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Latin America contains roughly half of the world's countries that use compulsory voting, but this electoral institution has received only limited attention from researchers. This article examines the determinants of voter turnout in the world's largest electorate subject to mandatory voting, that of Brazil. In analyzing data from six national legislative elections held in Brazil between 1986 and 2006, the study finds that the impact of compulsory laws varies across social and economic groups. From a methodological perspective, the article argues that "compulsoriness" of mandatory voting legislation can be modeled by taking into account both exemptions to the law and the relevance of potential sanctions against non-voters. The issue of enforcement must be considered if we are to develop comprehensive models of electoral participation under conditions of compulsory voting.

Examines conservative transitions to democracy & the role of ex-authoritarians in democratic institution building in Brazil. A case study of the Brazilian National Congress & questionnaire data from congressional surveys conducted 1990 (N = 249) & 1993 (N = 185) reveal behavioral differences between ex-authoritarian professional politicians & legislators elected after the transition to democracy. Ex-authoritarian politicians were significantly less likely to engage in legislative activity, including the number of bills passed & attendance at legislative sessions, & were more likely to report frequent contacts with bureaucrats. It is suggested that these differences are due to anti-institutionalism among the ex-authoritarians & a preference for individual clientism. It is argued that the weaker commitment to institutionalism among ex-authoritarian legislatures may undermine attempts at long-term democratic transition. 5 Tables, 57 References. Adapted from the source document.

Is legislative power flowing to the executive branch over time? Beginning in the 1990s, comparativists began to investigate delegation to the executive under different executive formats. Hypothesized causes include collective action problems due to legislative fractionalization, the presence of a dominant pro-executive faction, preference congruence vis-à-vis the head of government, and challenges posed by economic crises. We test these four hypotheses on a data set containing 2,020 country-year observations of democracies and semi-democracies between 1976 and 2014. Using V-Dem data, we derive annualized measures of shifts in executive–legislative relationships. Contrary to stereotypes of executive dominance, relative gains by legislatures are no less frequent than gains by executives, and economic crises do not advantage political executives in consistent ways. Surprisingly, some of the factors expected to benefit executives seem to enhance assembly authority as well. Robust democracy maintains interbranch power relations in equilibrium, while lower levels of polyarchy are associated with greater 'noise' in the relationship.

Scholarship on democratization has made significant progress in theorizing the trajectories of former authoritarian elites, with considerable attention given to authoritarian successor parties in particular. However, the literature has largely failed to contend with cases in which the cohort of former authoritarian officials scatters widely across the political system. We identify these patterns of dispersion as authoritarian diasporas and investigate their potential causes and consequences. In launching a new research agenda on this understudied phenomenon, we review not only contending causes for elite defection from authoritarian ruling parties, but also various options for political reincarnation of these officials (e.g. new party creation, colonization of existing parties, and independent candidacies). We hypothesize that the initial decision to defect is contingent upon a number of intervening regime- and individual-level variables. The destinations of former authoritarian incumbents are shaped by regime legacies, personal political resources, and institutional rules. We conclude by reflecting on the ways in which authoritarian diasporas are likely to be more harmful to democracy than the continued presence of an authoritarian successor party.

On 28 October 2018, far-right populist Jair Bolsonaro captured Brazil's presidency following a highly polarized runoff election against Workers' Party (PT) candidate Fernando Haddad. Multiple crises that have afflicted Brazil since 2013 and the blame Brazilians cast on establishment parties for these travails gave Bolsonaro his opening. Yet while prolonged economic recession, unprecedented corruption, and escalating crime rendered the PT and other major parties vulnerable, Bolsonaro leveraged his fringe status adroitly, sounding a "law and order" and anticorruption message that resonated strongly with the public. The incoming president's authoritarian leanings and illiberal rhetoric present concerns for Brazil's democracy.

This article investigates the causes of party system hyperfragmentation in Brazil. We ask why hyperfragmentation—understood as extreme multipartism that continues to fractionalize—occurs despite significant changes to social cleavages or to electoral rules. Using survey data from federal legislators, we rule out the possibility of new issue-based multidimensionality. Using new estimates of the ideological position of legislative parties, we show that new party entry was not driven by polarization or convergence among traditional parties. We advance an alternative explanation of "fragmentation without cleavages," arguing that changing dynamics of electoral list composition, federal party funding, and coalition management have changed the context of political ambition. For strategically minded elites, it is more attractive than ever before to be a dominant player in a small party.

