Choosing the Form of Government: Theory and Evidence from Brazil

Marcos Yamada Nakaguma ()

No 2013_17, Working Papers, Department of Economics from University of São Paulo (FEA-USP)

Abstract: This paper proposes a model to study the main factors that influence the preferences of different population groups between presidential and parliamentary systems. Our theory suggests that the parliamentary regime leads to a type of fiscal decentralization in the form of more transfers to constituencies. Ceteris paribus, the poor groups in the population tend to prefer a presidential system relatively more than the rich, since the lower quality of their local accountability institutions (e.g. local media and judicial courts) makes them more vulnerable to the expropriation of rents by their legislators. We also show that in order to perform adequately a parliamentary regime depends on the existence of a class of politicians that can be trusted to represent well the interests of voters. Our model is able to account for the main stylized facts emerging from an analysis of referendum data from Brazil.

Keywords: Constitutions; political regime; presidential system; parliamentary system (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D02 D7 H0 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-10-29
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-pol
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