Dinheiro e política: a ocupação de cargos de destaque nas assembleias legislativas subnacionais

Abstract

In democratic systems, the influence of organized interest groups on policymaking is a persistent issue. One of the ways these groups shape policies is financing electoral campaigns, whether to increase the chances of electing politicians with similar interests, to get access to the legislative branch, or to secure the support of legislators endowed with agenda-setting powers. Taking this reasoning into account, this thesis main research question is: What is the effect of the probability of a candidate for legislative office occupy an agendasetting position on the campaign donations they receives from corporate donors? To answer this question, we assembled a dataset with information collected from both electronic websites and formal requests on 15 Brazilian state legislative chambers. Methodologically, we used descriptive statistics, logistic regression to estimate the probability of a given state legislative candidate occupying an agenda-setting position, and linear regression (OLS) to examine the main hypothesis that likely agenda-setters benefit more from corporate donations. This thesis is organized into three chapters: 1. theoretical framework and literature review focused on the Brazilian case; 2. estimation of the probability of candidates occupying agenda-setting positions in state legislative chambers for the legislatures of 2007-2010, 2011-2014 and 2015-2018; and 3. the examination of the thesis central hypothesis. Among other results, for all positions but the party leadership we were able to build highly efficient models to predict the occupation of agenda-setting positions, especially the one of house speaker. Regarding this thesis main hypothesis, we find that donors finance both previous agenda-setters as well as likely candidates to occupy these positions. In particular, the latter effect for the house speaker position on received corporate donations is about 5% or, in other words, for every additional unit on the probability of occupying that position candidates expect to receive about 5% more donations. This effect appears to be consistent, as the probability of holding the speakership is bigger than other probabilities in several different scenarios, including the one in which the previous occupation of agenda-setting positions have a greater standardized beta coefficient.