Addressing Federal Conflicts: An Empirical Analysis of the Brazilian Supreme Court, 1988–2010

Abstract

Abstract We test the extent to which political variables can explain judicial behavior in the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) when dealing with conflicts between the federal government (namely, the union) and the states. One view argues that we should expect some alignment between the political preferences of the justices and the success of the union primarily due to the appointment mechanism. The opposite view suggests that there should be no systematic alignment between the political preferences of the justices and the success of the union as a consequence of political insulation. We built an original dataset encompassing different types of constitutional actions judged between 1988 and 2010 by the STF. Our research focuses fundamentally on the alignment between revealed judicial preferences when adjudicating cases and presidential appointments in Brazil. We find some evidence that judicial preferences do matter, but the patterns of politicization are weaker than in other similar courts. We also discuss the implications of our findings for comparative judicial politics; in particular, we do not observe strong partisanship.

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