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The article analyzes executive-legislative relations in Uruguay between 1985 and 2005. It demonstrates that even after controlling for ideological affinity and acknowledging that ideology affects presence in the cabinet, legislators whose factions hold ministerial positions behave in a more progovernment way than their ideology would predict. This result not only shows that coalitions "work" but suggests that they work because the presidents use resources under their control to attract support from legislators. This article presents a systematic analysis of executive-legislative relations in multiparty settings that builds on the finding that nonideologically contiguous coalitions often form to separate the ideological from the strategic determinants of legislative behavior. It also contributes to the literature by presenting a new set of roll call data and, more generally, highlights the risks of attempting to infer ideology directly from legislative behavior in presidential multiparty settings. Adapted from the source document.

This article estimates the electoral effects of conditional cash transfers (CCTs) in three presidential elections in Brazil. It analyzes municipal-level electoral results and survey data and employs matching techniques to reduce causal inference problems typical of observational studies. Results show that CCTs are associated with increased performance by the incumbent party presidential candidate in all three elections but that these effects have been reaped by incumbents from different parties. It also shows that CCTs have had no discernible impacts on party identification and the performance of incumbent parties in legislative elections. Together, these findings suggest that CCTs are significant in the short run, but lack the capacity to induce substantial long-term voter realignments. Adapted from the source document.

In this paper I show that voting patterns of Brazilian legislators depart from their ideology in ways that suggest that the president plays an important role in influencing their behavior. Moreover, statistical analysis indicates that this influence is channeled through the distribution of pork and nominations to cabinet positions. Ideology not only fails to fully explain the patterns of legislative behavior observed since the return to democracy, but there is evidence that ideological behavior has declined over time. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractThe 2006 presidential elections in Brazil witnessed a dramatic shift of Lula's voting base away from the more developed regions of the country and towards the poorest areas. This paper uses municipal-level data to argue that while this shift represents an important change for the support base of Lula himself, it can mostly be explained by the government's massive cash transfer programme, the Bolsa Familia, and by the empirical regularity with which presidential candidates from the incumbent party in Brazil always perform better in the less developed regions of the country.