The Supreme Federal Court as Queen of Chess: Partisan Fragmentation and Judicial Empowerment in Brazil

Q3 Social Sciences

Revista de Sociologia e Politica Pub Date : 2020-01-01 DOI:10.1590/1678-987320287307en

L. Barbosa, Ernani Carvalho

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引用次数: 1

Abstract

ABSTRACT Introduction: This article deals with the Supreme Federal Court’s empowerment trajectory, exploring exogenous variables in order to explain what made the Supreme Court so institutionally powerful, and how it happened. After the classic studies on the global expansion of the judicial power, that pointed to a myriad of causes as a result of the phenomenon, several recent researches have indicated the political-party fragmentation as the main cause of judicial empowerment. Seeking to corroborate these analyses, the present work analyzes the institutional empowerment of the Brazilian Judiciary from 1945 to 2015, testing the hypothesis the greater the party fragmentation, more institutional power the STF holds. Materials and Methods: As a dependent variable, a synthetic indicator was created to measure the institutional power of the Federal Supreme Court year by year. The independent variables measure the party composition of the Chamber of Deputies annually for the same period. In addition to these variables, other measures were imported from the V-Dem database. For this analysis, simple linear, generalized linear and multinomial models were used. Results: We identified significant impact of party fragmentation on institutional empowerment of the Supreme Court. In all tests, party fragmentation increased the chances of institutional empowerment of the Brazilian judiciary. Discussion: The exogenous reforms that generated this empowerment took place with the support of the Executive and the leniency of the Legislative, transforming the Brazilian Supreme Court into the Queen of the Chess.

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作为棋后的最高联邦法院:巴西的党派分裂和司法赋权

摘要:本文探讨了联邦最高法院的授权轨迹，探讨了外生变量，以解释是什么使最高法院在制度上如此强大，以及它是如何发生的。在对司法权全球扩张的经典研究指出了造成这一现象的众多原因之后，最近的一些研究表明，政党分裂是司法授权的主要原因。为了证实这些分析，本研究分析了1945年至2015年巴西司法机构的制度赋权，并检验了政党分裂程度越高，国家司法机构拥有的制度权力越大的假设。材料与方法:创建一个综合指标作为因变量，逐年衡量联邦最高法院的制度权力。自变量衡量的是同一时期众议院每年的政党构成。除了这些变量之外，还从V-Dem数据库中导入了其他措施。在此分析中，使用了简单线性、广义线性和多项模型。结果:我们确定了政党分裂对最高法院制度授权的重大影响。在所有测试中，政党分裂增加了巴西司法机构获得制度性授权的机会。讨论:产生这种授权的外部改革是在行政部门的支持和立法部门的宽大处理下进行的，将巴西最高法院转变为国际象棋中的女王。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Revista de Sociologia e Politica Social Sciences-Sociology and Political Science

CiteScore

0.80

自引率

0.00%

发文量

审稿时长

16 weeks

期刊介绍： The Revista de Sociologia e Política is a bi-annual publication of the Political Science staff of the Departament of Social Sciences of the Paraná Federal University, in Brazil. Created in 1993, it appears in the months of June and November. Open to scientific debate, the Revista de Sociologia e Política intends to be a pluralist space to divulge the results of substantive research, mainly of sociologists and political scientists. It publishes, preferably in Portuguese, original articles and critical reviews of recently edited works. The Revista de Sociologia e Política give priority to manuscripts whose main theme pertains to politics and the political.