About political analysis
Whoever frequents this site, and follows Brazilian politics at all, must think it is awkward that a site dedicated to Brazilian politics makes no reference to the current crop of scandals stories involving members of the Lula government.
Well, I have a confession to make: I am not a very good political analyst. I need to gather data, test models, and think over the issues before making any statement (at least in writing!) So, even though I plan to address at least in passing the “Mensalão” (practice of delivering monthly payments to deputies supportive of the government coming from a misterious source), I don’t plan do it here. But keep on reading this entry if you want to know how I think this site can help you understand Brazilian politics.
However, I do think that figures such as the ones I present here every so often, aid a great deal in understanding what is going on. Take the two top parties in the figure, PFL and PSDB. Together they formed the core support for the Cardoso presidency policies. We see in the figure that these deputies take positions quite far away from those of the current government.
The numbers in parentheses indicate the change in the number of deputies of each party, and we see that PSDB and PFL lost 9 deputies each. Notice how deputies that exited the PSDB (the red dots with no corresponding blue dots) are mostly to the left. It remains to be shown if they exited because they were in the left; or if they appear in the left because they changed to parties that pressured them to behave differently. See Scott Desposato’s forthcoming paper (AJPS) on party switching in Brazil.
The individual names also have a story. José Carlos Aleluia (PFL) is the minority leader in the Chamber. Raquel Teixeira (PSDB) is a freshman deputy from Goiás that accused Sandro Mabel (from PL, lower in the figure) of offering her financial incentives to change parties. Her roll call positions put her close to the median of the current members of the PSDB.