Takeo Hiroi's Article on Bicameralism

The Dynamics of Lawmakingin a Bicameral LegislatureThe Case of BrazilTaeko HiroiThe University of Texas at El Paso

This article analyzes legislative performance in a nascent presidential bicam-eral democracy, taking Brazil as a case. The author argues that the timing andoutcomes of legislative production are functions of bicameral incongruence,types of bicameralism, sequence of examination, and legislative bargaining.These hypotheses are tested using a new legislative data set from Brazil thatcovers over 3,000 bills submitted to the National Congress since 1988. Eventhistory analyses of these bills show that presidential bicameral (coalitional)majorities, presidential elections, initiation by the lower house, and billsproposing provisional changes raise the chances of a bills approval. Theresults also indicate that the effects of many of these variables are timedependent. In contrast, bicameral incongruence, symmetric bicameralism,and legislative elections either raise the risks of a bills rejection or delay thetiming of its approval. Economic crises increase legislative activities in generalin both approving and rejecting bills.

Keywords: bicameralism; legislative politics; gridlock; Congress; Brazil

This article analyzes the dynamics of lawmaking in a nascent presiden-tial bicameral democracy, taking Brazil as a case. It makes at least twocontributions to comparative legislative politics. First, much of the influen-tial quantitative legislative research both in American and comparative leg-islative studies has focused on either legislative behavior, usually analyzingpatterns of roll-call voting and party discipline (e.g., Ames, 2001; Desposato,2006; Morgenstern, 2002; Poole & Rosenthal, 1997), or the propensity for

Comparative Political StudiesVolume 41 Number 12

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Authors Note: I would like to thank Barry Ames, Christopher Carman, Gaspare M. Genna,Mark Hallerberg, William Keech, Anibal Perez-Linan, Lucio Renno, and two anonymousreviewers for helpful comments. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annualmeetings of the American Political Science Association and Midwest Political ScienceAssociation. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation DissertationImprovement Grant (Grant No. 0315126) and the Andrew Mellon Predoctoral Fellowship, theUniversity of Pittsburgh.

gridlock at the aggregate system level (e.g., Binder, 1999, 2003; Cheibub,Przeworski, & Saiegh, 2004; Krehbiel, 1998; Mayhew, 1991). Studies of law-making per se are surprisingly rare in legislative research except when indi-vidual pieces of legislation are analyzed as case studies (Binder, 2003, ch. 5).1To address this shortfall, I compiled a legislative data set that includes over3,000 bills submitted to the Brazilian Congress since the promulgation of thecountrys 1988 Constitution. Using this data set, I take individual bills as aunit of analysis and examine how various legislative rules, legislative actorspreferences, and environments that shift over time affect the timing and out-comes of lawmaking activities in the Brazilian Congress.

The second contribution of this research pertains to bicameralism. Manyscholars have argued that bicameralism is a key institution that increaseslegislative stability or gridlock (e.g., Binder, 1999, 2003; Bottom, Eavey,Miller, & Victor, 2000; Tsebelis & Money, 1997). Substantial corroboratingevidence has been accumulated in recent years for the U.S. presidential andEuropean parliamentary bicameral systems.2 However, there is virtually noresearch to date on the effects of bicameralism in recently democratizedcountries. Prior studies of legislative politics in new democracies haveinstead concentrated on the executive and presidentiallower chamber rela-tions or modeled bicameral legislatures as if there were only one chamber(e.g., Ames, 2001; Cox & Morgenstern, 2002; Shugart & Carey, 1992).

However, modeling bicameralism explicitly is particularly important forthe study of new democracies. First, many newly democratized presidentialcountries adopted bicameral legislatures. Legislative gridlock that bicamer-alism presumably causes may be detrimental to unconsolidated democra-cies, because it may contribute to democratic instability and breakdown,especially in presidential systems (Linz, 1994). Furthermore, many newdemocracies, where the status quo is not as favorable as that in theadvanced industrial countries, face multitudes of economic and social prob-lems that require immediate and dire changes. If bicameralism indeed hasthe propensity for increasing legislative deadlock as is often argued, it iscrucial to understand when and under what institutional configurationsbicameralism is likely to generate legislative gridlock.

Second, theories of bicameralism have been developed in advancedindustrial countries with consolidated democracies. Although their proposi-tions have found strong support in the empirical studies of OECD countries,we want to know whether they can travel to countries with very differentpolitical and economic environmentsfor example, where democracy hasnot yet been deeply rooted in society, political parties are inchoate andamorphous, and economic stability is rare but much desired.

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This article examines legislative performance in a new presidentialbicameral democracy: Brazil. I argue that the timing and outcomes of leg-islative production are functions of bicameral incongruence, types ofbicameralism, sequence of examination, and legislative bargaining. Eventhistory analyses of Brazilian legislative data (1988-2004) show differentdynamics for bill approval and rejection. Specifically, presidential bicam-eral (coalitional) majorities, presidential elections, initiation by the lowerhouse, and bills proposing provisional changes raise the chances of a billsapproval. The results also indicate that the effects of many of these vari-ables are time dependent. In contrast, bicameral incongruence, symmetricbicameralism, and legislative elections either raise the risks of a bills rejec-tion or delay the timing of its approval. Evidence also shows that acute eco-nomic crisesbut not mere economic problemsstimulate policy-makingactivities both in approving and rejecting economic bills, a finding that isespecially relevant for crisis-prone developing countries.

This article proceeds as follows. The next section lays out theoreticalexpectations derived from the existing literature on lawmaking in a bicam-eral legislature and legislative bargaining. Section 3 outlines the researchdesign and methodology. Section 4 discusses independent and dependentvariables and Brazilian legislative data and the fifth section presents theirestimation results. The final section concludes.

