Quais as Condições para o Sucesso do Presidente 
na Arena Legislativa no Brasil?

Carlos Pereira

Resumo: (Versão Preliminar)
Embora exista um amplo consenso na literatura, bem como na imprensa e sociedade em geral de que o comportamento do voto dos legisladores no Congresso é orientado no sentido da maximização dos seus interesses econômicos e políticos, as evidências empíricas que suportam tal afirmativa são extremamente frágeis. 
A literatura que trata das relações executivo legislativo foi dividida em três grandes blocos levando em consideração as variáveis analíticas que melhor justificam o comportamento dos legisladores: o primeiro, análises centrada no presidente (habilidades do presidente em negociar e aprovação publica do presidente); segundo, análises centradas no congresso(partidos políticos e ideologia), terceiro, análise centrada nas instituições(regras eleitorais e regras internas do congresso). 
Embora, cada uma destas abordagens tenha por demais contribuído para elucidar o complexo conjunto de determinantes explicativos do comportamento do voto dos legisladores, elas acabam por oferecer uma análise parcial ao eleger uma das variável explicativa como a definidora do comportamento do voto do legislador no Congresso.
Meu objetivo neste artigo é construir um modelo analítico capaz de entender o processo pelo qual os legisladores tomam suas decisões de cooperar ou não com as iniciativas presidenciais no Congresso levando em consideração neste modelo tanto as variáveis presidenciais, congressuais e institucionais. Ao fazer isto, será possível identificar qual destas variáveis se mostra determinante em cada issue que estiver sendo votado, em cada contexto, bem como para cada diferente legislador.

XXII Encontro Anual da ANPOCS
Caxambu-MG, de 27 a 31 de Outubro de 1998

What are the Conditions for Presidential Success in 
Legislative Arena in Brazil?

by Carlos Pereira 
Preliminary Version(do not quote or cite) 

Introduction
The main goal of this article is to develop a simple model of analyzing the Brazilian legislator’s behavior with regard to his/her relationship with the executive. Precisely, I have in mind focusing on two aspects. First, on the possibilities and capabilities that the president can arrange in order to induce compliance of his/her parliamentary base of support in the Congress. Second, on the forces behind the formation of president’s coalition. What the president needs most from members of Congress is their votes. Votes are the basic commodity of presidential-congressional relations. Therefore, the general questions that I will try to answer through this model are: how can president build governing coalition inside the Congress? How can the president induce or incentive his/her parliamentary base of support in the Congress to vote according to president’s interests? 
To do such a thing, the president therefore needs to design an incentive scheme that rewards the legislator who votes according to the president own interests and penalizes the legislators who vote against the president interests. To accept to vote for the president, the legislator must be compensated by a transfer greater enough to reimburse his/her costs. In other words, in his/her negotiation with the president the legislator must obtain at least as much utility as the level of  her/his reservation utility. His/her reservation utility is understood as the act of voting according to his/her constituency preferences without any transfer from the president. 
Therefore, the generic problem facing the president is thus the following: How to induce the legislators who take part of government coalition in the Congress to act in the president’s interest?  What really has mattered is whether the executive offers appropriate incentives to politicians(legislators) to promote the government’s interests. 
Roughly speaking, legislators’ behaviors of voting in the Congress have presented two typical patterns of votes. First, the party vote, in which the deputy follows the party leader or coalition indication (in the Brazilian case it actually means cooperation with the president interests). Second, personal vote (not cooperation with the president), in which there is a higher level of freedom for  legislator follows his/her private and personal preferences. The personal vote happens because parties place weak or no constraints on the behavior of individual representatives.
The presidential-congressional relations literature recognizes that most the time legislators present these two kinds of vote behavior. However, it offers different answers about the conditions in which legislators do strategically cooperate or not with the president’s preferences in the Congress. More specifically, there is no consensus among the political scientists that study legislative behavior. In the other hand, there are also many theories about how presidents lead in the Congress. Actually, they offer different explanations in terms of what are the determinants (independent variables) that could better explain the legislator’s behavior inside the Congress.
This article, in a broad sense, classifies this literature that works with presidential-congressional relations in three main schools. First, the presidency-centered approach, which represents the majority of the literature, focuses their analysis on the presidential variables -- such as presidential leadership skills, presidential popularity, presidential resources, presidential capacity of bargaining, and so on. This first approach seeks, indeed, to determine the extent to which the legislator’s decision to vote in support of the president’s position was the result of what the president actually did to influence their votes, that is, if the president has exercised an effective leadership. 
Second, Congress-centered approach, which principally emphasizes the role of political parties and political ideology. According to this second approach, the presidential success in Congress is determined by the number of seats of the president’s party or coalition. It is also determined by the level of shared values and preferences between members of Congress and the executive. Hence, if the last election brings individuals to Congress whose local interests and preferences coincide with the President’s, then he will enjoy greater success. If, on the other hand, most members of Congress have preferences different from the President’s, then he will suffer more defeats, and no amount of bargaining and persuasion can do much to improve his success.
Finally, the institutional-centered approach, that could be divided in two variants.  The first variant essentially gives emphasis to electoral laws to explain the legislator's behavior and, because of that, it is labeled here as Institutional Electoral approach. For these authors, for instance, the presence of an open-list and nominal representation -- which allows the citizens to select their candidates instead of parties based principally on candidates’ personal qualities, activities and personal records -- provides a strong incentive for candidates develop direct links with his/her constituency groups rather than mediate this relation through political parties. These constituency groups may be  local government, local business elites, professional groups, and others. Thus, the personification of the vote is highly influenced by the way that the legislator is elected by the citizens (Mainwaring & Scully, 1995; Mainwaring and Shugart, 1997; Haggard, 1995; Haggard & Kaufman, 1995; Lima Junior, 1993; Ames, 1995a and 1995b; Lamounier, 1994).
The second variant of the institutional-centered explanation, on the other hand, emphasizes the institutional rules and structure that organizes the legislative process itself. In other words, the set of rules and internal procedures that define the level of centralization in terms of prerogatives of initiating the decision-making process (agenda setting) on the hands of deputies or on the hands of parties and/or executive. Actually, this second variant, called here Institutional Internal approach, tries to explain how internal institutional variables to the decision making process (the distribution of power inside Congress) and the institutional legislative powers held by the president work as key variables in the definition of legislator’s behavior (Figueiredo and Limongi, 1997, 1996, 1995).
It is very important to recognize at the beginning that this classification cannot be understood as a straitjacket. On the contrary, this division intends to promote a better understanding of the main arguments and differences among them. It is not uncommon, thus, to find some authors that work with more than one variable some of them present in other different approaches. However, my aim in doing so, was to emphasize the main characteristic of each author and school. 
In the following section, I shall briefly discuss these three theoretical approaches. I will focus on the main accounts of each school in terms of their analytical strengths and weaknesses. I then provide an alternative model of analyzing the legislator behavior with regard to its relationship with the president. Each scholar and different approach have contributed a lot to elucidate the complex set of reasons that explain the legislator’s pattern of voting; why some presidents experience grater success than others; and yet, why presidents face more problems in approving some issues than others. However, they have presented limited and partial explanations as well as they have depicted an incomplete picture specifically by privileging one or other variables that they elect as the most important to explain any phenomenon.  
A critical discussion about how each of these theoretical approaches understand the relation between president and Congress is very helpful because it will render the basis for the theoretical framework to build an alternative model. My concern in proposing this model, therefore, is to understand the variety of factors and determinants of legislator’s behavior at the same time. These factors and determinants are institutional variables (internal congressional rules and electoral rules and procedures), presidential variables (presidential skills and capacities in negotiating and controlling the legislative agenda), congressional determinants (legislator’s partisan and ideological predispositions). In doing so, it will be possible to see which of these variable influences can be more important than others in a specific issue, in diverse contexts, as well as for each different legislator.

