“Assembleia Fiscaliza” e o controle parlamentar: a eficácia do projeto da Assembleia Legislativa de Minas Gerais na fiscalização do executivo mineiro

Abstract

The Constitutional Amendments 99/2019 and 103/2019 changed the article 54 of the Constitution of the State of Minas Gerais (CE/MG) in order to improve the Legislative’s supervision over the performance of the State Executive. These normative changes originated the “Assembleia Fiscaliza” project, whose regulation was given by the Resolution of the Board 2.705/2019 of the Legislative Assembly of Minas Gerais (ALMG). The initiative seeks to promote periodic reunions in which authorities from the State Executive attend the ALMG and provide information on how public management is been carried out in recent months. State legislators inquire these authorities, and, after the meetings, parliamentary committees can also approve written requests for information to those authorities. In this work, we sought to investigate the effectiveness of the Assembleia Fiscaliza project as a parliamentary control procedure. It starts from the hypothesis that the procedure introduced in article 54 of CE/MG has the potential to grant greater horizontal accountability and to stimulate vertical accountability. However, considering the assumption that legislators are boundedly rational agents, as stated by Luc J. Wintgens, and that the validity of the norm takes place in a contextualized way, the regulation of article 54 of CE/MG needs to be revisited and confronted with the practice of the Assembleia Fiscaliza project. The case study was carried out from the analysis of the normative framework of Assembleia Fiscaliza and from a bibliographic survey on parliamentary control, which then helped to conduct the empirical verification. The empirical analysis was carried out by collecting cross-sectional data regarding meetings of the 1st cycle of Assembleia Fiscaliza – from June 10th 2019 to June 19th 2019 – as well as requests made by the parliamentary committees from those meetings. The participation of state legislators as inquirers, how inquiries have been used, and the realization of the purpose of the requirements have all been taken into consideration in the analysis as factors that could influence the efficacy of Assembleia Fiscaliza project.