Portuguese Ministers as Political Survivors: an empirical analysis of the first 20 Constitutional Governments (original) (raw)
Related papers
Portuguese Ministers, 1851–1999: Social Background and Paths to Power
South European Society and Politics, 2002
This paper provides an empirical analysis of the impact of regime changes in the composition and patterns of recruitment of the Portuguese ministerial elite throughout the last 150 years. The 'out-of-type', violent nature of most regime transformations accounts for the purges in and the extensive replacements of the political personnel, namely of the uppermost officeholders. In the case of Cabinet members, such discontinuities did not imply, however, radical changes in their social profile. Although there were some significant variations, a series of salient characteristics have persisted over time. The typical Portuguese minister is a male in his midforties, of middle-class origin and predominantly urban-born, highly educated and with a state servant background. The two main occupational contingents have been university professors-except for the First Republic (1910-26)-and the military, the latter having only recently been eclipsed with the consolidation of contemporary democracy. As regards career pathways, the most striking feature is the secular trend for the declining role of parliamentary experience, which the democratic regime did not clearly reverse. In this period, a technocratic background rather than political experience has been indeed the privileged credential for a significant proportion of ministers.
BPSR, 2019
The article aims at understanding the determinants of ministerial turnover in presidential systems. There are essentially three key factors that govern the propensity for ministerial turnover in a presidential system: 01. political ambition-reflected in the individual or collective strategies and tactics employed by the party-affiliated actors represented in the cabinet; 02. the presence or absence of a governing coalition-which has bearing on the degree of ideological distance between the president and such political parties as form part of any governing coalition, with consequences for ministerial scrutiny; and 03. accountability-a determinant in responding to such external pressures as may be brought to bear by public opinion. In order to investigate the impacts of these factors, this inquiry seeks to analyze the new and dynamic democracy of Brazil. Brazil's presidential system presents interesting features that make it an excellent laboratory in which to test hypotheses concerning every aspect of ministerial turnover. To this end, this paper employs a multivariate methodology, as well as descriptive and survival analyses, based on a comprehensive and original database of cabinet ministers that draws on three presidencies over five democratically elected governments from 1995 to 2014. Among other results, our most original finding was that there is an inverse correlation between the degree of ministerial politicization (political ambition) and ideological distance from the president during political scandals (interaction between the governing coalition and accountability) on the one hand, and the length of ministerial tenure on the other.
Is there duration dependence in Portuguese local governments' tenure?
European Journal of Political Economy, 2013
" "I Is s t th he er re e d du ur ra at ti io on n d de ep pe en nd de en nc ce e i in n P Po or rt tu ug gu ue es se e l lo oc ca al l g go ov ve er rn nm me en nt ts s' ' t te en nu ur re e? ?" " V Ví ít to or r C Ca as st tr ro o R Ro od dr ri ig go o M Ma ar rt ti in ns s NIPE WP 09/ 2012 " "I Is s t th he er re e d du ur ra at ti io on n d de ep pe en nd de en nc ce e i in n P Po or rt tu ug gu ue es se e l lo oc ca al l g go ov ve er rn nm me en nt ts s' ' t te en nu ur re e? ?" " V Ví ít to or r C Ca as st tr ro o R Ro od dr ri ig go o M Ma ar rt ti in ns s N NI IP PE E *
The Primacy of Experts? Non-partisan ministers in Portuguese democracy
Executive functions in modern democracies have been traditionally entrusted to elected representatives with a party membership, and the most important appointments political parties can make are for ministerial positions. In this context, Portuguese democracy is a relevant case for comparison, because expert and non-partisan ministers (usually described as ‘the independents’) are to be found in large numbers. This chapter investigates the determinants of this pattern of ministerial recruitment, and in assessing the main hypothesis postulated in the literature, operationalises the analytical distinction between politicians and experts, establishing their number and evolution over time, and sketches a tentative profile of both ministerial types, highlighting a few significant differences and contrasts.