The Presidential-Congressional Relation Approaches in Review
Presidency-Centered Approach
Perhaps the most significant representative of this first approach is Richard Neustadt in his now classic book Presidential Power (1960). He starts arguing that a government of “separated institutions sharing powers” guarantees that the President will be frustrated by Congress. In order to overcome this inevitable conflict, Neustadt asserts that the President must be a supreme politician and rely on his power of personal persuasion, bargaining, reputation, prestige, and compromise. His analysis, therefore, focuses on what the president does and how well he does it. According to this point of view, presidents may not dominate Congress, but they are usually the lead player in establishing the agenda of issues that Congress will debate and consider. To a significant degree, the president's agenda becomes the legislature’s agenda.
Paul Light makes a very important distinction between presidential resources and formal prerogatives. According to him, “formal prerogatives guarantee certain advantages, but they do not explain the vast differences between individual presidents” (1982: 14).  By making such distinction, he observes that it is the combination of presidential resources, internal and external, that shapes the president’s agenda and not president’s institutional prerogatives. He adds that “what differs is the fuel. Different presidents enter with different fuel (...) Thus, it is not the system of checks and balances that determines agenda outcomes; it is resources that that drive the presidential machinery” (14).
Among the presidential resources, I will briefly discuss the presidential popularity and presidential leadership skills once they are the most studied inside the presidency-centered explanations. The belief that presidential popularity affects support in Congress is widely accepted among presidential-congressional relations literature. The idea that sustains such scholars is that the desire for reelection lead members of Congress to support the president in response to his popularity. Thus, when the president is very popular, members of Congress, especially members of the president’s party, want to be closely associated with the president’s administration. In bad times, however, they will want to distance themselves from the president. 
In spite of that huge amount of research, the findings presented by scholars seeking to explain the relationship between the President’s public approval and support in the Congress are very diverse and mixed. Rivers and Rose, for instance, argue that members of Congress recognize that they and the president share a common political fate “based in their understanding of how the public holds government accountable for policy failure...[T]his connection promotes congressional support for the program of a popular president.”. Peterson (1990) adds that when president “had the approval of more than half the electorate and went on television to discuss issues related to what the public considered to be the most important problems facing the nation, Congress reacts more favorable to the president’s initiatives in those areas” 
Edwards (1980), also suggests that there is a strong correlation between presidential popularity and congressional support. He says that “presidential prestige does serve as a source of presidential influence in congress” (1980:99). However, Edwards in his later work (1989:109) claims that “one should not expect public approval to translate directly into support in Congress (...) no matter how high his approval level climb or how large his winning percentage of the vote, a significant portion of the Congress still oppose his policies”. Thus he concludes, “the president public support must compete with other, more stable factors that affects voting in Congress, including ideology, party, personal views and commitments on specific policies, and constituency interests.” 
Bond and Fleisher’s (1990) new findings also suggest that presidential popularity is directly related to support from members of the President’s party and inversely related to support from members of the opposition. In other words, popular presidents tend to receive more support from members of their party but less support from members of the opposition. Therefore,  these authors add that “presidential popularity is not likely to alter greatly the decisions of individuals already in Congress. Instead, its effects are likely to be indirect, operating through the electoral process to alter the distribution of partisan and ideological forces in the Congress”(29). 
 I refer again to Richard Neustadt and his research about presidential leadership skills. According to him, one of the most important sources of influence in Congress is the President’s ‘professional reputation’ as skilled or unskilled.  He believes that professional reputation is a “cardinal factor in the President’s own power to persuade” (60).  Although Neustadt and others focus mainly on interpersonal skills, which involve president’s ability in face-to-face contact and negotiations with members of Congress, students of presidential-congressional relations also refer to other kind of skills, ‘structuring skills.’ Structuring skills are more interested in manipulating the environment in which those bargains between president and legislators take place. Perhaps the most important structuring resource available to some presidents is his ability and power to set the Congress’s agenda. 
As presidential popularity presented fragility and controversies among scholars, presidential skills have also raised doubts especially in terms of methodological and empirical evidences. King (1983), for example, observes that the empirical evidence in support of skills' theory is based in small number of cases. These cases were selected because they were major presidential proposals on which presidential interest and activities were high. Such cases, however, are neither typical nor representative of presidential-congressional relations. Although the skills variable has occupied almost the dominant position in this literature, King insists that “it would be quite wrong to conclude that a president’s warmth, charm, and knowledge of congressmen’s susceptibilities can ever be crucial except at the margin (...) because members of Congress have their own political needs and priorities, which the president, whoever he is, is mostly powerless to affect” (254, 265).
In a similar way, Light also raises a strong criticism against presidential skills variable analyses. He suggests that “a president can be skilled, charming, charismatic, a variable legislative wizard, but if he does not have the basic congressional strength, his domestic agenda will be severely restricted -- [political] capital [number of seats in the Congress] affects both the number and the content of the president’s priorities” (1982:34).
In addition, presidency-centered approach also turns difficult to understand how very different kinds of presidents, with sharply contrasting backgrounds and styles, can enjoy comparable rates of success with Congress. This approach also overemphasizes the conflict between the president and Congress, ignoring the reality of conflicts among interests inside the Congress itself usually taking it as a unified body (Peterson, 1995). A set of authors that can be grouped in another broad umbrella -- Congress-centered explanations -- try to correct such deficiencies of the presidency-centered explanations. 

