal, 1985, 1997), because it maximizes the
correct classification of the legislative choices. As argued by Rosenthal and Voeten (2004,
622), “the optimal classification method does not rely on distributional assumptions about
errors to uncover metric information from binary roll-call data. The optimal classification
method seeks to find ideal points for legislators and separating hyperplanes for roll calls such
that the number of classification errors is minimized. A classification error for a legislator on
a roll call occurs when the legislator’s ideal point is such that his or her vote is inconsistent
with the separating hyperplane for the roll call”. The following steps describe how OC
method works (Poole, 2005):
1. Generate starting values for the legislators, the Xi , from an eigenvalue eigenvector
decomposition of the legislator-by-legislator agreement score matrix.
2. Given the Xi , find the optimal estimates of the normal vectors, the Nj .
3. Given the Nj , find the optimal estimates of the Xi .
4. Go to step 2.
Comparing choices of each legislator in each roll call it is possible to summarize each position
in a multidimensional map. Each dimension varies from -1 to 1 and legislators receive an
estimate in each of them. It is important to assert that I will use the ideal point estimated
for the first dimension. In the Brazilian Congress one-dimension correctly classify around
90% of the votes, and the addition of a second dimension does not significantly improve the
model (Leoni, 2002; Freitas, Izumi and Medeiros, 2013).
Therefore, my independent variable measures the difference of the ideal point of the rapporteur and the government leader (a legislator selected by the government coalition to represent
its interests within the legislative). Giving the impossibility to estimate the President’s an
ideal point comparable with the legislators’ - since she does not vote - I followed Leoni (2002)
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and used the position of the government leader as a proxy of how the President behavior in
the legislative. We are considering the government leader as an institutional position and
not as an individual. This is possible for two reasons: leaders can be changed during the
presidential term and they also indicates a vote as the government leader (this indication
does not count as a vote, it is just a signaling of which is the government coalition position
on that issue).
It is important to make clear that spatial distance is not an indicator of the agreement or
disagreement between the rapporteur and the government leader in each bill I selected to
analyze. This would be possible only if every bill has a recorded voted on the floor, which is
not the case. In turn, spatial distance is a measure of the difference of the general behavior
of these two actors expressed in roll calls.
As noted by Clinton (2012, p. 80) “Roll calls appear to offer an ideal opportunity for measuring the preferences of political elites because I observe elites registering their individual
support on many proposed policies”. That’s an important advantage of estimating ideal
points based on roll calls: the outcome is based on real choices about policies alternatives
and not on hypothetical situations.
Ideal points estimations produced by roll call analysis does not have a direct and obvious meaning. To identify and interpret what the ideal point represents is a task to be
performed by the researcher and this can vary from each legislative setting (Poole, 2001;
Clinton, 2012). What does explain the legislative behavior expressed by voting in Congress?
The pioneer research about the ideal points in the United States showed that ideology, the
liberal-conservative continuum, describes the ideal points in the first dimension (Poole and
Rosenthal, 1997). In Brazil the substantive meaning of the political space revealed by roll
call analyses is under dispute. Ideology was the first interpretation offered to the ideal points
in the Chamber of Deputies Leoni (2002). More recent studies, however, demonstrated that
the division between government and opposition is a better fit for the ideal points estimated
(Zucco Jr., 2009; Freitas, Izumi and Medeiros, 2013). In short, the correlation between
the ideal points and the percentage of votes that legislators cast following the government
guidelines is high. In a study combining roll call analysis with survey data, Zucco Jr. and
12
Lauderdale (2011, p. 391) argue that “there exists a single ideological dimension in Brazilian politics, but the analysis of legislative behavior suggests that the government-opposition
dynamic constitutes an important non-ideological aspect of political conflict”. But at the
same time they assert that both dimensions tend to overlap, which means that it is difficult
to separate the position in the left-right scale from the support (or lack of support) given to
the government appeal.