Lawmaking in a Bicameral Legislature

This section generates theoretical predictions about the timing and out-comes of legislative activities. Much of the contemporary debate on leg-islative politics focuses on the conditions that constrain a political systemsability to act promptly and decisively (e.g., Weaver & Rockman, 1993).Past research has shown that a concurrence of the preferences of key leg-islative actors (both collectives and individuals) is crucial for a change of aprevailing policy (Tsebelis, 2002). Where this condition is absent, legisla-tive gridlock is expected. Prior research has also revealed the importance ofbargaining in the timing of legislative enactment (Cox & Kernell, 1991,p. 243). How, then, do bicameralism and bargaining affect the speed andoutcomes of legislation?

Bicameral incongruence and gridlock. Social choice scholars haveargued that bicameralism is an institution that imposes a more stringentcondition for a change of a status quo policy than unicameralism (Hammond

Hiroi / Lawmaking in a Bicameral Legislature 1585

& Miller, 1987; Riker, 1992; Tsebelis & Money, 1997). The gridlock-inducing quality of bicameralism stems from the requirement that concur-rent majorities of two distinct chambers be needed to implement a policychange.3 In the social choice literature, therefore, whether bicameralisminduces policy immobility depends critically on the locations of the twochambers ideal points. In general, the larger the distance between the idealpoints of the two chambers, the greater the size of the bicameral coretheset of all points that cannot be defeated with a given decision-making rule(Hammond & Miller, 1987). As a result, gridlock is more likely as thebicameral incongruence of preferences grows:

Hypothesis 1: Bicameral incongruence increases the likelihood of gridlock.

Generally, the two houses of a bicameral legislature are incongruent if theyhave different partisan compositions and member characteristics.

Legislative bargaining. Even when there is a consensus among legisla-tive actors that some change is preferable to the status quo, they may dis-agree on the details of the new legislation. This leads to bargaining amongrelevant actors. Prolonged bargaining causes significant delays in the pas-sage of new legislation even when the prevailing policy is in no ones inter-est. In fact, delay is a prominent property of legislative bargaining (Cox &Kernell, 1991, p. 243).

One can approach bicameral bargaining as a timing game where the lowerand upper houses decide on the timing of concession given its and the otherhouses degrees of impatience to reach an agreement.4 Consider the fol-lowing scenario. The lower and upper houses both loathe the status quo butthey want different changes. The lower house prefers a change to x whilethe upper house desires a change to y. The passage of legislation requiresthat both houses come to an agreement. However, agreeing on a point closerto the lower houses ideal point, x, incurs greater costs to the upper house,and agreeing on a point closer to the upper houses ideal point, y, makes thelower house assume greater costs. Therefore, each house bargains hard tominimize the costs of legislation to itself, the costs with which it will haveto live once the bill is passed. In bargaining between the two chambers, thegreater the distance between their ideal points, the larger is the degree ofconcession required to pass legislation (Tsebelis & Money, 1997, p. 102).

One of the variables that affect the length of bargaining and its outcomesis the time discount factor (denoted ) of the actors. The higher the , thelower is the cost of waiting another round of bargaining to obtain a better


deal. Thus, reflects the relative bargaining strengths of the actors involved.In the bargaining literature, actors that value an immediate agreement morethan an agreement in a later period are considered impatient. In a game withcomplete information, an agreement is struck immediately and the passageof new legislation is instant (Rubinstein, 1982). Legislative delays occurdue to uncertainties about actors impatience levels (Alesina & Drazen,1991; Tsebelis & Money, 1997). Generally, the more impatient a player is,the sooner will a concession be made and therefore the faster the speed oflegislation.

Hypothesis 2: Impatience reduces the propensity for legislative delay.

Another factor that may affect the length of prelegislation bargaining isthe expected duration of new legislation. Remember that the differencebetween x and y represents the degree of concession required to make topass legislation. Concessions are the costs of an agreement, and becauseboth houses must live with the consequences of new legislationincludingthose concessions madethat affect the anticipated values of their futurepayoffs, ceteris paribus, an uneven distribution of compromises givesstrong incentives to bargain harder, resulting in more time before an agree-ment is concluded.5

However, if a new policys expected duration is shortfor instance, if ithas a preset expiration date, then an expected postlegislation utility lossfrom compromise (i.e., the costs) would be smaller than in a case wherenew legislation is expected to last infinitely. In other words, the difficultyof bargaining does not only depend on x-y; it also depends on some sort ofcoefficient representing the expected lifespan of the new legislation, say t(as in t[x-y]), that affects future payoffs from new legislation. As t increases,the expected costs of compromise increase, inducing the actors to bargainharder. Conversely, as t decreases, the total expected utility loss decreasesand hence it is less difficult to reach an agreement. Therefore,

Hypothesis 3: Legislative delay is positively related to the duration of legis-lation proposed.

Symmetric and asymmetric bicameralism. Bargaining in a bicamerallegislature occurs within a set of rules and procedures binding bicameralconflict resolution. Conferring on one chamber (typically the lower house)the power to be decisive in the case of bicameral disagreements is a con-flict resolution mechanism adopted in many bicameral systems. Another


exemplary procedure for bicameral conflict resolution is navette in whichbills shuttle between the two chambers until they reach an agreement orthe bills are aborted (Tsebelis & Money, 1997). There is also a conferencecommittee in which select members of the two houses draft a compromisebill to be voted in each house under a closed rule (i.e., without amend-ments). Conference committees are often adopted in the United States andFrance.

