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Severino Cavalcanti renounced last week as federal deputy and as president of the camara. The law requires a new president to be elected within 5 legislative days, which means that today we will know who the next president will be. The election is by runoff majority vote. If no candidate receives 257 votes, there will be a runoff election.

Although about ten candidates are competing for the position, the race has narrowed down to essentially three candidates. José Thomaz Nonô (PFL-AL) is the main opposition candidate. He is currently the Vice-President (actually, temporarily President, since Severino stepped down) of the Camara. The PT and PCdoB are supporting Aldo Rebelo (PC do B-SP). Aldo was Lula’s minister for political relations (or something like that) but was outed in the last reshuffle. Finally, there is Ciro Nogueira (PP-PI). Considered the political heir of Severino, he is more centrist than the other two candidates.

Spatially, I think the competition looks like this:

The valence issue reflects how much the deputy will help or detract from the already shaken Camara reputation in the press and, most importantly, among voters. It is clear that a candidate from the opposition will help it the most, distancing the chamber somewhat from the government. It is also clear that the election of Ciro would be a reenactment of the election of Severino earlier this year. Although it is likely a mistake to say that Ciro is the same as Severino, they do represent the same parties and factions in Congress.

I think it is safe to say that Ciro will receive many less votes than what the press in Brazil has been claiming he would, perhaps 10%. In a 3 way race, the median voter can be squeezed by the outer candidates. The Executive’s actions so far demonstrate that it can be a quite powerful squeeze, by promising lots of pork to secure support from deputies (in particular from the PL) to Aldo.

The second round will probably happen. And then, it’s anyone’s guess. It depends on two things: a) on how much support the government can buy in the hours that follow; and b) how do deputies at the center expect next year’s elections to play out.

The past week in Brazil was marked by three main events. First, the president of the Chamber of Deputies, Severino Cavalcanti (PP/PB), was forced to step down from office and renounce his mandate of Federal Deputy due to the emergence of strong evidences linking him to corruption charges. Second, due to the vacancy in the Presidency, a new election for President of the Chamber of Deputies was scheduled for Wednesday of next week. Two main candidates, Aldo Rebelo (PCdoB/SP), supported by the government, and José Thomas Nôno (PFL/AL), the opposition candidate, are campaigning hard for the position. Third, the Workers’ Party election for its national and state directorates is coming to a close and the candidate from the Campo Majoritário, Deputy Ricardo Berzoini is leading the race for president of the party. It is not yet decided, but apparently Raul Pont, state deputy from Rio Grande do Sul and from the left wing faction Democracia Socialista will defeat Valter Pomar from the Articulação de Esquerda in the race for the second round of the elections.

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Very busy week so far in Brasilia. Here are the most recent developments for those not following the Brazilian newspapers:

1. Three months after his first hearing at the Camara ethics committee in wich he jump started the current crisis, Roberto Jefferson, federal deputy from Rio de Janeiro, lost his mandate yesterday. The roll call was secret, with 313 _yea_ votes (in favor of stripping his mandate) and 156 against. An absolute majority (257) deputies were needed. Jefferson promised to become a singer if that happened, so I guess the suffering isn’t over.

2. Paulo Maluf and his son, Flavio, were put under arrest due to corruption charges and attempt to intimidate a witness. Maluf comes from the largest and richest state in Brazil, Sao Paulo. He was mayor and twice a presidential candidate. Prosecutors believe he skimmed hundreds of millon dollars from public contracts during his term as mayor of Brazilian biggest city.

3. In a scandal involving much smaller sums of money, the president of the Camara, Severino Cavalcanti, is being accused of extortion by the owner of one of the _restaurants_ in the Camara’s building (Sebastiao Buani). The owner claims Cavalcanti requested a monthly “stipend” to extend the concession of the restaurant for a couple of years while he was 1st Secretary of the Camara back in 2002. Severino claimed he signed no such contract, but yesterday a personal check was uncovered, endorsed by Severino’s secretary. The secretary in question, after spending several hours with Severino yesterday, claimed the money was a (undeclared) donation to Severino’s son political campaign. The secretary, however, stated to the police just a couple of days ago that she never received any money from Buani. Most parties expect Severino to renounce or risk losing his mandate.

