Does cabinet instability matter? Understanding the legislative production of Brazilian ministries

Published in BRAZILIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION - RAP, 2022

Abstract

What explains the legislative production of Brazilian ministries? The article explores the relationship between ministerial instability and the performance of ministries measured by the number of legislative proposals they produced between 1999 and 2014. Using an exponential average model with endogenous regressors, we argue that the change of ministers negatively affects the entities’ legislative production. The ideological distance between the minister’s and president’s parties and the prior legislative expertise of the ministers, have a pronounced impact on the level of legislative production on the government’s political agenda. The results corroborate the perception of the negative effect of ministerial instability on the efficiency of the conception and formulation of public policies and contribute to the understanding of legislative production and bureaucratic performance of Brazilian presidentialism

Keywords: ministries; legislative production; instability; party ideology; presidentialism

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