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

Ballot structure, candidate race, and vote choice in Brazil

Although racial injustice and inequality are widely acknowledged in Brazil, recent experimental research concludes that citizens there do not rely on racial cues when voting. In this article, we test for the impact of candidate race on vote choice. We find evidence of identity-based voting in Brazil that interacts with ballot size. When facing a short ballot with only a few candidates, most subjects chose candidates without regard to race or color. But when presented with a large ballot with many candidates, white and brown subjects show a significant preference for same-race candidates. Selfidentified black subjects, however, demonstrated a strong and consistent preference for black candidates regardless of choice set size. These results are particularly important given Brazil's electoral rules that provide voters with overwhelming numbers of candidates from which to choose

Methodological considerations for students of Mexican legislative politics: selection bias in roll-call votes

This paper examines the nature of the data available for studying legislative behavior in Mexico. In particular, we evaluate a potentially serious problem: only a subset of roll-call votes have been released for the critical transition period of 1998-2006. We test whether this subset is a representative sample of all votes, and thus suitable for study, or whether it is biased in a way that misleads scholarship. Our research strategy takes advantage of a partial overlap between two roll call vote reporting sources by the Chamber of Deputies: the site with partial vote disclosure, created in 1998 and still in place today; and the site with universal vote disclosure since 2006 only. An examination of the data generation and publication mechanisms, comparing different estimations of legislative behavior, reveals that omitted votes reduce the precision of estimates but do not introduce bias. Scholarship of the lower chamber can therefore proceed with data that we make public with the publication of the paper