Congress-Centered Approach 
The Congress-centered theory supports their argument simply affirming that the president’s policy preference may prevail for reasons that have nothing to do with presidential influence or skills. For instance, high presidential success may result if the president and Congress have highly similar policy preferences. In such situations, regardless of whether the president is weak or powerful, his preferences will succeed because they correspond to what most members of Congress want to do anyway. Either if the president’s party exerts strong control in Congress, or if the president accumulates some institutional legislative powers, the president’s interests may also equal prevail in the absence presidential popularity or personal skills.
Therefore, this second approach emphasizes a much greater autonomy of the Congress by admitting that the Congress is an institution composed of strong-willed politicians who have goals and policy preferences of their own. Consequently, according to Bond and Fleisher(1990), the result of the last election determines the president success. If the last election brings individuals to Congress whose local interests and preferences coincide with the President’s, then he will enjoy greater success. If, on the other hand, most members of Congress have preferences different from the President’s, then he will suffer more defeats, and no amount of bargaining and persuasion can do much to improve his success. Thus, their findings indicate that members of Congress provide levels of support for the president that are generally consistent with their partisan and ideological predispositions. 
The basic assumption of this approach is that the most essential of all presidential resources is capital. On the other hand, capital is directly linked to the congressional parties. While there is little question that bargaining skills can affect both the composition and the success of the domestic agenda, without the necessary party support, no amount of expertise or charm can make a difference. “Though bargaining is an important toll of presidential power, it does not take place in neutral environment. Presidents bring certain advantages and disadvantages to the table.”(Light 1982: 26)
Edwards (1984, 180-84) points out that previous research on presidential-congressional relations revels that members of the president’s party in Congress are more likely to support his policy position than are members of the opposition. He suggests a lot of reasons why members of president’s party are predisposed to vote according his preferences. These preferences may be policy preferences, concern with reelection, personal loyalties, president’s resources such as patronage, distribution of pork barrel programs. President can use these last programs to reward loyal party members and to punish those who oppose him. Therefore, following this argument, it is plausible to say that partisan support is important to explaining the president success in the Congress.
Cox and McCubbins (1993, 2) also see a definitive role of parties framing legislator’s behavior inside the institutional arrangement of Congress, especially the committee system structure. They consider that: “parties in the house -- especially the majority party -- are a species of ‘legislative cartel’. These cartels usurp the power, theoretically resident in the House, to make rules governing the structure of legislation. Possession of this rule-making power leads to two main consequences. First, the legislative process in general -- and the committee system in particular -- is stacked in favor of majority party interests. Second, because members of the majority party have all the structural advantages, the key players in most legislative deals are members of the majority party’s central agreements are facilitated by cartel rules and policed by the cartel’s leadership.”
Keith Krehbiel (1993), however, argues that the legislator’s policy choice will be shaped by political parties only if parties are politically significant. According to him, “if parties are empirically significant, then politics should be significant different with parties from what it is without them. For instance, a partisan legislature should be organized significantly different from a non-partisan one; its decision making process should be different; and its final policy choices should be different”(240). Implicit in this assertion is the distinction between party influence and personal preferences. For him, parties -- as a group -- are significant if individual legislators vote with fellow party members ‘in spite of their disagreement’ and preferences about the policy in question. Thus, he concludes saying that “the apparent explanatory power of the variable, party, may be attributed solely to its being a good measure of preferences.
Another important voting source that may structure the legislator’s decision of voting present at the Congress-centered explanation literature is political ideology. In other words, a set of  shared values that exist between the president and some members of Congress. According to Kingdon(1981, 268), in his analysis about the role of ideology on roll call votes in Congress, “at least for a congressmen who is at either end of a given spectrum, ideology is a means to array the amendments and the proponents on a continuum, enabling him to vote for the one nearest him.”  While ideology is less useful for moderates than it is for ideologues on the left or right, its influence “is nearly always present” (Kingdon, 1981, 271).
The literature that works with ideology variables strongly associates that ideology and constituency are not separate influences on congressional behavior especially in roll call decision making. Indeed, it is generally assumed that the legislator’s personal ideology is constrained by constituency interests. Richard Feno (1978, 144), as an example, observes that legislators are convinced that their voting records are very important for reelection. He says that a single discrepancy vote from the constituency’s interest could not defeat the representative, but that “voter disapproval of their total, overall policy performance could.” He implies that overall performance is indicated by the incumbent’s ideological voting pattern. 
Thus, constituency forces play a decisive role in the decision making because members of Congress are vulnerable to their electorates. Obviously, these forces are less important whenever members are secure in their constituency. According to Sullivan (1987, 290), constituency “trust acts as a buffer modifying the main effect of the constituency variables.” Therefore, trust makes it possible to respond more positively (or at least more freely) to the party leader, the president, and so on. “Secure from defeat, a member may act more independently of constituency forces. On the other hand, those more closely threatened by defeat are far more likely to exhibit inflexibility in dealing with administration requests for support whenever they would violate constituency interest.” 
Douglas Arnold (1990, 5) also assumes that members of Congress care intensely about reelection. He points out that “although they are not single-minded seekers of reelection, reelection is their dominant goal. This means simply that legislators will do nothing to advance their other goal if such activities threaten their principal goal.” His assumption implies that “whenever legislators are asked to choose between two alternative policies they first ask which alternative would contribute more to their chances of reelection. If they see a significant difference, they choose the alternative that contributes more to their electoral margins. If they see no difference, they may base their choice on any other criteria they find relevant, including their intent to make good public policy and their need to trade favors with congressional leaders, other legislators, and the president”(60).
The ideological motivation is also appropriated when the legislators often must express a public opinion on roll calls about which they have very little information. To take a decision in such situation, specially when they have limited time available, the ideological and programmatic references become a key answer to justify the legislator’s behavior once they frequently turn to their partners to looking more for cue-advice. Thus the tendency to seek information from political partners who have similar political values explain the formation of ideological and partisan voting blocs (Kingdon, 1981; Santos, 1997; Kiewiet and McCubbins, 1991).
Likewise the presidency-centered approach, there are a lot of other authors that reject the decisive role of Congress-centered explanation variables, partisan and ideological powers. Morris Fiorina (1984) argues that the insulation of congressional incumbents from national tides and presidential coattails has resulted in a Congress that is less responsive to party leadership, less subject to the presidential leadership, and less accountable for the failure to govern. Fiorina also asserts that in a situation of ‘divided government,’ when the president’s party has the minority of seats in the Congress, there is a “more subtle, more indirect effects on the political process, such as raising the level of executive-legislative conflict”(1996, 166).
The general criticism against the Congress-centered variables is that the process of building winning coalitions on the chamber of deputy has become more uncertain and difficult once parties have presented an increased undisciplined behavior. It is common to find considerable variation in the behavior of party faction specially cross-pressures legislators who are typically divided. Even members of the party bases who have reinforcing partisan and ideological preferences frequently fail to unify for or against the president’s position. 
According to Ferejohn and Calvet (1984), candidates for Congress have become less dependent on party for campaign organization and finance. And once a representative is in office, the advantages of incumbency tend to insulate him or her from national tides and to decrease the effectiveness of presidential coattails. Those arguments have weakened party variables as an important linkage between president and individual representatives in Congress.
In terms of ideological determinants, some authors also have admitted that those variables are limited for several reasons. An important limitation is encountered in its own assumption that ideology is a voting cue specially for legislators who are localized at the extreme ideological spectrum. As the majority of the legislators are formed by moderates, ideology could have at maximum a marginal effect. However, the most strong criticism against ideology variables is concern its relatively informal character. Without an integrated institutional structure, ideological coalition formation remains relatively ad hoc with its effects very limited. Hence, numbers of seats and shared values and preferences do not necessarily translate in votes in Congress.
These consideration concerning the limitation present in the variables of both presidency-centered and Congress-centered approaches have led students to look for other potential determinants, institutional variables, of legislator’s behavior in Congress.

