Power, Composition, and Decision Making: The Behavioral Consequences of Institutional Reform on Brazil's Supremo Tribunal Federal

How does a court's policy-making authority shape the nature of judicial behavior? We argue that judicial systems that limit policy-making authority also discourage the politicization of courts, encouraging judges to think narrowly about the interests of litigating parties. In contrast, granting a court high policy-making authority—affecting potentially thousands of cases and other branches of government—naturally encourages judges to consider broader ideological principles. Typically, unraveling cause and effect would be difficult, as judicial behavior and institutions are usually stable and endogenous. But an especially stark sequence of political and institutional changes in Brazil affords analytic leverage to explore these questions. A series of judicial reforms greatly expanded the Brazilian Supreme Court's authority, and our analysis of judicial decisions shows the emergence of a political cleavage on the court after these reforms. (JEL C140, K39, K49

Sources of the Incumbency (Dis)Advantage

An emerging literature finds that legislators frequently suffer a negative incumbency advantage in developing countries but disagrees as to the sources of this anti-incumbent bias. We contribute to this literature by examining the case of Brazil, where the extant literature predicts a large incumbency disadvantage. Building a new methodology for OLPR which leverages both inter- and intraparty thresholds, we find, contrary to expectations, a large ‘positive’ incumbency advantage. We further exploit within-country variation and show that this advantage appears to be largest in the least developed areas. Our results suggest that previous work may be confounding country-specific factors with development levels