All powers of the president – 05/14/2023 – Marcus Melo

Brazil has the most powerful executive branch in the democratic world. The statement is by Matthew Shugart and John Carey, in Presidents and Assemblies: constitutional design and electoral dynamics, Cambridge, 1992.

Other works with a regional focus followed and, invariably, Brazil and Chile have alternated in the top positions.

In the index they formulated, they distinguish proactive powers (areas of exclusive initiative, etc) from reactive ones (presidential veto, etc). They conclude that there is an inverse relationship between the constitutional powers of presidents and their party powers (size and cohesion of the president’s party(ies): when constituents expect these to be weak, there will be greater delegation of powers to presidents for fear of future ungovernability . That’s what happened in 1988.

Much has changed since that first pioneering work on measuring constitutional powers. It is true that there have been few substantive changes in reactive powers -in provisional measures and in budgetary powers (impositive budget). However, Executive-Legislative relations have undergone major transformations due to structural alterations that affect the other Powers.

Constitutional powers are the hard core from which the power of the Executive derives, but other variables obviously matter: party power, coalition management style; and others of a contextual nature: his popularity, the state of the economy, the timing of his term (honeymoon versus lame duck).

Among the recent transformations that have markedly altered the Executive-Legislative relationship is the political reform of 2017 and the end of corporate campaign financing. This shock to the system was the institutional response to the monthly allowance and petrolão. The creation of an electoral fund in values ​​unparalleled in any democracy radically altered the dependency of the parties –and consequently of the Legislature– in relation to the Executive Branch.

Another seminal change also discussed in the column is the transformations in the Judiciary.

There are two variables of choice in the presidential decision regarding his coalition: its size and heterogeneity –the ideological breadth of its base– which is of decisive importance for the congruence between the coalition and the congress as a whole. Between a president who delegates to the median distribution of political preferences in Congress and one who tries to impose his agenda unilaterally, there is a continuum of intermediate positions. If Congress has shifted to the right, and the government’s ministerial portfolio and policy initiatives do not reflect this, there will be considerable costs.

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