Responsividade e responsabilidade no presidencialismo brasileiro: 1995 a 2022

Abstract

Assuming the premise that political parties expected to implement in government, at least partially, the policies advocated during the electoral campaigns, this dissertation aims to assess the effects of coalition's composition and presidential term length on governing party’s capacity to accommodate the structural tension between responsiveness and responsibility in Brazil. The investigation covers the period from 1995 to 2022, encompassing the administrations of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Dilma Rousseff, Michel Temer, and Jair Bolsonaro. A mixed-methods approach is employed, combining qualitative content analysis of party manifestos and televised campaign broadcasts (Horário Gratuito de Propaganda Eleitoral – HGPE) with statistical modeling via Negative Binomial Regression (NB), suitable for discrete and overdispersal data. Six econometric models were estimated: two focusing on the overall frequency of responsive and responsible actions, and four addressing the specific subdimensions of responsibility – namely, social, international, fiscal-political, and other categories. The empirical findings reveal convergent patterns between responsiveness and responsibility, highlighting three key results: (1) presidents serving their first term are less likely to issue normatively justified actions in either dimension, suggesting a pattern of strategic caution; (2) greater coalition cohesion is systematically associated with lower levels of normative production in both dimensions, indicating that more stable arrangements prioritize institutional maintenance over programmatic innovation; and (3) ideological heterogeneity within the governing coalition exerts a positive effect on the volume of justified actions, supporting the hypothesis that plural coalitions require increased normative legitimation efforts by the Executive. These findings suggest that presidential behavior is not solely driven by ideological orientation or public pressure, but rather emerges from a complex institutional architecture involving programmatic bargaining, coordination costs, and adaptive strategies of governance within multiparty contexts.