Decision-Making Process in Brazil's Supreme Court

Abstract

This paper investigates internal dynamics of decision-making process in Brazil’s Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal – STF). The interest is not in each Justice individually, but in the collegial game, focusing on how Justices group together to vote. The empirical analysis is grounded on 2.473 judicial review cases (Acoes Diretas de Inconstitucionalidade – ADIns), decided from 1995 to 2014. It is commonly argued that there is a high degree of personalism in Brazil’s Supreme Court rulings, implying that the Court would work more as an aggregate of individual votes than as a collegiate body. The personalism argument is based on specific cases of large media coverage and repercussion, but the argument here is that it would not apply when considering a large body of systematically analyzed rulings. When observing Supreme Court decision-making process in Brazil during those twenty years it was possible to identify temporary coalitions and constant exclusive groups (cliques), constituted specially according to presidential appointments, influenced by other aspects, such as professional and career background.