The Political Survival of Foreign Ministers
Foreign Policy Analysis, 2009
The survival of governments ultimately depends on the survival of its components. These components are politicians whose goal is to stay in office. There has been extensive research on the survival of leaders, but not on the survival of other politicians in government; and even less on how the survival of one affects the survival of the others. The purpose of this article is to take the first step in this direction by analyzing and precisely measuring the impact of the tenure of leaders on the tenure of foreign ministers. This article provides a systematic and formal investigation of the variables that affect the duration in office of foreign ministers. The investigation is based on a new data base on the tenure of more than 7,500 foreign ministers spanning three centuries. Although evidence shows that political institutions have significant impact on the tenure of foreign ministers, internal coalition dynamics such as affinity and loyalty toward a leader, uncertainty, and time dependence are better predictors of their political survival.
1（2014.7） Turnover of Political Appointments in Brazil
2020
The authors are grateful to Acir Almeida and Tomas Bugarin for helpful comments and insightful discussions. The financial support of CNPq and IPEA is gratefully acknowledged. Mauricio Bugarin was a visiting researcher at the Graduate School of International Cooperation Studies of Kobe University, GSICS, during the fall semester of 2013. The institutional support of GSICS is gratefully acknowledged. The authors remain sole responsible for errors or opinions expressed here.
Does the relationship between politcs and bureaucracy matter for ministerial performance? The goal of this paper is to bring theoretical and empirical fundaments that show the allocation of ministerial portfolio has consequences for government results in presidential Executives. Ministerial Performance is conceptualized as execution of Executive goals, and measured by annual proportion of ministeries' financial execution. My main hypothesis is that Monitored Command-when a bureaucrat executive-secretary is allocated to monitor a partisan ministry-would present better levels of performance when compared to other kinds of Command. I also argue that bureaucracy quality has effect over the ministerial Command's capacity of influencing that agency's performance. Empirical tests were enacted on a panel database with ministery/year observations, for all Brazilian Executive ministeries from 2000 to 2014. Results achieved through ANOVA, linear regression with fixed effects, and regression on matched data models, show the situation is opposite to the main hypothesis. Monitored Command gives the worst means of ministerial performance, in rebuttal to the Partisan Command, with the best means. Monitoring seems to work more as a deadlock than a way to provide better results. However, since I don't evaluate the quality of the goals execution, it's not possible to affirm if the financial execution means the policy was actually executed, or if it was the way it should be.
Presidential Political Appointments and Coalition Governance in Brazil, 2007-2010
2011
Research on the relationship between the Executive and the Legislative in Brazil has generated a voluminous literature that sheds important light on our understanding of the policy-making process in Brazil and the relationship between the Executive and the political parties in Congress. However, little is known about how the bureaucracy is used as a tool for political patronage and its overall role in the policy-making. We aim to advance the understanding of this phenomena by studying which factors explain the distribution of political appointee positions in the Brazilian federal bureaucracy among political parties. By using an unique panel dataset and applying an One-Way Random Effects GLS regression model we found that the number of seats a party has in the lower Chamber, the party's appointment of a cabinet minister, and being from the same party as the president's (formateur party) play a fundamental role at explaining why some parties are more able to fill political appointees' positions with their party members in the bureaucracy than others. These findings lend credence to the idea that appointments in the Brazilian bureaucracy can be better understood as "coalition goods" (by establishing an exchange baseline between the partisent's party and the parties in the coalition) instead of "exchange goods" (as tools that help cover the ongoing costs of holding together the coalition).
Political survival strategies: Political career decisions in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies
Journal of Latin American …, 2004
As Brazilian federal deputies approach the end of their legislative terms, they have four major political career options : to retire from electoral politics; to run for state legislative office (regressive ambition) ; to run for re-election (static ambition) ; or to run for higher offices (progressive ambition). We developed a model that focuses on the determinants of political career choices by incumbent federal deputies in the 1998 Brazilian election. We argue that it is not the nature of political ambition that determines the career choices of federal deputies, but the evaluation of the risks and costs. A nested logit regression was used to estimate the impact of the distinct political strategies used by incumbents during their terms and their previous electoral campaigns in their choices of career. The main findings suggest that an incumbent's career choice is decisively influenced by the strategies they adopt to effectively use their resources.