The interpretation of ideal point estimates could be complicated, especially if other motivations rather than preferences over policy alternatives take particular votes. Rosenthal
and Voeten (2004, p. 620) identify five sources of problems if one estimates ideal points
using parametric methods (as the W-NOMINATE): “variation in discipline across parties,
unstable party memberships, proxy voting, near perfect two-dimensional spatial voting, and
parliamentary institutions that provide incentives for strategic voting”. In the Brazilian case,
party-switching and strategic behavior (i.e., incentives and constraints offered by parties and
government that affect the votes) could lead a legislator to “cast votes for reasons other than
the relative proximity of the alternative to the legislator’s most-preferred policy” (Clinton,
2012, p. 83).
In sum, ideal point as an operational definition seems to overlap with the theoretical construct. The former as the estimator of the combination of the most preferred policy alternatives and the latter defining preferences as a map of the choices made by political actors.
The idea that both the ideal point and the preferences can be used to predict future behavior
of the political actor results in a approximation of them. However, since it is possible that
ideal points reflect other factors than preferences over policy alternatives, the correspondence
between the construct and the indicator may be threatened. Nevertheless, the interpretation
of the Brazilian political dimension as the division between government and opposition does
not represent a big problem, because it is still measuring the choices made - my goal is not
to measure the “true” and static preferences, but to estimate the public positions taken by
political actors. In the Brazilian case this means that legislators whose parties are members
of the government coalition cast votes, in general, supporting the government. More problematic is the possibility that a legislator take a decision in a roll call regarding the risk of
13
being punished by her party.
To minimize this problem I estimated the ideal points with a nonparametric method, the
Optimal Classification, which does not make any assumption about the distribution of errors
and the utility function underlying parametric models. As I have mentioned above, OC
minimize the errors of the estimative. In other words, its robustness “to the stochastic nature
of the data makes it [OC] an ideal candidate for studying strategic behavior in legislatures”
(Rosenthal and Voeten, 2004, p. 620).
3
Data Analysis
In this research I am recurring to the Brazilian Legislative Database organized by the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (“Banco de Dados Legislativos - CEBRAP”). This
dataset contain information on both roll calls and lawmaking. Before describing the variables used in this preliminary study, I alert that some simplifications were made. First, only
information about the decision-making process in the Chamber has been considered. Bills
initiated by the Executive always begin in the Chamber. The inclusion of data about the
Federal Senate has to be better planned and developed. Moreover, the Senate works just
as reviewer and tends to approve what passed in the Chamber. Second, only one rapporteur/committee for each bill is considered. This decision was made to simplify our analysis
and also to capture the action of the most important rapporteur, the one that is designated
by the committee which area of expertise is related to the bill. Other two constitutional and
financial committees evaluate each bill and their reports are technical.
3.1
Variables
Among all bills initiated in the Brazilian Congress, my selection of cases includes bills introduced by the President (the goal of this research is to understand Executive-Legislative
relations regarding presidential prerogatives) that passed in the legislature (thus, the President can decide to use or not her veto power). I analyze all 627 bills initiated by the President
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and passed by the legislative since the first year of the new constitution (1989) and the end
of the last presidential term (2010). I consider the following variables in my study.
The dependent variable is the existence of presidential veto in the bill. It is coded as 0
(the President enacted the bill) and 1 (the President vetoed the bill). As we can see in the
Table 1 bellow the distribution of bills per President is very similar (except for Sarney),
but the proportion of vetoes dramatically decreased. Collor vetoed almost 40% of the bills
included in the analysis.
Table 1: Distribution
President
Sarney
Collor
Franco
Cardoso
Cardoso II
Lula
Lula II
Total
of bills enacted and vetoed by President
Enactments Vetoes Total
25
3
28
58
38
96
62
20
82
96
24
120
73
30
103
79
15
94
90
14
104
483
144
627
Source: Brazilian Legislative Database - CEBRAP
The independent variable is the spatial distance between the rapporteur and the government
leader (proxy of the President’s ideal point). Roll calls were used to estimate the ideal
points. Then, the difference between the ideal points were calculated. The distribution of
this variables is shown on Graph 1. It is very impressive that 50% of the cases the distance
is very close to zero (i.e., the rapporteur’s ideal point is almost the same as the government
leader’s ideal points). The expectation is that this variable has a positive effect in the
likelihood of veto.