This article revisits theoretical claims that separation of power systems will display an inverse relationship between presidential power and party strength. Shugart and Carey posited this as a general equilibrium within presidential democracies; later, Shugart proposed that the inverse relationship resulted from founding institutional choices shaped in turn by modes of democratic transition. We test both the equilibrium and the genetic versions of the inverse relationship on a large-N dataset of presidential systems from 1900 to 2016. We find strong significant empirical support for an inverse relationship between executive power and party system institutionalization. However, the relationship is more dynamic than would be predicted by theories based on institutional foundings alone. Through analysis of decree reform in Argentina and Brazil, we observe changes in the expected inverse relationship despite the absence of a constitutional assembly and the lack of any change in electoral rules or party authority.

In recent years, the comparative literature on presidential democracy has emphasized the role of coalitional politics in attenuating the 'perils' facing minority presidents. Yet since the beginning of the Third Wave of democratization in 1974, a surprising number of minority presidents have eschewed cabinet coalitions (defined minimally as the awarding of at least one portfolio to a party other than the nominal party of the president). We observe unipartisan governments just under half of the time. What explains the adoption of single-party cabinets by minority presidents? We employ cross-sectional time-series analysis to address this question. We test hypotheses relating to the size and distribution of the formateur (presidential) and largest non-formateur parties that make up the legislature; the nature of party linkages and ideological distance between the president and possible partisan allies; and the extent of reactive veto powers held by the president.

We examine the distribution and consequences of postmaterialist value orientations among national legislators in Brazil. Using data collected in the Brazilian Legislative Survey in 2013, we undertake the first systematic study of postmaterialism within the National Congress and the party system and map the materialist/postmaterialist scale onto other salient divisions within the political class. We present five main findings. First, political elites evince vastly higher commitment to postmaterialism than the mass public. Second, Brazilian political elites drawn from constituencies with higher human development are more postmaterialist than their counterparts in other constituencies. Third, within the political class, the materialist/postmaterialist cleavage overlaps in important ways with the left–right cleavage. Fourth, although postmaterialism successfully predicts elite attitudes on a number of "new politics" issues that are unrelated to the construction of the postmaterialist scale itself, postmaterialism is a poor predictor of voting behavior on the Congressional floor. Fifth, as others before us, we find institutional factors to be better predictors of legislative voting behavior in the Brazilian context.

This article investigates the electorally expressed ideology of Brazilian voters via ecological analysis at the municipal level between 1994 and 2018. Our purpose is to analyze the main conditioners of aggregated patterns of ideology measured at a high spatial resolution. We test four major explanations for the variation in ideology at the municipal level: the effect of incumbent alignments, social modernization, political pluralism, and social inclusion. We find that although the Brazilian electorate as a whole leans to the right, there has been a 'gravitational effect' exerted by presidential incumbents over local ideology, and during the PT years this was visible in municipal outcomes. However, the vast majority of municipalities tended to the right even during the period of PT national government. During the late Dilma Rousseff years there was a return to a more conservative vote-revealed ideology at the local level, with a sharper veer to the right in the 2016 municipal and 2018 federal elections under Michel Temer. Overall, when we examine local voting in PR elections, we observe that there was no durable electoral realignment in the period under study.

How do political actors value different portfolios? We propose a new approach to measuring portfolio salience by analysing paired comparisons using the Bradley–Terry model. Paired-comparison data are easy to collect using surveys that are user-friendly, rapid, and inexpensive. We implement the approach with serving legislators in Brazil, a particularly difficult case to assess portfolio salience due to the large number of cabinet positions. Our estimates of portfolio values are robust to variations in implementation of the method. Legislators and academics have broadly similar views of the relative worth of cabinet posts. Respondent valuations of portfolios deviate considerably from what would be predicted by objective measures such as budget, policy influence, and opportunities for patronage. Substantively, we show that portfolio salience varies greatly and affects the calculation of formateur advantage and coalescence/proportionality rule measures.