Institutional-Centered Approaches 
Institutional Electoral Variant
As it was mentioned before, the institutional-centered explanation can be divided in two variants, electoral and internal institutions. Firstly, it shall be analyzed the chiefly arguments raised by the institutional electoral explanation, which pays special attention on the role of electoral rules in framing the structure of party system and, as a consequence, the legislator’s behavior. Thus, the main assumption of this variant is that the pattern of voting of members of Congress as well as the level of fragmentation and discipline of their political parties is highly correlated to the institutional rules in which legislators are selected by the citizens. Indeed, this variant considers party discipline and party fragmentation as direct result of electoral laws.(Ames, 1995; Mainwaring and Shugart, 1997; Mainwaring and Scully, 1995)
For instance, the presence of an open-list and proportional representation, which allows the citizens to select their candidates instead of parties based principally on candidates’ personal qualities, activities and personal records, provides a strong incentive for candidates develops direct links with his/her constituency groups, such as, local government, local business elites, professional groups, rather than mediate this relation through political parties. It could be possible to say that the maximum of customization of the legislator’s vote (preference effects), and at the same time, the high level of undiscipline will take place when as much as the candidate will be closer from his/her constituency and there is not party’s control concerning the indication of the candidate. 
Otherwise, the presence of a closed-list  offers less power to individual legislator and, at the same time, provides more party control concerning the legislator’s future behavior and strong incentives for legislators to cooperate with the party leader indication (party effects). Consequently, by providing less autonomy for legislators, this kind of legislator’s selection offers a greater level of anticipation oriented to a less fragmented party outline. Thus, with disciplined parties, presidents can negotiate primarily with party leaders, thereby reducing the number of actors involved in negotiations. 
Mathew Shugart and Scott Mainwaring (1997, 421) in the conclusion of their new book, Presidencialism and Democracy in Latin America, leave clear what are the electoral institutional law which determine party discipline. They believe that “The extent to which members of a given party’s congressional delegation vote as a bloc or, on the other hand, vote independently of one another, can be expected to be strongly related to three basic features of the rules under which they become candidates and are elected. These three features are - control of candidates selection, control of the order in which members are elected from a party list, and pooling of votes among a party’s candidates - all strongly affect the degree of influence leaders have over the rank-and-file members.”
In summary, in systems with limited party control over nominations, the order of the list, or both, and candidates owe their election largely on their own efforts promote individualism in campaigning and successful candidates are less likely to be loyal legislators of a disciplined party when the later did not secure their victory to begin with. Therefore, such systems contain strong incentives for individualism, factionalism and party undiscipline.
Barry Ames is another author who develops an institutional theory of candidate strategy by explaining the campaign behavior and the spatial patterns of vote distribution for candidates to the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. According to him, the core of Brazil’s political institutional crisis lie in the electoral system, that is, a unique set of rules, refereed as ‘open-list proportional representation.’ He affirms that as a consequence of this electoral arrangement, the Brazilian Deputies seek to secure bailiwicks, search for vulnerable municipalities where their obvious and rational choice is concentrated campaigns, and strive to overcome their own electoral weakness by delivering pork barrel.
According to Mainwaring and Lian (1996), party discipline influences how legislatures function and how executives and legislature interact. They argue that “With comparatively undisciplined parties, support for government can become less predicable and stable, and presidents may have difficulties forming stable bases of support. Presidents are sometimes forced to rely on ad hoc bases of support, rather than counting on party leaders who can deliver the votes of their fellow legislators. This is a difficult situation for presidents, and it encourages the widespread use of patronage to secure the support of individual legislators or party function. Under these conditions, presidents are less likely to accomplish their legislative agendas.”  Presidents, thus, can not consistently rely on national party leaders to deliver the vote of their copartisans. Rather, they must often win the support of leaders of factions or governors, both of whom exercise influence over individual legislators, or they must win the baking of individual members of Congress. 
It is fair, however, to observe that, in this new book, Mathew Shugart and Scott Mainwaring (1997) propose other variable than electoral rules and party system, such as presidential constitutional powers, in order to the president see his agenda enacted. Presumably, these two factors - which they call constitutional and partisan powers over legislation - interact to determine the degrees of influence presidents have over their policy - and hence their strength. 
They assert that “presidents who have no independent constitutional authority over legislation would appear very weak if they lacked control over a majority party but might appear to dominate - in spite of their constitutional weakness - if they were undisciplined leaders of the majority party. On the other hand, presidents with substantial legislative powers may have significant influence over legislation even if their party lacks a legislative majority - indeed, even if their party is a minor one. Such presidents would also have independent influence over policy even if were not the unchallenged leaders of their party. On the other hand, presidents without constitutional legislative powers might not be able to leave a stamp on policy even if their party has a majority in situations in which the party itself is divided with respect to the leadership provided by the president.
However, even recognizing the existence of other variables than electoral laws interfering on legislator’s behavior, Shugart and Mainwaring regard legislative powers of presidents at most as a device to bypass the lack of party discipline. “Legislative powers of the president are not a means to bypass an antagonist institution. They provide presidents with the means to entice part of the legislature’s members into a cooperative strategy (Figueiredo and Limongi, 1997, 17). 