Lijphart (1999) calls two chambers with equal constitutional prerogativesand democratic legitimacy (i.e., whether members are appointed or selectedthrough popular elections) symmetric and ones that lack these qualificationsas asymmetric. The navette procedure without a stopping rule is an instanceof symmetric bicameralism, and rules that give one of the chambers preva-lence over the other is asymmetric bicameralism. If, in symmetric bicameral-ism, the composition of the two chambers differs with respect to membercharacteristics and their preferences (i.e., if the two chambers are incongru-ent), policy immobility is a likely result. It is also likely to take longer tostrike a deal under symmetric bicameralism than under asymmetric bicamer-alism. By contrast, an asymmetric bicameral procedure facilitates legislationeven if the two houses are incongruent because the more powerful chambercan overshadow the less powerful one. In short,

Hypothesis 4: Legislative delay and gridlock are more likely in symmetricbicameralism than in asymmetric bicameralism.

Bicameral sequence. Another factor that may affect the speed and out-come of legislation is bicameral sequence. Rogers (1998) argues thatsequential moves are strategic choices that bicameral legislatures face.Because information acquisition is costly, in an environment of high uncer-tainty, the chamber that has higher expected payoffs specializes, given thatthe net expected payoffs (gains from specialization minus costs of special-ization) are positive. Rogers maintains that the costs of information acqui-sition are negatively associated with chambers sizes such that the costfunction is usually smaller for the lower house than the upper house(assuming that the lower house has more members than the upper house).Hence, the probability that the lower house introduces legislation that willbe adopted is higher than the probability that the upper house introducessuch legislation. Furthermore, because the upper house desires to takeadvantage of the lower houses informational expertise, bills initiated by thelower house should enjoy relatively swifter approval.


Hypothesis 5: Bills initiated by the lower (more populous) house are morelikely to have speedy approval than bills initiated by the upper (lesspopulous) house.

Note that this argument challenges a conventional wisdom of bicamer-alism that stresses senatorial expertise. According to this view, a senate (oran upper house) promotes superior legislation relative to a lower chamberbecause of longer terms of office, higher minimum ages, and finer careertrajectories that make senators professional legislators capable of studyinglegislation relatively objectively (Tsebelis & Money, 1997, p. 40). Therefore,this perspective implies that senate-initiated bills should entertain higherapproval rates than those proposed by the lower house. However, Rogerssinformational model predicts the contrary. These two opposing argumentscan be tested empirically.

Research Design and Method

I test these hypotheses with legislative data from Brazil for the period1988-2004. Brazil is an ideal case to examine the effects of bicameralismand various decision rules on legislative production. First, Brazil hasunique legislative rules that in effect make it possible to study varioustypes of bicameralism while holding country-specific factors constant.Constitutionally, the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies (the lower house) andthe Senate (upper house) are coequal. Unlike many countries in which thelower house dominates the upper house, there is no area of legislation thatis granted to the Chamber of Deputies but denied to the Senate.6 However,in the making of statutory regimes, the house where a bill is first introducedprevails in the final decision. That is, although the reviewing house has theright to amend, so long as it approves the bill, there is no formal mechanismfor the reviewing house to enforce such amendments. In this case, theBrazilian bicameral system can be considered asymmetric. What makesBrazilian bicameralism particularly unique is the fact that, by initiating billsfirst, both the Chamber and Senate can be the house with the power to makea final decision.

On the other hand, proposals for constitutional amendments representlegislative activities in the context of symmetric bicameralism. The BrazilianConstitution requires that each house of Congress approve an identical textof an amendment by three fifth majorities, voted on two separate rounds(Article 60), and the bill shuttles between the two houses until both houses


adopt exactly the same text, or else the bill is aborted. Therefore, neither houseis dominant in the making of constitutional amendments. Table 1 summa-rizes decision rules and procedures in the Brazilian Congress.

Second, the question of legislative efficiency has spurred widespreaddiscussions both among political scientists and policy makers in Brazil. Tomany observers and practitioners of Brazilian politics, Brazil suffers gov-ernability problems. Governability refers to the efficiency of a nationsexecutive and legislative branches in the making of programs and policies(Ames, 2001, p. 1). Scholars such as Mainwaring (1999), Ames (2001), andStepan (2000) argue that the Brazilian political system has been unable tocarry out major socioeconomic and political reforms despite their direneeds. Where changes were made, moreover, they often came too late (usu-ally punctuated by some sort of crises) and/or too little. These scholars con-tend that the lower chambers open-list electoral system and strongsubnational forces fragment the polity and hinder governability in Brazil. Incontrast, Figueiredo and Limongi (2001) argue that Brazilian presidentshave been able to marshal coalitional majorities in Congress and able togovern effectively using their enormous agenda-setting powers in an other-wise fragmented Congress. My expectation is in the middle of the twostrands of arguments, akin to the argument by Amorim Neto, Cox, andMcCubbins (2003). I expect that Brazils governance patterns are morecomplex than those depicted by either position but are influenced by eachpresidents legislative strategy and other political and socioeconomic land-scapes that prevail in particular periods.


Table 1Rules and Procedures in the Brazilian Congress

Mode of Number of Type of Deliberation Type of Vote Votes Required Bicameralism

Constitutional Navette until Roll call 3/5 of each chamber Symmetricamendment agreement is reached on 2 rounds

Complementary Navette (initiating Roll call Absolute majority Asymmetriclaw house is decisive) in each chamber

Ordinary law Navette (initiating Symbolic Simple majority Asymmetrichouse is decisive) in each chamber

Note: This table excludes budgetary procedures and deliberation of presidential decrees and vetoes.A simple majority refers to votes by a majority of members present in the session, and an absolutemajority refers to votes by a majority of each chambers membership.Source: The Brazilian Constitution (Senado Federal, 2002).

