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This paper analyses the development of the discretionary system of bureaucratic positions in Brazil. On the one hand, the research literature relates the allocation of public offices to the coalitional presidential system. On the other hand, this literature pointed out initiatives aiming to professionalise the bureaucracy and strengthen state careers. In this context, the presidential dilemmas refer to choosing between seeking support from the coalition by appointing party members and controlling public policies by nominating individuals aligned with the president's preferences. In this article, theories of institutional change are the main theoretical framework for analysing the progression of rules on appointments to public offices and their impacts on the portraits of nominees. Through a case study of Brazil, the paper assesses the congruence between theoretical predictions and empirical evidence regarding the relationship between institutions and the distribution of public sector posts. The methodology comprises bibliographic research, documental analysis, and descriptive statistics. The documentary search concentrated on the rules regarding the presidential coordination bodies and compulsory percentages of appointed career civil servants. The results demonstrated that the laws were not effective as federal public bodies did not comply with the rules. Furthermore, the quantity of career civil servants in discretionary public offices was already high before the establishment of compulsory percentages. The role of coordination bodies varied across the different administrations. Despite the centralisation of presidential power, evidence points out that public managers are partially free to choose their staff and only sometimes comply with the legal requirements. Thus, the conclusions reinforce the need to include informal institutions in further analysis. Besides promoting a contextual description of Brazil, the paper contributes to theory-testing and theory-building on the relationship between institutions and the distribution of public offices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the changes in the internal structure of the departments of the Brazilian Executive Branch between 1990 and 2014. The general argument is that in coalition presidentialism, the president positions himself in a complex delegation network in which he faces several agency costs and, to deal with this, relies on a toolbox. The literature points to some of these tools; however, administrative power, related to the structural dimension of the departments, has remained underexplored. In this sense, the article aims to contribute to this debate by answering the following question: what factors influenced the structural changes in the departments of the Brazilian executive in the years 1990 to 2014? In other words, is administrative power a resource used by the president to deal with agency costs stemming from her relationship to coalition parties? What other factors might influence the president's decision to use such power? This longitudinal study is explanatory and takes a quantitative approach. The results show that the president cautiously uses his administrative power of agency design to strengthen the structures of the most salient departments to his agenda and of the more institutionalized departments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The formation of multiparty governments increases the risk of asymmetry of information between principals and agents so that the cabinet's policy conflicts are reflected in the behavior of parties in parliament. Several studies reveal that mutual control between cabinet parties is a way to compensate for the loss of information inherent in the delegation. While analysts often focus on the policy-making process, I argue that there is a more diverse set of strategies that allow parties to scrutinize policies implemented by their cabinet partners. To test this argument, I analyze the multiparty governments formed in Brazil between 1995 and 2014. I use network analysis and machine learning--Gibbs Sampling Method, Bayesian algorithm derived from Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)--to show that, in situations in which ministerial portfolios are distributed to actors with different policy preferences, parties intensify the use of Information Requirements (RIC), an important tool for horizontal control, to monitor the ministries, policies, and programs that interest them. The structure of the intra-cabinet control networks varies according to the importance of the ministries: the parties allocated in the ministries with the largest portion of the federal budget--those with the most resources for the implementation of public policies--are the actors with the greatest degree of centrality in the intracabinet mutual control networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the dynamics of political control between the Executive and Legislative in coalition governments, focusing on the effects of tasks delegation to the parties of multiparty cabinet government. We argue that the chances of horizontal control based on monitoring of mutual coalition parties vary according to the party, cabinet and characteristics of parliamentary committees. The empirical reference of the analysis corresponds to the presidential cabinets in Brazil in the period from 1995 to 2010. Results demonstrate that the ability of horizontal control over a policy area by the ministerial party is related to the subject area considered, to the characteristics of the governing coalition and to the parties that occupy the ministries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the recent analysis of presidentialism has been based on the assumption that executive-legislative confrontation creates simultaneous conditions for policy stability and regime breakdown. In the first section of the paper, I show that there is an inherent logical tension between these two predictions and that they rely on contradictory assumptions. In the second section, I develop a model of executive-legislative deadlock and argue that regime instability is more likely when partisan players are unilaterally impatient, when institutional design is biased in favor of one party, and when the number of parties is greater. In the third section, I test the predictions of the model using time-series cross-section data for 19 presidential countries in the Western Hemisphere between 1950 and 2000. Finally, I discuss how this approach illuminates some empirical puzzles like the historical survival of American presidentialism and the lower levels of regime instability created by executive-legislative deadlock in Latin America in the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]