Parliamentary Supervision of Brazilian Foreign Policy: An analysis of Approval of Authorities

• Autor(a) principal: Spohr,Alexandre Piffero
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Brazilian Political Science Review
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1981-38212019000300202
• topic: Brazilian foreign policy; legislative studies; parliamentary supervision; approval of authorities; diplomatic missions

This article seeks to address the question of how the Federal Senate acts in approving the appointment of authorities to lead diplomatic missions and to determine if the decision-making process on foreign policy is similar to the handling of other matters. It therefore aims to contribute to the debate about the action of lawmakers in the foreign policy decision-making process in Brazil and in the understanding of the elements that influence the approval process of authorities by the Federal Senate. To do so, it gathers statistics on the elements that influence the results of voting on authorities, measured in terms of the time taken for approval and the rate of favorable votes, and specifically the appointment of chiefs of permanent diplomatic missions. The article’s results point to a similar pattern of legislative supervision for foreign policy and other public policies. These corroborate the article’s filiation with legislative trends, according to which party rivalries set the tone for the relationships between Executive and Legislative Powers in Brazilian presidentialism. Although approval of diplomatic authorities displays specific characteristics, such as the presence of lengthy approval cases, they remained aligned with the pattern observed in other cases of senatorial deliberation.