One of the key political configurations that are likely to influence gov-ernability is bicameralism. It is surprising that none of the major studies onBrazilian legislative politics has examined bicameralism as a potentialsource of legislative gridlock. Ames (2001), Figueiredo and Limongi(2001), and Amorim Neto et al. (2003) all focus on executivelower cham-ber relations. This scarcity of scholarly attention to Brazilian bicameralismmay stem from the widespread perception that the Senate is simply thehouse of review and tends to be pro-executive, making it appear to be a non-significant actor in the legislative process (Figueiredo & Limongi, 1996,p. 8).7 Although it is true that many bills originate from the lower house (dueto the constitutional requirement that executive proposals be submitted tothe Chamber of Deputies) and the initiating house has the last word on thebills, the Senate still retains veto power on such proposals. Moreover, theSenate holds the same last word prerogative as the Chamber in relationto the bills originating from that house. With respect to constitutionalamendments, there is no advantage for being the initiating house. Hence,any analysis of legislative politics in Brazil should explicitly treat the pow-ers and preferences of the Senate as variables to be studied rather thanassume its nonimpact. Understanding the relationships between the twohouses will shed new light into the study of legislative politics in Brazil andcontribute to solving the governability puzzle.

In the past, many scholars estimated legislative delays and gridlock usingcross-tabulations, linear regressions, and/or logit or probit models (e.g.,Binder, 1999, 2003; Figueiredo & Limongi, 1996; Krehbiel, 1998; Mayhew,1991). I use an event history analysis to examine legislative dynamics in abicameral congress. Event history analysis is concerned with the time untilan occurrence of an event. The hazard rate, h(t), is the instantaneous rate ofan events occurrence (i.e., the probability that an event occurs at a particu-lar point in time), given that the case has survived until t:

Pr(t t + t T t)h(t) = limt0

________________________

t

where T is a nonnegative random variable denoting the time to an eventsoccurrence. The following analyses use a semiparametric Cox model,because it estimates the effects of the covariates on the hazard rate withoutspecifying the distribution of the baseline hazard function or durationdependency (Box-Steffensmeier & Jones, 2004).

The modes of bill termination in Congresswhether congressionaldeliberation ended in the approval or rejection of a billand not just the


durations of deliberation, are of great interest for students of legislative pol-itics. When multiple modes of events are of substantive interest, compet-ing risks models can be used. The novel element of competing risksmodels is risk-specific hazard rates hk(t|k, Xk) where k = 1, . . . , r possibleevents that a case is at risk of experiencing. A competing risks model canbe specified using the latent survivor time approach.8

The goal of the quantitative analysis is to estimate risk-specific hazardrates of bill deliberation in the Brazilian Congress by identifying a set ofcovariates that influence them. There are multiple modes of terminating billexamination. A bill may be approved or rejected. Yet many bills actually donot reach the final stage of deliberation but are discarded in the process. Forexample, some bills are withdrawn by their sponsors; others are declaredimpaired due to the approval or rejection of related bills; and yet others aresimply dispatched to the archive at the beginning of a new Congress.9 Thesubsequent analyses will focus on the causes and timing of bill approvaland rejection. Clearly, why certain bills are tabled and not acted on is aninteresting and important question. As the discussion of legislative bargain-ing pointed out, inaction is often a result of bargaining deadlock, and anystudy of legislative production should not exclude tabled bills. The com-peting risks event history model can readily incorporate them because theinformation on all forms of bill termination as well as pending bills is usedto estimate the hazards of approval and rejection. It explains both why anevent occurs and does not occur at specific times.

Dependent and Independent Variables

The dependent variable is the timing and outcome of bill examination inthe Brazilian Congress. Central controversies on Brazils governability lie innot only whether a particular proposal passes (i.e., an outcome) but also howsoon the measure passes (i.e., timing). As Ames (2001) aptly points out, manybills that are proposed to Congress never reach a vote, and long delays arecommon for many others that are eventually voted up or down. Some impor-tant and controversial bills stay in Congress for many years, even decades.10Furthermore, Congresss inability to move quickly often waters down theeffects of the policy change even if a proposal ultimately passes.11 Therefore,we need to look at the time to a decision as well as the decision itself to accu-rately capture the essence of the governability debate.12

Timing is indeed of crucial concern to many policy makers and politicalscientists. Many care not only whether a bill will be passed but also how


fast it will be passed. The aggregation method based on the quantity of billspassed then misses an important piece of information in an analysis.Furthermore, counting approved bills per Congress may not be an appro-priate way to capture the dynamics of bill approval and gridlock in legisla-tures like Brazils whose archival rules are more complex than their U.S.counterpart. Unlike the U.S. Congress, where all bills not voted within a 2-year legislative period are terminated, in Brazil bills that do not reach finalvoting within a 4-year legislative period may be terminated or carried overto the next legislative period.

The legislative data set I constructed for this analysis includes proposalsfor constitutional amendment and two types of statutory billsordinary andcomplementary.13 It includes all executive and judicial proposals submittedto the Brazilian Congress from October 1988 (the promulgation of the cur-rent constitution) through December 2003. With respect to congressionalproposals, the data set includes all bills submitted during the same periodand subsequently approved at least by the house of origin. Specifically, allthe congressional bills considered here were approved by the Chamber ofDeputies if proposed by a deputy or approved by the Senate if proposed bya senator. In other words, I consider only those bills that cleared the hurdleof approval at least in the legislative body of origin, be it the Executive,Judiciary, Senate, or Chamber of Deputies. This method allows me to ana-lyze only those bills that are regarded as important enough to pursue at leastby a house or branch of origin given its legislative agenda. At the same time,I can eliminate the bills that were proposed for the sake of proposing (whichmany members of Congress do). In total, the data set contains 3,066 billsthat meet those criteria.