Internal Variant
According to this second variant, the combination of the institutional variables internal to the decision making process - level of centralization of power - of the Congress and legislative powers of the president allow the executive control the legislative agenda and, as a result, increase the capacity of the president to accomplish support for his policies. 
Figueiredo and Limongi (1997, 3) solidly assert that “electoral laws and lack of party control over candidacy my give politicians room for cultivating personal vote and defying party line. But individualistic behavior does not encounter a milieu to develop in Congress. The institutional powers held by the executive, on the one hand, and the centralized decision making system in the legislature, on the other, impose restrictive agendas and limit legislators’ role in policy outcome.” 
The Brazilian case is a very good example of the powerful presidential’ prerogatives. There, the rules of the game have clearly favored the executive through its agenda-setting veto powers, either via reduced quorum or decree power. Figueiredo and Limongi contest the thesis that the new legislative powers, attributed to the Brazilian Congress in the 1988 Constitution, are an obstacle to executive actions. The empirical evidence on the relationship between the executive and the legislative after 1988 reveals an opposite scenario: rather than being an obstacle, the Brazilian Congress has favored presidential initiatives. In fact, the Brazilian President has directed the legislative process, and has undermined the legislature’s autonomy. Hence, the Presidential power has not been decisively limited by the new Constitution. According to Figueiredo & Limongi, the executive has made an ample use of Medidas Provisórias(MP) - provisional decrees. Although this provisional decree established by Article 62 was originally created as a tool to be used in situations of urgency and relevance, it has been used frequently. From 1989 to 1993 the government sent to Congress an average of ten MPs per month(for a total of 792 MPs). Only seven were rejected, 229 were approved; the reminders were revoked or lost their efficacy.  Although the excessive and indiscriminate use of provisory decree (MP) may contribute to a low level of democracy, it is important to recognize that it, like the “confidence vote procedure” in parliamentary democracies, exercises a decisive role in equilibrating the system.
Article 62, not only gives the president the power to legislate; it also gives them influence over the congressional agenda. If Congress fails to act on a provisional measure within 30 days, it automatically goes to the top of the legislative agenda, displacing issues that the Congress may have been discussing for some time. Moreover, the Article 64 of the 1988 Constitution also gives the presidents the right to declare a bill of their own initiative “urgent.” Under these conditions, the two houses of Congress are obliged to vote on the bill in 45 days. If they fail to do so, the bill immediately moves to the top of legislative agenda, pushing aside bills of congressional initiative. Article 57 allows the president to convoke a special section of Congress. During such a section, Congress is allowed to deliberate only those issues determined by presidential initiative. 
In summary, the combination of partial veto, provisional measure and urgent initiative give Brazilian presidents strong capacity to obstruct legislation they do not want, and to define their own legislative priorities onto the congressional agenda. With all these institutional devices, it is not surprise to conclude that the executive have plenty dominated the legislative process in Brazil. 
Concerning the internal organization of the Brazilian legislature, Figueiredo and Limongi claims that after the Constitution of 1988 it has had an unique design. Instead of being organized in terms of political parties or committees, the internal rules have attributed to party leaders asymmetrical rights regarding the legislative agenda and amendments prerogatives through two decisory instances: the Presiding Officers Board (Mesa Diretora) and Leaders Group (Colégio de Líderes). These two institutional instances have clearly benefited the executive regarding the definition of the legislative agenda and during the process of deciding making itself.
Finally, in regard to the discipline and party behavior in the Brazilian Congress, it is possible to observe that the pattern of legislators vote and coalition are not so fragmented as the literature has claimed. Concerning the pattern of party coalition, Limongi and Figueiredo, in a recent provocative article, suggest the presence of three ideological blocks in the Brazilian Congress: right, center, and left. 
According to these authors, from 1988 to 1994 the parties that make up these blocks have voted in a greatly similar way. They also point out that out of 221 cases that were analyzed, 143 (64.7%) were labeled as ideologically consistent, that is, when the blocks sharply voted against each other; 18 (8.1%) were considered less consistent, that is, when the party’s leaders allow the party’s members to vote in different way following their own principles and/or interests; and only 54 (24.5%) of voting were really considered ideologically non-consistent.
Moreover, Limongi and Figueiredo affirm that it is common the parties’ members follow their leader’s indication - only in 33 cases from a total of 1317 voting did legislators vote against party line. The data shows that, during this period, the party with lowest internal cohesion, the PMDB, saw 85% of its members vote in the same way, which implies a very high level of internal discipline. They also affirm that the constant turnover of the members of right-wing parties and the continual changes of labels do not directly affect the deputies’ behavior in plenary. 
Even with all institutional mechanisms, it would be a naive mistake to conclude that Brazilian presidents can get anything they want by steam-rolling Congress. Although this new institutional findings offered by Limongi and Figueiredo play a rethinking on the traditional view of labeling and understanding the Brazilian party system, it is important to recognize that especially in issues in which the legislative constituency is threatened, it is not expected the parties work in an integrated and disciplined way. Thus, it reveals that institutionalization of party system is not a simple process.
A very good example was the successive government’s defeats during the legislative voting of social security reform on March 06, 1996. The government’s reform proposal got only 294 voters from 381 needed (three fifth of the Chamber of Deputies) to constitutional change; 190 Deputies voted against the reform, and 8 Deputies abstained. From 190 Deputies who voted against the reform, 101 voters came from the all parties that give political support to government in the congress, including 9 voters from the President’s party, PSDB. The whole map of the dissident voters reveals that 40 came from PMDB(45.4%), the biggest dissident party; 29 of PPB; 08 of PTB; 07 of PFL; 04 of PL; and 01 of PMN. 
In summary, the rich literature of presidential-congressional relations, broadly divided in presidency-centered approach (presidential popularity and skills), Congress-centered approach (partisan and ideological powers), and institutional-centered approach (electoral and internal rules), has identified these six most important variables as a source of presidential accomplished support in Congress. Although all these approaches try to answer the same question, that is, what are the conditions for presidential success in legislative arena, they do that in different ways offering competing and partial explanations. Actually, each of them illuminates part of the complex relations between President and Congress. Undoubtedly, these approaches have offered a lot of insightful explanation to the phenomenon of executive-legislative relationship. Nevertheless, by working with models that deal with isolated variables instead of take the influences of all variables at the same time, those approaches have presented analytical limitations. The great challenge and contribution of this article are to build a model that takes into account each of these variables that have been traditionally analyzed through an isolated way. My concern to build a such model is to clearly assume that presidential, congressional, electoral, and institutional internal variables matter in constraining the bulk of legislator’s options.

