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Discipline and cohesiveness of political parties are essential for legislatures to engage in policy-making. Parties in Brazil have historically been considered ideologically weak and uninvolved in policy issues of national importance. Analyses of roll-call votes, however, have shown that parties can be disciplined government supporters. This paper tests the claim that Brazilian parties have also become programmatic actors in their own right. The paper uses statutory delegation content to test whether voting discipline translates into greater influence on the substance of legislation. The data analysis shows that party unity among parties of the government coalition does not affect statutory content. Opposition parties, by contrast, are more likely to reduce the executive's discretion when they are more unified. Overall, the support for the hypothesis of programmatic parties is weak, given that executive authorship is the strongest determinant of statutory content.

Discipline and cohesiveness of political parties are essential for legislatures to engage in policy-making. Parties in Brazil have historically been considered ideologically weak and uninvolved in policy issues of national importance. Analyses of roll-call votes, however, have shown that parties can be disciplined government supporters. This paper tests the claim that Brazilian parties have also become programmatic actors in their own right. The paper uses statutory delegation content to test whether voting discipline translates into greater influence on the substance of legislation. The data analysis shows that party unity among parties of the government coalition does not affect statutory content. Opposition parties, by contrast, are more likely to reduce the executive's discretion when they are more unified. Overall, the support for the hypothesis of programmatic parties is weak, given that executive authorship is the strongest determinant of statutory content. Adapted from the source document.

In the course of the legislative process, legislators choose how much policy discretion to delegate to the executive branch. Uncertainty about policy outcomes and bureaucratic intentions weighs heavily in such decisions. In Brazil, executive control over the budget creates uncertainty about the availability of discretionary spending, which results in comparatively high levels of delegation in the legislature's direct‐spending decisions. I demonstrate that sidelining the legislature from the budget in order to insulate government spending from political pressures diminishes the value of legislative work in Brazil and reinforces historical patterns of policymaking centered on the federal executive.

This article seeks to understand multiparty cabinets in presidential systems. The article applies theories developed for parliamentary systems to the case of Brazil and uses ministerial endorsements of executive bills to test whether multiparty cabinets are anchored in an office or a policy‐seeking compact. The analysis shows that participation in policy making within the cabinet is highly concentrated in technical ministries and ministries occupied by the president's party. The analysis also shows that ideological heterogeneity is a significant predictor of ministerial endorsement, indicating that under conditions of ideological proximity, presidential cabinets are able to share policy‐making responsibilities.