Using the Senates and Chambers online legislative databases (Cmarados Deputados, 2003-2004; Senado Federal, 2003-2004) and informationobtained through the Senates Subsecretaria de Informaes, I recorded thehistory of each of these bills. The data include information on (a) the datein which the bill was introduced in Congress, (b) its sponsor, (c) the type ofthe bill (i.e., ordinary bill, complementary bill, or constitutional amendmentproposal), (d) the sequence of its examination, (e) the time (in days) it spentin Congress, and (f) its final outcome (approved, rejected, impaired, orpending). The histories of these bills were traced from their introduction toCongress to their termination, or in the case of pending bills until July 31,2004, on which date they exit the data set.

Table 2 provides descriptive statistics of the proposals used in the sub-sequent analyses. The figures include both censored and noncensoredcases. There are 2,842 bills of ordinary law with the median time of 1,162


days (or over 3 years), the minimum of 2 days, and the maximum of 5,777days (or nearly 16 years). Those figures demonstrate that there is much vari-ation in the bills life span. The bills with 5,777 days of recorded time werestill pending in Congress as of July 2004, indicating that certain bills stay inCongress for a tremendously long time without any decision. Both bills ofcomplementary law and constitutional amendment follow similar patterns.There are 119 complementary law bills and 105 constitutional amendmentproposals with their respective median times being 713 and 964 days.

Table 2 also shows the life span of bills by their outcomes. The datareveal that approved bills have the shortest life span of the three outcomes.There are 1,344 approved bills with the mean and median survival times of759 and 509 days, respectively. Although the Brazilian Congress passedmore than half of the approved bills in less than 2 years, it took much moretime to pass some billsit could take as long as 5,155 days (or 14 years)!Compared to approved bills, the bills that were eventually rejected or ter-minated for other reasons tend to stick in Congress much longer. Forexample, the median number of days in Congress for rejected bills is 1,257,which is 2.5 times as much as the median number of days for approvedbills. Finally, the data set contains 933 censored cases.

The covariates included in the analysis are as follows. Hypothesis 1 pre-dicts a greater likelihood of legislative gridlock as bicameral divergencesincrease. Brazils fluid multiparty system poses a challenge to a researcherin measuring the degree of bicameral divergence over time. For example,there is no simple and meaningful way to calculate the difference betweenthe partisan compositions of the Senate and the Chamber as it would be


Table 2Life Span of Bills (in Days)

Number of Bills M Median Min Max

By typeOrdinary 2,842 1,498 1,162 2 5,777Complementary 119 1,417 713 20 5,630Constitutional amendment 105 1,204 964 11 4,629All bills 3,066 1,485 1,140 2 5,777

By outcomeApproved 1,344 759 509 2 5,155Rejected 416 1,376 1,257 41 4,282Other termination 373 1,864 1,828 7 4,830All billsa 3,066 1,485 1,140 2 5,777

a. The figures include censored and noncensored cases. There are 933 censored bills.

possible in a two-party system, and party switching is common and fre-quent. However, Brazilian legislative parties do tend to cluster together intotwo camps: one supporting the president and the other acting as oppositionto the presidents government.14 I therefore use the percentage difference inseat shares of the parties in the presidential coalition in the Senate andChamber (labeled incongruence) to measure the degree of bicameral diver-gence. Admittedly, this is a crude measure of bicameral divergence andassumes that the members of the parties in the presidential coalitionhave similar preference portfolios with respect to important legislation.However, there are reasons for political parties and their members to be inthe presidents support coalition, and many of them do try to vote with thegovernment whenever possible. In addition, this measure permits me torecord changes in the partisan compositions at much more frequent obser-vation points than using alternative methods (e.g., estimated ideologicallocations based on roll-call data), thus allowing for more accurate estimatesof legislative timing.15

Because presidents are important legislative actors in Brazil, I createdanother measure of legislative congruence that represents presidents basesof support in Congress. Presidential Bicameral Majority is a dummy vari-able and takes the value of 1 when the president has (coalitional) majoritiesin both the Senate and Chamber, and 0 otherwise. Both incongruence andpresidential bicameral majority are measures of legislative preferences. Iexpect that the larger values of incongruence increase the risk of bill rejec-tion and that presidential bicameral majorities raise the chance of billapproval. I used deputies and senators changes in party affiliations to con-struct the partisan composition of the Chamber and Senate using informa-tion obtained through the Chambers Secretaria-Geral da Mesa and Centrode Documentao e Informao (Cmara dos Deputados, 2004), and theSenates Relatrio da Presidncia (Senado Federal, various issues). In1988-2004, no presidents achieved legislative majorities solely with theirown parties; however, many presidents did attain coalitional majorities. Theonly minority presidents were President Collor (1990-1992) and PresidentLula (2003-Present) during his first two quarters. The largest bicameral dis-crepancies in the sizes of presidential coalitions occurred during the Francoand Lula presidencies and the beginning of Cardosos first term.

The data analysis examines two factors that may elevate the level ofimpatience among legislative actors. First are legislative and presidentialelections. Elections may increase legislative activities because legislatorsand presidents allies in Congress are likely to wish to deliver results totheir constituencies when facing upcoming elections. I coded 1 for the


quarter in which legislative and presidential elections took place and threequarters prior to it. I expect that legislative productivity generally increasesin pre-electoral periods compared to nonelection years. However, there is apossibility for an alternative hypothesis. Because most Brazilian legislatorscampaign locally and prefer to stay close to their constituencies duringelection years, they tend to disappear from the capital during campaign sea-sons. Consequently, legislative productivity may actually decline duringelection years. If such is the case, the hazards of legislative elections willbe lower with respect to both approval and rejection of bills.