Theoretical Framework of the Model
While the majority of the literature of presidential-congressional relations emphasizes single and isolated variables determining the legislators’ behavior in Congress, the general thesis of this model is that Congressional support for the president is a function of the combination of presidential variables (presidential skills of bargaining with individual legislator and presidential popularity with the public) and congress variables (legislator’s partisan and ideological predispositions), operating within constraints imposed by the internal institutional structure of the Congress (interval variables) and the set of electoral rules that define how the members of Congress are selected by the citizens.
Actually, it is the result of the combination of electoral and internal constraints that will define the relative prices of the of the legislator’s behavior of voting. Therefore, in Brazil, the combination of the two institutional variables, electoral and internal, provides paradoxical incentives for personal and party votes at the same time. Briefly, if on the one hand, in terms of legislator’s selection, the deputy has incentives to behave personally, on the other, in terms of agenda-setting power, the deputy has incentive to act according to the party leader or, in the last instance, according to the president’s interests. In this case, the dynamic equilibrium point that can be reached will change on each issue that will be voted, and will chiefly depend on the capacity of the president and his party leaders in offering the appropriate incentives (political and economic benefits) for individual legislators in order to overcome his/her personal costs from voting for president with his constituency.

Assumptions
First:  (Motivations of Members of Congress)
It is assumed that legislators are utility maximizers. Their choices (cooperation or nor cooperation with president) are determined by the outcome that a such policy can benefit them in terms of: (1) political resources with his party, (2) political and economic benefits transferred from the executive during the bargaining with each individual legislator; (3) maximization of their expected election return with their constituency.  It is also assumed that there is not one necessary hierarchical position among these choices utilities. Indeed, the choices will depend on each legislator’s calculus in each different issue and context.
For instance, if the legislator follows the party leader indication it can carry out some political benefits, such as, her/his indication for an important position in a committee, to not be punished or does not lose transit with some executive brunches, to be nominated for a Ministry or have the right to indicate someone of his confidence to be a Minister,  and so on; and/or economic benefits such as, to get a public job for her/his nephew, to obtain a special budget endowment that generate direct benefits to his constituency, to get a public permission(grant) to explore a radio or TV channel privately, and so forth. Otherwise, if the legislator’s preferences coincide with his constituent pleasures he probably will get a greater favor from his constituency groups (reelection). 
In making his decision, therefore, the individual legislators are motivated by the rational calculation of: (1) constituency interests - mass of votes, campaigning financers, interest groups, governors, mayors, etc.; (2) party leader indication; (3) ideology predispositions; (4) president’s position and possible selective economical and political incentives (transfer) that he may offer to the individual legislator to obtain his cooperation, and (5) president’s public approval with the public which may give the president temporary strengths or weakness in the leadership process in a specific context.
Second: Level of Legislator’s Autonomy from his Constituency
It is also assumed that each personal legislator’s utility preference is directly correlated to the level of constituency dependency. It is expected that legislators with concentrated distribution of votes in the municipalities will be more constrained by their constituency’s preferences than legislators who have a more spread distribution of votes in their state. Otherwise, legislators with a large spread distribution of votes will be less constrained by the constituency and, as a result, will have a great level of freedom to follow president’s position.
These variables try to measure the level of autonomy of the individual legislator from his constituency. According to Sullivan (1987), constituency forces play a decisive role in the decision making because members of Congress are vulnerable to their electorates. Obviously, these forces are less important whenever members are less dependent and secure in their constituency. Sullivan argues that constituency “trust acts as a buffer modifying the main effect of the constituency variables. In addition, trust makes it possible to respond more positively (or at least more freely) to the institutions of power: party leader, the president, and so on”(290). Therefore, it is important to take into account, for instance, if the legislator is a potential pre-candidate for the next election, or the level of legislator’s financial dependency from interest-groups who will contribute to financing the legislator’s campaigning. It is it is expected, thus, that if the legislator is intending to run for the next election or if he is financial dependent of other groups, he will likely exhibit difficulties in dealing with president request for support whenever it would violate constituency preferences.
Finally, as a result of the Brazilian federalism, mayors and governors have been powerful actors with significant autonomy vis-à-vis the federal government and with significant resources and influences over the legislator’s behavior in Congress. State loyalties lead politicians to coalesce in support of projects that will benefit their own state, regardless of politicians’ party and ideology (and regardless of the cost-effectiveness of the project), sometimes, in opposition to the national party indication and leadership. According to Mainwaring and Shugart (1997, 83),  “state loyalties make it more difficult for presidents to pull together reliable coalitions; to retain political support of a state congressional delegation, presidents need to offer high-level positions and resources.(...) Powerful political figures with independent bases, governors, and majors cities compete with the president for power and resources. Because of their influence over deputies and senators of their party or coalition, governors and majors can thwart or facilitate presidential designs.”
Third: Legislator’s Position on Institutional Structure of the Congress 