15
0
1
2
Density
3
4
5
Figure 1: Distribution of the Spatial Distance
0
.5
1
1.5
distance
Source: Brazilian Legislative Database - CEBRAP
The following control variables were selected:
• Amendment: Indicates if a bill was modified in the Congress. I expect a positive effect
once I assume that the President tends to not accept modifications in her own bills.
• Urgency: Indicates if a urgency rule was requested. Urgencies are important to accelerate the processing of the bill. It is an evidence that party leaders (the main requesters
of urgencies) consider this bill very important. I expect a positive effect because salient
bills (and urgency increases the saliency of a bill calling attention of the media and
other political actors) can induce the President to review some parts of her own bill,
enhancing the likelihood of a veto.
• Committee Rule: Indicates if the bill passed by just committee decision, without the
participation of the floor. The Speaker can decide that a bill does not need to be voted
in the floor, and if no legislator request to vote it the bill can be approved just in the
committee. I expect a negative effect because the floor is an important locus for the
opposition discuss the bill’s.
• Same term: Indicates if the bill was introduced and approved in the same presidential
term. I expect a negative effect because when the President in power changes the
16
agenda also changes, increasing the chance of veto.
• Honeymoon: Indicates if the bill was approved in the first three months of a presidential
term. According to Palanza and Sin (2014, 774) “during honeymoon periods following
the beginning of a new administration, the probability of vetoes should be smaller”
because the Congress tends to pass bills close to the President’s ideal point. Thus, a
negative effect is expected.
• Minority: Indicates if a bill was approved during a minority government coalition.
When the government does not control the majority, the Congress tends to pass bills
far to the President’s ideal point. A positive effect is expected.
We also control by legislative term in order to assess differences in the agenda, the composition and other temporal factors. The legislative term just summarizes theses issues.
A multi-level analysis including detailed information about each term would be a better
method, but I do not have resources to do that by now.
The content and the significance of the legislation are not considered here. As Palanza and
Sin (2014) demonstrate for the Argentinian case, the latter (which is related to the former)
is critical for the presidential veto behavior. As I am analyzing Executive bills I assume that
all pieces are evaluated as highly significant at least to the Executive agenda.
3.2
Preliminary Analysis: the logistic regression
To test our hypothesis I use a logistic regression model. This decision is based on the fact
that my dependent variable is binary. Logistic regression is a nonlinear regression model,
which estimates the probability of our dependent variable be 1 (event occurrence).
First of all, I present the boxplot of the independent variable (spatial distance) by the values
of the dependent variable (occurrence of presidential veto). The result is shown on Graph 2.
The distribution of spatial distance is very similar in both scenarios. The median is almost
the same. The only difference seems to be the existence of outliers when bills are enacted
instead of vetoed. This descriptive analysis lead me to believe that there is no relation
17
between the variables present in my hypothesis.
Figure 2: Distribution of Spatial Distance, by occurrence of veto (enactment vs. veto)
Vetoed bills
1
0
.5
Spatial distance
1.5
Enacted bills
Source: Brazilian Legislative Database - CEBRAP
To produce more robust conclusions about the interaction between the dependent and the
independent variables I ran four logistic regression models. In the first all controls are
included. In the second all controls but the legislative terms are included. The third and
fourth models are variations of the first and the second but without the variable amendment
(modification in the Congress). The effect of having a modification is so large that lead me
to test a model without this variable. The models with the legislative term variable use the
legislature initiated in 1987 as the basis.
The results are presented in Table 2. In model 1 just one variable is statistically significant
at the 5% level: amendment. Holding other variables constant, the passage from not having
amendments to having amendments increase the odds of presidential in 802.1%. The effect of
distance is negative and it is not statically significant in all four models. The interpretation
of this effect in the first model is that, holding everything constant, each additional unit in
spatial distance will decrease the odds of presidential veto in 29.2%. The signal of the effect
is the opposite of which I was expecting.
