Ministry appointment and partisan importance in the Brazilian 1945-64 democracy: a comparative analysis with current democracy

Abstract

Differently to what happens in today’s Brazilian democracy, during the system of 1946-64 the Executive branch often had not prevailed in the legislative process and frequently had not succeed in approving its agenda – due to institutional dissimilarities as the lack of agenda power, the absence of Medidas Provisórias and the regimental weakness of the party leaders into the Congress. But there is a lot of uncertainty with respect to that period in what regards the political importance of the political parties – that we imagine to be derived today from those institutional frameworks that lacked before. In order to fill part of those gaps, this paper tests for the previous Brazilian democracy the hypothesis that Meneguello forwarded to analyze today’s democracy: an evidence of the political parties importance in the political system should reside on the confirmation of Gamson’s assumption that the number of ministries that a party receives is proportional to the number of chairs it holds at the Lower Chamber. Tests also reproduce analytical approaches used by Amorim Neto to study the cabinet formation at the Brazilian recent democracy. And as the preliminary results suggest that yes, the previous democracy also had coalition formations under a presidential system based on trusting the well functioning of the party system, this research also try to afford an explanation to why presidents would share the offices with other parties, just as nowadays, even in a political system marked by indexes of discipline and Rice indexes far lower than the current ones.