It is assumed in this model that legislators who undertake national leadership position in their party, government coalition, and/or in the institutional structure of the Congress(Mesa Diretora, Colégio de Líderes, and committee leader), will be greater constrained to follow the party leader indication and, as a consequence, to follow the president’s position even if this position could threaten the constituency interests of those legislators. Thus, the higher the rank of the individual legislator in the institutional distribution of job inside the Congress, the higher the probability that the decision of this legislator will support the president position. 
Forth: Legislative versus Executive Initiative
According to Figueiredo and Limongi(1996, 1997), after the Constitution of 1988, the presidents in Brazil have had a high degree of success in the enactment of their legislative proposals. They show that “executive initiative accounts for about 85% of the total laws enacted from 1989 to 1994.” They justify this executive preponderance by saying that the extension of three prerogatives powers: “expanding exclusive initiative, establishing urgency time limits for voting procedures according to presidential demands and giving the president provisional decree power.”
Through these three prerogatives, the legislative rule establishes that the Congress works in a joint section. It means that the two Houses, the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, will function together in an abbreviated time(30 days for Provisional Decrees and 45 days for urgency time). During ordinary legislative process, each one of the Houses need to deliberate in the first instance of the permanent committee followed by a plenary deliberation. With these new exclusive initiative, however, the executive can not only abbreviate the time, but also to take advantage by discharging the bill from permanent committee and referred directly to the floor decreasing, thus, some steps of negotiation with the individual legislator. As a consequence of these institutional procedures, it is assumed that the level of freedom of individual legislators reduces because these constitutional rules grant the executive advantages in determining the timing and the content of legislation. Therefore, it is expected that when the legislation takes the form of exclusive executive initiative it is more likely that the legislator will follow the president position.

The Model
Given the assumptions stated above, the probability of legislator’s cooperation can be represented by the following model:

Vijt = 0 + 1 P1.1kt + 2 P1.2kt + 3 P1.3kt + 4 P2kt
                5 Z1.1kt + 6 Z1.2it + 7 Z1.3it + 8 Z1.4i + 9 Z2it + 
                10 I1 + 11 I2 + 12 I3 + 13 E + 
                14 C1 + 15 C2 + 16 C3 + 17 C4 + 18 C5 + 

As mentioned before, the legislator has basically two patterns of votes. First, party vote, when he decides to follow the party leader indication and as a consequence cooperates with the president; and personnel vote, to follow the constituency interests. It is assumed the value of 1 if the individual legislator {i = 1,.....,n} decides to cooperate with the president, and 0 otherwise. Thus, these patters of legislator’s vote can be represented as Vij = {0, 1}. It is also assumed that the individual legislator’s vote varies according to different issues {j=1,.....,k} which has been voted in a such context “t.”
P1 means what the individual legislator can get by following president position. Indeed, P1 is understood as the set of monetary and political transfers to reimburse the possible legislator’s costs for voting for president interests. It will be estimated in terms of how close the individual legislator is surrounded and constrained by the party leader and the president. In other words, it is assumed that how closer is the legislator from his/her party and executive, grater will be her constraint to follow the president’s preferences. 
Therefore, P1.1kt represents the number of Ministers who belong to the individual legislator’s party during the moment in which a such issue has been voted in the Congress.
P1.2kt represents the number of public jobs in the first and second rank appointed by the legislator or his/her party during the moment in which a such issue has been voted in the Congress.
P1.3kt designates the level of government public spending in the legislator’s state or municipality. In other words, this variable tries to measure if there is any correlation between legislator’s vote and a consequent increase of government public spending in his state. There are strong reasons to expect positive correlation between government spending and legislator’s cooperation with the executive. The inflow of federal funds to state is affected by a large number of actors, but the executive plays an important role in order to obtain compliance of his parliamentary support. 
P2kt represents the popularity of the president with the public in the moment “t” that a such issue has been voted in the Congress.
Z1.1kt symbolizes the partisan influence on individual legislators. In other words, it measure if the individual legislator takes part of president party coalition during the moment of voting a such issue in the Congress. It will assume the value of 0 if he does not take part from the president’s coalition, and 1 if he does.
Z1.2it, on the other hand, means the total size of all presidential coalition(percentage of seats in the Congress)
Z1.3it designates the level of legislator’s party discipline in a such time t. 
Z1.4i designates the level of discipline of the individual legislator inside his party.
Z2it depicts the individual legislator’s ideological predisposition. It is assumed the vavue of 0 if the legislator is classified as left, 1center, and 2 right of the ideological spectrum of the Brazilian Congress.
I1 means the hierarchical position of the individual legislator inside his party. It will assume the value of 1 if the legislator is a party leader, and 0 if he is not.
I2 designates the hierarchical position of the individual legislator inside the legislative committee. It will assume the value of 1 if the legislator is a committee leader, and 0 if he/she is not.
I3 represents if the individual legislator takes part of the Mesa Diretora. It will assume the value of 1 if the individual legislator has been a member of the Mesa Diretora, and 0 if he has not been.
“E” represents who takes the legislative initiative. It will assume the value of 1 if the president takes the its exclusive initiative, and 0 otherwise.
C1 corresponds to the spatial distribution of votes that the individual legislator got in his state in the last election. It is atributed the value of 1 if he got a wide distribution of votes, and 0 if he got a narrow distribution of votes in his state.
C2 represents the the influence of the individual legislator to run for reelection. It is taken for granted the value of 0 if the idividual legislator decide to run for reelection, and 1 otherwise.
C3 denotes the level of finantial dependence in the legislator campaing. 
C4 the level of influence of Governors and Mayors.
C5 the number of pork barrel projects presented and/or approved by the individual legislator in the budget committee specially oriented to benefit directly his/her contituency.

