Redes de proteção: incentivos, escolhas e comportamento na política brasileira.

Abstract

The structure of the Brazilian federal government, very wide and decentralized, provides a large amount of resources which are usually perceived by the political actors as important factors for the conformation of their preferences and, consequently, their choices and decisions. These resources - budgetary, administrative and financial - acting asinstitucional constraints, allow the political actors to identify and to rank their preferences and, doing so, to produce the intelligibility that is absolutely necessary to equilibrate the political games. In this sense, the burocratic structure of the federal government and its offices functionin Brazil as a kind of general equivalent, that can be use in the political bargains. So, the process of appropriation of these resources by the policital actors contributes: a) to minimize zero sum situations in the political arena, by elevating the amout of rewards; b) to decrease the transaction costs that, on ad hoc political negotiation, tend to be very elevated; c) to build networks which protect or minimize, for individual actors, the damages caused for failures in the electoral arena.