In the second model the effect of a minority coalition in the odds of presidential veto is
18
positive and statistically significant at the five 5% level. This could be related to the fact that
President Collor never had a majority coalition and he was the President that more frequently
used the veto power. Presidents Cardoso and Lula governed with minority coalitions for short
periods.
In the models without the amendment variable, other variables became statistically significant at the 5% level. This is the true for the occurrence of committee rule and the dummy
variable indicating if a bill was approved in the same presidential term. The explanatory
power of amendments is so high that minimizes the effect of other variables. In the Graph 3
the average marginal effect for each variable in the second model is estimated and it is possible to identify the difference of the magnitude of the marginal effect of amendments in the
presidential veto.
Spatial distance
Amendment
Urgency
Committee rule
Same term
Honeymoon
Minority
1991 term
1995 term
1999 term
2003 term
2007 term
Observations
Pseudo R2
Table 2: Logistic Regression
(1)
(2)
Presidential veto Presidential veto
0.708
(-1.24)
0.827
(-0.71)
∗∗∗
∗∗∗
9.021
(6.85) 9.687
(7.11)
1.112
(0.42)
1.091
(0.36)
0.597
(-1.48)
0.538
(-1.88)
0.668
(-1.57)
0.616
(-1.93)
1.067
(0.11)
0.939
(-0.11)
1.447
(1.42)
1.750∗
(2.35)
1.488
(1.06)
0.725
(-0.73)
1.234
(0.52)
0.762
(-0.61)
0.697
(-0.68)
627
627
0.162
0.151
Exponentiated coefficients; z statistics in parentheses
∗
p < 0.05, ∗∗ p < 0.01, ∗∗∗ p < 0.001
Source: Brazilian Legislative Database - CEBRAP
19
results
(3)
Presidential veto
0.692
(-1.40)
(4)
Presidential veto
0.849
(-0.66)
0.989
0.397∗∗
0.579∗
1.139
1.245
2.045∗
0.846
1.663
0.828
0.819
627
0.058
1.005
0.362∗∗
0.530∗∗
0.983
1.468
(-0.05)
(-2.76)
(-2.22)
(0.22)
(0.91)
(2.00)
(-0.40)
(1.32)
(-0.45)
(-0.39)
627
0.036
(0.02)
(-3.22)
(-2.67)
(-0.03)
(1.74)
Figure 3: Average Marginal Effects with 95% CIs
-.2
Effects on Pr(Veto)
0
.2
.4
Average Marginal Effects with 95% CIs
distance
alter
urg
comm_rule sameterm honeymoon
Effects with Respect to
minority
Source: Brazilian Legislative Database - CEBRAP
In sum, our hypothesis are completely frustrated by the data analysis. The evidence is
present even in the rudimentary boxplot. There is no relation between spatial distance and
presidential veto. The regression analysis also showed that the effect is not significant and
it is negative (I hypothesized a positive effect).
4
Conclusions
This paper is a preliminary tentative of bringing the legislative process and the coalition management into the explanation of the paradoxical cases of presidential vetoes in presidential
initiatives. This phenomenon seem to be associated with the existence of modifications made
by the legislature when it passed the legislation. The hypothesis develop in this exploratory
working paper - the higher spatial distance between the rapporteur and the President, the
higher the likelihood of a presidential veto - did not hold the preliminary tests. This could
be a result of the difficulty of measuring spatial distance, using government leader as a proxy
of the President, bias or endogeneity.
The rapporteur may have an institutional position and her ideal point might not be decisive
20
to the legislative output. Nevertheless, the strong effect of the existence of amendments in
the presidential veto require the following question: how are amendments approved in the
Congress? According to Freitas (2013) the rapporteur plays a critical role in the decisionmaking process, once she is decisive in negotiating the modifications within the parties of the
coalition and also with the opposition. In the Brazilian separation of powers system may be
a channel for parties bargain their positions over policies, allowing compromises to pass the
legislation with majoritarian support. The presidential veto, in this scenario, is an expression
of unresolved problems which have to be managed by the Executive and the coalition after
passing the legislature. Vetoes are used by the President to promote coalition’s goals that
were not achieved in the Congress.
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