If you read portuguese and want to follow closely the crisis in real time, check the “Blog do Noblat”. Noblat, a well known and respected journalist who was previously editor in charge of the main newspaper in Brasilia, decided to go online and is making waves with his coverage of the scandal.

This year, Brazilian democracy celebrates its 20th anniversary. Meanwhile, the country faces its most severe political crisis in years. What better way to say farewell to teenage years than with an overwhelming personality crisis? That is exactly what Brazilian democracy is going through now. As an insecure ex-teen, caught short-handed after doing something really, really stupid, Brazilian democracy attempts to affirm its maturity amidst insecurities and hesitations.

Certainly, tracing parallels between personality traits and political regimes is quite tricky. We do not want render ourselves to archaic ideas of national character. Instead, regimes are formed by a plethora of institutions, ideas and interests. Variation in behaviors, creeds and expectations is the soul of democracy. Still, the analogy between regimes and personality traits is useful because it allows us to highlight two aspects of the current crisis that have not been sufficiently stressed.

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The last month in Brazil was chaotic. I headed back home hoping for some peace and quiet, before moving to my new position in the University of Arizona and what do I get? I find the country engulfed in its largest corruption scandal since the impeachment of Collor de Melo in the early 90’s. What is worse, the corruption scheme is incomparably more generalized and systematic than any seen before.

The main accusations against the PT (Workers’ Party) were made by Federal Deputy Roberto Jefferson, the President of PTB (Brazilian Labor Party). Facing serious accusations of benefiting from corruption in the post office services, Jefferson, a former ally of the PT administration, announced that he would not go down alone. In fact, he promptly denounced a very well organized scheme of bribing Federal Deputies to vote in favor of executive branch proposals.
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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.

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I spent almost an entire day working to produce this figure. That’s right, a full day of work to produce this entry in the blog! (higher qualiy pdf version here.)

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What are the factors voters weigh more heavily when choosing a candidate for Federal Deputy? Do voters want their representatives to make national level policies or do they expect them to work for their localities of origin, investing federal monies at the municipal level? Does casework play an important role in vote choice? All of these questions are in the essence of voter/representative relation and in orienting the behavior of legislators once elected. The Brazilian system has been repeatedly characterized as one in which federal transfers to the municipality, arranged by Federal Deputies through budgetary amendments, plays a central role in incumbents’ electoral success. If these transfers are in fact to affect electoral success, as they seem they do, they must resonate with voters’ expectations. The 2002 Two City Panel Study, conducted by Barry Ames, Andrew Baker and Lucio Renno provides an answer to this question.

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One of my main research areas is spatial analysis of roll call data. If you keep on reading this site you will learn more about it then you would like to know about it. At this time I only itend to show one of the cool things it can do, namely identifying the left-right positions of parties in legislatures using individual deputies roll call decisions.

The following figure plots the region where the central 50% of the deputies of each party are expected to be in. You can get the roll call votes I used to generate the map right here .

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We know very little about how Brazilian voters’ choose their candidates for Federal Deputy, what they expect from their representatives in the Chamber of Deputies and what they actually know about both candidates and representatives. There aren’t many survey studies designed specifically to focus on the local level and that include several items on legislative elections. With this in mind, we (Barry Ames, Andrew Baker and Lucio Renno) designed and collected a four-wave public opinion panel dataset in two mid-size Brazilian cities during the 2002 elections. One of the many goals of the project is to investigate vote choice for Federal Deputy. By focusing on the city level, the study attenuates the enormous national fragmentation in number of candidates and each candidate’s number of supporters is large enough to allow analysis of vote choice. Several questionnaire items, in several of the waves (some repeated in all four waves) focused exclusively in the elections for the Chamber of Deputies.

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