The second operationalization of impatience uses an economic variable.Many developing countries experience severe economic problems rather fre-quently. I expect that politicians and policy makers imperatives to promptlycope with economic difficulties become elevated during times of economiccrises. One of the chronic economic problems that Brazilian governmentshave faced is inflation. As such, I use monthly inflation rates as a measureof economic problems and interact it with bills proposing economic policies.Economic policy bills hazard rate should be significantly positive onlywhen inflation rates become very high. Rather than arbitrarily deciding thethreshold for very high inflation, I leave the data to determine such levelsand limit my prediction to describing a general pattern. At low inflationrates, an economic policy bill does not increase its chance of approval.However, as inflation rates rise, the probability that economic policy billswill be approved increases. Inflation data are obtained through the BrazilianCentral Banks online database (Banco Central do Brasil, 2004).

Hypothesis 3 pertains to the anticipated duration of legislation. I assessthe impact of the expected duration of legislation by including a dummyvariable representing bills proposing a temporary policy change rather thana permanent one. Temporary policy changes include those with predeter-mined expiration dates (e.g., provisional taxes) and those that are subject toperiodic re-examinations (e.g., minimum wages). In total, 103 bills arecoded as provisional legislation. The relative ease of bargaining is expectedto facilitate the approval of those bills compared to bills proposing perma-nent legislation.

To analyze the impact of asymmetric and symmetric bicameralism(Hypothesis 4), I use dummy variables that represent supermajority-symmetric bicameralism (i.e., constitutional amendment proposals) andabsolute majority-asymmetric bicameralism (i.e., bills of complementarylaw). The base category is simple majority-asymmetric bicameralism (i.e.,bills of ordinary law). I refer the reader to Table 2 for the descriptive statis-tics of those bills.


Hypothesis 5 is about the impact of the sequence of deliberation. It statesthat the bills whose examination begins in the lower house have higherchances of approval than the bills initiated by the upper house. The billsthat were considered by the Chamber first are coded 1 and the bills initiatedby the Senate are coded 0.

In addition, the data analysis takes into account the following factors.First, the extant literature (e.g., Figueiredo & Limongi, 2001) on Brazilianlegislative politics indicates that the executive is the principal agent of leg-islation. Thus, I include dummy variables for congressional and judicialproposals, having executive bills as the base category. Second, the begin-ning of each legislative period may represent changes in the preferenceswith respect to status quo policies as new members join Congress and manyold ones depart. Turnover rates of the members of Congress in Brazil arequite high, especially in the Chamber of Deputies, where re-election rateshave been around 50% in the last two decades. Hence, I coded 1 the firstyear of each 4-year legislative period and 0 otherwise. Third, in addition toeconomic policy, the data analysis includes policy areas concerning admin-istrative issues, rights and codes (such as civil and penal codes), politicaland institutional questions, and tributes (such as renaming a highway inhonor of a famous politician). The base category is social policy. Finally,the models are estimated with a series of dummy variables representing dif-ferent administrations since the promulgation of the 1988 Constitution.

Last, incongruence and inflation variables are time-varying covariates.For computational convenience, these continuous time-varying covariatesare monthly averages over a quarter. Incongruence has a mean of 9.11 rang-ing from 0.36 to 24.83. Monthly inflation rates range from 0.28% to75.22% with an average of 10.3%.

Estimation Results

Table 3 presents the results of Cox competing risks models of billapproval and rejection in the Brazilian Congress. As discussed before, a haz-ard rate is the instantaneous rate of an events occurrence, that is, the prob-ability that an event (bill approval or rejection) occurs at time t, given thatthe case has survived until t. Tests of the proportional hazard assumptionbased on Schoenfeld residuals indicate potential nonproportional hazards forgovernment bicameral majority, supermajority-symmetric bicameralism,congressional and judicial bills, and temporary change in the case of theapproval model, and for supermajority-symmetric bicameralism in the


rejection model. I interacted these variables with the natural logarithm oftime to correct for the potential violations.

As predicted, bicameral incongruence has a positive and significant effecton bill rejection. The hazard ratio can be obtained by exponentiating the coef-ficient, exp(0.04) = 1.04. Because the values of incongruence range from 0.36to 24.83 and their corresponding hazard ratios from 1.01 to 1.58, going fromthe minimal value of bicameral incongruence to that of the maximal valueraises the risk of bill rejection by 56.4%. In other words, when the differencebetween the shares of seats held by presidential coalitional parties in the twohouses grows from 0.36% to 24.83%, the probability that a bill gets rejected


Table 3Cox Competing Risks Models of Bill Approval and Rejection

Approval RejectionBicameral incongruence 0.01 0.04**Presidential bicameral majority 6.17**** 0.50Presidential bicameral majority bicameralism*Time 0.78**** Supermajority/Symmetric bicameralism 3.36**** 9.53****Supermajority/Symmetric bicameralism*Time 0.54**** 1.49***Absolute majority/Asymmetric bicameralism 0.19 0.47Congressional election 0.22 0.64*Presidential election 0.30** 0.90**Beginning of legislature 0.35**** 0.91****Congressional proposal 3.18**** 1.29****Congressional proposal*Time 0.36**** Judicial proposal 0.41**** Judicial proposal*Time 0.03 Chamber of Deputies first house 0.97**** -0.53****Temporary change 3.96**** -0.47Temporary change*Time 0.51**** Inflation 0.002 0.01Inflation*Economic 0.01*** 0.02**Economic 0.03 0.08Administrative 0.23*** 0.19Rights and codes 0.41**** 0.11Tribute 0.93**** -0.05Political-Institutional 0.15 0.12Log pseudo-likelihood 9483 2863N 52,950 (1,344) 52,950 (416)

Note: Entries are coefficients. Entries in the parentheses are the numbers of failures. Significancetests used a two-tailed test and robust standard errors. There is no rejected judicial proposal.Coefficients are estimated with various government dummies (not shown in the table).*p .1. **p .05. ***p .01. ****p .001.

at a given moment increases by 56.4%. Bicameral incongruence has no sta-tistically significant impact on bill approval, however. This finding suggeststhat bicameral incongruence is an important determinant of bill rejection, butit alone has no influence on bill approval.