Hypothesis
These hypothesis are considered in terms of probability of legislator’s cooperation with the president’s position in Congress. Thus, positive means cooperation, and negative means not cooperation.
1) The Significance of Presidential Transfers: 
In its relationship with the president, the legislator must obtain at least as much utility of his/her reservation utility in order to cooperate with the president. Hence, the legislator’s individual rationality constraint (IRC) or “cooperation” constraint is accordingly: 1, 2, and 3 > 0 (should be greater than zero), that is, the coefficient for the variable P1.1 P1.2   P1.3  should be positive(+).  Otherwise ( 1, 2, and 3 < 0), the legislator will prefer to vote according his/her private preferences and only to get his reservation utility, in this case, reelection. The legislator’s IRC express the requirement that the mechanism that the president is designing must offer the legislators at least as much for their participation (cooperation with president’s interest) as their best outside option (not cooperation, voting according to his/her private interests, personal vote). 
2) The importance of Presidential Public Approval: 
Although the literature findings concerning the effects of presidential popularity are limited and indirect mostly correlated to constrain support from president’s party members than form opposition members, it is expected in this model that its coefficient 4 should be positive(+).    
3) The importance of Party and Ideology:
Although the political and ideological classification of parties in Left, Center, and Right seems arbitrary and imprecise especially in terms of Brazil where the fragility and heterogeneity of the parties are broadly recognized, it is possible and helpful to label them as such since the pattern among them has been very consistent and uniform after 1989. As is recalled by Limongi and Figueiredo(1995), the parties’ voting in the Brazilian Congress have displayed a ideological continuum from left to right where coalitions are the rule of the game. In addition, the authors show that, in contrast to what is generally expected, the parties’ voting on the plenary assembly is perfectly foreseeable. In other words, it is quite possible to anticipate the result of a plenary voting with a great level of certainty because legislators are expected to follow the party leader’s indication. 
Therefore, for both variables, partisan and ideological predispositions, will be taken as a reference this ideological classification right, center, and left. For instance, as the current government coalition is largely know as a center-right coalition, it is expected that those legislators who take part of this government coalition should present the party and ideological coefficients (5 and 9) positive.
With regard to the level of discipline of both individual legislator and his/her political party, it is expected that their coefficients 7 and 8 will be positive 1 if the individual legislator follow his/her party leader indication, and 0 otherwise.
4) The Role of Institutional Variables:
Institutional  arrangements do not determine what coalitions can actually be formed, and when. The success of the president’s coalitions, indeed, depends on the number of representatives and Senators who are either natural supporters of the president’s position (because of shared perspectives, interests, or electoral initiatives) or can be persuaded to go along(enough transfers from the president to overcome the legislator’s costs). However, they exert a decisive constrain determine the number and sequence of legislative decision making and veto points, affect the number of supporters the president needs, and help to shape the access of noncongressional allies and opponents to the legislative process. 
Therefore, it will be expected that I1, I2, and I3 (respectively, legislator’s hierarchical position as a leader either in his party, or in the Legislative Committee, and/or in the Mesa Diretora) exercise a decisive constraint in shaping legislator’s choice by decreasing the margin of legislator’s freedom. Thus, if the individual legislator exerts a leader position in his party, Committee, or Mesa Diretora it is expected that their coefficient values (10, 11, and 12) should be positive.
5) The importance of Constituency Variables:
Constituency variables can be measured in terms of how strong is the legislator’s constituency constraints as a follows: 
•	To measure the increase or decrease in the flow of bills (pork barrel projects) that the individual legislator have presented in the Congress(especially in the Budget committee) in which carry out directly benefits for his constituency groups (local governments, local business elites, professionals groups, and so forth). 
•	To investigate the frequency of the relationship between distributive state and level spending and vote distribution and financial support for legislators mainly through the Budget Committee. The goal of investigation is to provide evidence that increased federal spending in some states could help individual legislators win votes.
•	To measure the amount of legislator’s constituency services (such as agricutural payments, special tariffs, subsides; social security; low-income house payments; build new highway, and so on) and election outcomes. 
Regarding individual legislator’s municipal distribution of votes(C1), it is expected that its coefficient (14) will be positive if the legislator has wide distribution of votes -- as the constituency constraints are supposed to be weak  -- and negative if  the distribution of votes is concentrated (bailiwicks) once he will be more likely be more constrained by their constituency’s preferences than legislators who have a more spread distribution of votes.
If the legislators decide to run for reelection(C2), the coefficient 15 is anticipated to be negative. Otherwise, if he decides does not run for reelection, 15 will be positive. Concerning the C3 and  C4, it is expected that their coeficients 16 and 17 will be negative if the legislator has not financial autonomy from interest groups and if the legislator will suffer a strong influence from governor or mayor, and positive otherwise. Concerning C5 (the number of pork barrel projets in the Budget Committe), it is expected that if the individual legislator has been very concerned in presenting and/or approving projects specially oriented to benefit his/her constituency in the Budget Committee its coefficient 18 will be negative, and positive otherwise.

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