What does affect the chances of bill approval is the congruence of thethree institutional legislative actors: the president and the lower and upperhouses of Congress. When presidents hold bicameral majorities, the likeli-hood that Congress will approve of the bill increases significantly. This mayimply that Congress anticipates presidents preferences and responses whenconsidering bills. However, the impact of presidential bicameral majoritiesdiminishes over time without the bills approval. For example, a bill that hasstayed in Congress for a year is 4.71 times more likely to be approved whenpresidents sustain majorities in both houses than when they lack such majori-ties. In contrast, approval under presidential bicameral majorities is onlytwice more likely if a bill has been pending in Congress for 3 years. Finally,such majorities (or lack thereof) do not influence the hazard of bill rejection.

As expected, deliberation under symmetric bicameralism with a superma-jority rule delays bills approval significantly and increases the risk of rejec-tion compared to deliberation under an asymmetric bicameral setting.However, these effects also lessen as bills stay longer in Congress. Moreover,under asymmetric bicameralism, there is no significant difference in eitherbill approval or rejection when only voting quotas are compared, as non-significant coefficients of the absolute majority/asymmetric bicameralismvariable indicate. Although it is impossible to separate the effects of sym-metric bicameralism from the supermajority rule, these findings combinedsuggest that types of bicameralism do have significant impact on the timingof bill approval and rejection.

Turning to the impatience variables, the estimation results of electoralperiods indicate that the hazard of bill approval rises and that of bill rejectiondecreases during presidential election years.16 That is, the Brazilian Congressis more likely to approve bills in a year running up to presidential electionsand delays the rejection of bills that are eventually rejected. In contrast, thehazard of bill rejection rises in legislative election years but that of billapproval is not statistically significant. These findings provide mixed evi-dence for the impatience hypothesis. The coefficient of bill approval duringpresidential elections is as predicted by the theory. However, estimationresults of legislative elections do not render strong support for either the impa-tience hypothesis or the alternative hypothesis. If the impatience hypothesiswere correct, legislative elections coefficient would be positive and signifi-cant for bill approval. If the alternative hypothesis (that legislative activities


decline during legislative election years because legislators are on campaigntours) were right, then the coefficient for bill rejection should also be nega-tive. One of the possible explanations may be that legislators find it moreelectorally useful to orchestrate position-taking by rejecting bills than byapproving them. This finding calls for more research in the future.

Another measure of impatience is inflation rates. The interaction ofinflation rates and economic policy bills is positive and significant, sug-gesting that inflation raises the hazard of bill approval and rejection in theeconomic policy areas. Figure 1 shows conditional hazard ratios of eco-nomic bills (the y-axis) at various inflations rates (the x-axis). Note that thehazard ratios are only significant at higher inflation rates (monthly inflationrates of 10% or higher for rejection and 15% or higher for approval), con-firming the hypothesis that only economic crises, but not mere economicproblems, compel politicians and policy makers to work more efficiently inapproving and rejecting bills. The results also show that the chances of eco-nomic policy bills being approved and rejected grow progressively higheras inflation rates become elevated. For instance, the likelihood that economic


Figure 1Conditional Hazard Ratios of Economic Bills at Various Inflation Rates

0.0

1.0

2.0

3.0

4.0

5.0

6.0

7.0

-5 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45 50 55 60 65 70 75 80

Monthly Inflation Rates

Con

ditio

nal H

azar

d R

atio

s

Rejection

Approval

Note: The solid lines indicate where hazard ratios are significant at least at p = .1. The dis-continuous lines are those that do not achieve statistical significance.

policy bills will be approved is 24% higher than that for social policy bills(i.e., the base category) when a monthly inflation rate is 25%; however, ata monthly inflation rate of 75%, such likelihood is 120% greater for eco-nomic policy bills compared to social policy bills.

As expected, provisional legislation has a higher hazard of beingapproved than permanent legislation. This finding suggests the relative easeof bargaining in striking an agreement when one proposes a short-termchange rather than a long-term change and has tremendous implications forlegislative agenda-setting. It also implies the difficulty of pursuing a long-term reform through legislation. But the advantage of a provisional policychange in a bills passage declines with time. For instance, a 3-month old billproposing a provisional change is five times more likely to be approved thanan equivalent bill proposing a permanent change. However, this advantagediminishes to 2.5 to 1 in a year and 1.8 to 1 in 2 years. There is no advan-tage of it being a provisional reform if a bill has been pending for 3 years.

With respect to the effects of bicameral sequence, when the Chamber ofDeputies is the first house to deliberate, a bill has a much higher chance ofbeing approved on a given day (163% higher) and a lower risk of beingrejected (41% lower) compared to when the Senate is an initiating house.These results hold even though the estimated models control for the effectsof the executive bills (as a base category comparing bills institutional ori-gins) whose consideration always begins in the lower house. These findingssupport Rogerss (1998) argument about a sequential advantage of a billbeing examined in the lower house first and counter the conventional wis-dom of bicameralism that emphasizes senatorial expertise. The estimationresults also indicate, however, that congressional bills as a whole do notfare very well compared to executive bills.

Finally, the beginning of a legislative period induces greater legislativeactivities in both approving and rejecting bills. These findings are consis-tent with the expectation that fundamental changes in the institutional leg-islative preferences occur at the beginning of each Congress due to thedeparture of many former incumbent legislators and the arrival of new ones.

Conclusion

This article examined the dynamics of lawmaking in a new presidentialbicameral democracy taking Brazil as a case. It contributes to comparativelegislative research by analyzing the causes of bill approval and rejectionwith new legislative data. Rather than using aggregate data on legislative


gridlock as much previous work has done, I performed more nuancedanalyses of individual bills submitted to the Brazilian Congress using anevent history method.

This article also analyzed the impact of bicameralism on legislativeperformancean often overlooked but important institutional feature oflawmaking in many new democracies. Although legislative research in newdemocracies has increased in recent years, most of these studies tend tomodel bicameral legislatures as single-chamber congresses. However, thisarticle demonstrated that bicameralism is consequential for policy-makingeven in nascent democracies. In particular, bicameral incongruence raisesthe risk of bill rejection, and presidents bicameral (coalitional) majoritiesincrease the chances of bill approval. The data analysis also showed thatpassing bills under symmetric bicameralism with a supermajority rule facessignificant challenges. Furthermore, a bicameral sequence matters: Billsthat are introduced in the lower house first enjoy greater legislative suc-cesses than the Senates bills.

In addition to the effects of bicameralism, this study also confirmed theimportance of bargaining in a legislature. The bargaining literature hasshown that the timing of concession, or reaching an agreement, criticallydepends on the levels of actors impatience to conclude such a deal. Thedata analysis indicated that acute economic crisesa situation in whichpolicy makers are likely to be impatienttend to stimulate policy-makingactivities both in approving and rejecting economic bills. But evidence alsorevealed that elevated levels of economic distress (i.e., crisis), and not mereproblems, were necessary to increase legislative productivity. This findingis also ironic: If a legislature needs an economic crisis to act, it is not a com-petent legislature. A more incisive legislature would address problems attheir initial stages before they escalate into crises.

The empirical analysis also indicated that the likelihood of approval ishigher for bills proposing provisional changes rather than permanentchanges. This finding suggests a relative ease of bargaining in passing pro-visional changes compared to long-term changes. It also has importantimplications for legislative agenda-setting. Particularly, if legislators andgovernment are interested in a quick approval of certain measures, the bestway to accomplish this is to propose temporary legislation. This finding,unfortunately, also implies a difficulty of pursuing long-term reforms.Perhaps that is why postdemocratization Brazil has had a series of minireforms in the economic areas but its significant economic reforms havebeen very few.


Future research should take a step further and identify and include leg-islative priorities in a quantitative analysis. As Ames (2001) correctly pointsout, there are many important legislative issues that never even reachCongress. On the other hand, there are many nonpriority and/or noncontro-versial bills that do get proposed and approved. This study did not distin-guish priority bills from nonpriority ones. However, it would be importantto understand how priority bills fare in a bicameral legislature.

Notes1. Examples of prior research on lawmaking in Latin America include Amorim Neto and

Santos, 2003; Ricci, 2006; Ricci and Lemos, 2004; Saiegh, 2003; Taylor-Robinson and Diaz,1999.

2. For example, Tsebelis and Money (1997), Binder (1999, 2003), and Druckman andThies (2002) deal with U.S. presidential or European parliamentary bicameral systems.

3. This statement assumes that both chambers are endowed with veto rights. However,even if one of the chambers has only the power to delay, modeling legislative politics in abicameral legislature as if it were unicameral would be fallacious (Tsebelis & Money, 1997).

4. Alesina and Drazen (1991) uses a war of attrition model to explain rational delay in eco-nomic stabilization policies. Tsebelis and Money (1997) models bicameral bargaining as adivide-the-dollar game.

5. Alesina and Drazen (1991) and Fearon (1998) made similar arguments with regard tobargaining over economic stabilization and creation of international regimes, respectively.

6. Neivas (2006) study comparing constitutional powers of upper houses indicates that theBrazilian Senate is one of the most powerful upper chambers in the world.

7. During President Luiz Incio Lula da Silvas first term (2003-2006), the Senate defeatedcertain government projects, thereby challenging the perspective that the upper house isalways a pro-executive chamber.

8. The latent survivor time approach assumes that there are K specific events that a case isat risk of experiencing but only the incidence of the first event is observed. For example, if weobserve a rejection of a bill in Congress, we would not observe its approval that might even-tually occur were it continue to stay in Congress. See Diermeier and Stevenson (1999).

9. The author of a bill may appeal the decision to the executive board of the house.10. The median time that a bill spends in the Brazilian Congress without a decision is 509

days if eventually approved, 1,257 days if rejected, and 1,828 days if terminated for other rea-sons (see Table 2). As a comparison, the median time approved bills spent in the ChileanCongress during the 1990-1993 legislature is 149 days for presidential proposals and 448 daysfor congressional proposals (Siavelis, 2002, p. 87). In the United States, all bills not votedwithin a 2-year legislative period are terminated.

11. For example, there is a cost in delaying the adoption of legislation aimed to improvethe fiscal balance as deficits grow in its absence.

12. Legislative delays are indeed an important measure of gridlock alternative to a morecommonly used measure of gridlock in terms of the quantity of bills passed. See Binder, 2003,pp. 75-79.

13. I thank Fernando Limongi for sharing Cebraps legislative data set. I benefited fromtheir coding schemes in constructing my data set.


14. See Amorim Neto and Santos (2001) and Amorim Neto, Cox, and McCubbins (2003).15. As an alternative operationalization of bicameral incongruence, I also used the differ-

ence between the Chambers and Senates median voters W-NOMINATE scores. However,W-NOMINATE scores are not comparable across different houses or different congresses.Furthermore, these scores are available only for the 49th and 50th Congresses. Perhaps dueto these problems, this variable had no significant impact in the event history analysis andis therefore not included in the further discussion. I thank Scott Desposato for sharing hisW-NOMINATE data.

16. Presidential and legislative elections became concurrent from 1994.

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Taeko Hiroi is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas at El Paso.Her research interest is in the areas of democratic institutions, legislative politics, politicaleconomy, and Latin American politics. Her most recent publications appear in Latin AmericanPerspectives, Journal of Developing Societies, International Interactions, and Brazilian Journalof Political Economy.


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