Media Exposure of Portfolios as a Measure of Relevance*,†

The distribution of ministerial portfolios in the formation of government coalitions in Brazilian presidentialism is a crucial factor in determining the governability of the political system. Objective measurement of the relevance of ministries to politica l parties offers a means of shedding light on the relations between the executive and legislative branches of Brazil’s government. This research note aims to improve the empirical measurement of the relevance of Federal ministries in negotiations between presidents and political parties by including a fundamental theoretical aspect to political behavior: the media exposure of the various ministries. Given the importance of the media in shaping the political agenda and public opinion, we have expanded the theoretical conceptualization of the means to effect such measurements by adding a construct of ministerial relevance that is exogenous to the government apparatus. We have made empirical use of concepts such as the relative prestige of the various ministries and the degree of public exposure to them by quantifying the frequency of their appearances on the front pages of the three Brazilian newspapers with the largest readerships. Our results demonstrate the empirical utility and theoretical complementarity of the insertion of a variable relating to media exposure into Batista’s ministerial relevance (2017).

The distribution of ministerial portfolios in the formation of government coalitions in Brazilian presidentialism is a crucial factor in determining the governability of the political system. Objective measurement of the relevance of ministries to politica l parties offers a means of shedding light on the relations between the executive and legislative branches of Brazil's government. This research note aims to improve the empirical measurement of the relevance of Federal ministries in negotiations between presidents and political parties by including a fundamental theoretical aspect to political behavior: the media exposure of the various ministries. Given the importance of the media in shaping the political agenda and public opinion, we have expanded the theoretical conceptualization of the means to effect such measurements by adding a construct of ministerial relevance that is exogenous to the government apparatus. We have made empirical use of concepts such as the relative prestige of the various ministries and the degree of public exposure to them by quantifying the frequency of their appearances on the front pages of the three Brazilian newspapers with the largest readerships. Our results demonstrate the empirical utility and theoretical complementarity of the insertion of a variable relating to media exposure into Batista's ministerial relevance (2017 ______________________________________________________________________________________________ easurement of the relevance of ministries during negotiations aimed at forming a governing congressional coalition is key for understanding the relations between the executive and legislative branches of Brazil's federal government (AMORIM NETO, 2006;BATI STA, 2013;RAILE et al., 2011). Ministries are not assigned equal values by political parties. To estimate these values, we must measure to what degree each ministry confers on its minister the power to shape public policy, to what degree it is endowed with staff vacancies that can be distributed to allies and to what degree it offers public exposure, as all of these capacities may lead to advanced potential electoral prospects for parties and legislators wishing to occupy its highest office (AMORIM NETO and SAMUELS, 2010). In this connection, an excellent study has been undertaken by Batista (2017). She uses three central elements to determine the relevance of a ministerial portfolio: the gross and net budgets available to each ministry for the development of public policies; the number of so-called commissioned positions (i.e. positions filled at ministerial discretion rather than by civil service examinations) available; and finally, the number of bills sent directly from each ministry to the legislature. Thus, the capacity to project the political relevance of each portfolio is measured by three elements. These Batista (2017) calls 'budget', 'positions' and 'legislative initiatives'. This provides us with an excellent parameter endogenous to the government for determining the relevance of ministries to political parties.
The main objective of this research note is to present Batista's index (2017), plus the level of media exposure of the ministerial portfolios, a theoreticalconceptual dimension exogenous to the government. The central contribution is precisely to fill the conceptual gap presented by Batista (2017) herself in the construction of the index mentioned above: "[...] our measure only takes into account the policy, office, and budget dimensions. Aspects such as prestige are not considered for the moment" (BATISTA, 2017, p. 19). Media exposure of ministries is a way of empirically measuring the degree of public attention paid to the portfolio, including its prestige, and is compatible with Batista's other variables (2017). The exposure of a given minister or ministry in Brazilian mainstream media is measured to indicate the intensity of the portfolio's importance in the national political scene.

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Where media exposure is positive, this increases awareness of the minister's image and ideas among the public. Where negative, it attracts the attention of parties and politicians who seek to provide solutions to possible problems. In both cases, greater media exposure means greater importance of the portfolio for the electoral ambitions of politicians, and this allows for a theoretical and conceptual expansion of Batista's empirical index (2017).
In addition to describing our empirical procedures, we present the results of inserting the media variable into the ministerial importance index for the two terms of President Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (hereinafter 'Lula') (2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)  This research note is structured as follows : In the second section, which follows this introduction, we briefly review the literature on the importance of the media for legislators and political parties, highlighting their influence on shaping the political agenda and their theoretical-conceptual relevance. In the third section we describe the new data inserted in the ministerial importance index, notably the degree of media exposure of the ministries, as well as the results of the factor analysis carried out for the composition of the new index wit h the four variables. We compare the results of the indexes with and without the insertion of the new variable developed in this study and demonstrate the empirical utility of the insertion of the media in a single dimension estimated by the factor analysis. In the fourth (and final) section we conclude the research note.

The relevance of the media to lawmakers
An opinion widely expressed in the literature on political communication is that the media play a fundamental role in shaping the political agenda (JONES and BAUMGARTNER, 2005;WALGRAVE and AELST, 2006). Case studies (SEVENANS et al., 2015;SOROKA, 2002), comparative studies (MAURER, 2011;SEVENANS, 2018) and specific topic studies (LIU et al., 2008) have demonstrated that politicians respond and are sensitive to media priorities. Legislators operate with a significant degree of voter preference uncertainty (BUTLER and NICKERSON, 2011). The media play a paramount role as a source of information for mapping public opinion, thereby connecting voters and elected representatives (BAUM and POTTER, 2008).
The issues that receive the most media attention are likely to have a higher status on the political agenda (SEVENANS, 2018). To use a quantitative parameter, a meta-analysis of 90 empirical studies found an average correlation of r = .53 between the media agenda and the public agenda (WANTA and GHANEM, 2007).
Media coverage influences which issues the public perceives to be relevant and shapes the collective view of how issues should be resolved (IYENGAR and KINDER, 1987). Based on a case study that considered members of the Israeli In the case analyzed here, the external public is the media, due to their relevance to the political parties and legislators mentioned above. To assess the prestige component of a ministry in isolation, it would be necessary to use sentiment analysis of media content by calculating the frequency of positive and negative words associated with the names of bureaucracies (CARPENTER and KRAUSE, 2012). As we describe below, we analyze media exposure and add the frequencies of mentions of ministries, be they positive, negative or neutral. In this way, the quantification proposed here adds both the prestige of a ministry and the degree to which it

Methodology and results
In order to determine the degree of media exposure of ministries, we chose Thus, the frequency with which ministries appear on the front pages of major newspapers offers an excellent source of data to measure the degree of public exposure of a given portfolio, as it is a variable that can be counted daily in an ongoing, consistent and easily accessible manner. As mentioned earlier, our data cover three presidential terms between 2003 and 2014 1 and essentially consist of accounting for the absolute frequency with which government ministries appear on the front pages of newspapers. In Graph 01 below, we represent the The automatic data extraction codes are available at: https://github.com/luishacm/codemidiaimportance/. The presentation of the results of the factor analysis follows the same structure and steps performed by Batista (2017)  Variables with an extraction indicator greater than 0.5 must be included in the final index. As we can see, the media variable has significant relevance in the dimension estimated by the factor analysis, presenting a value of 0.612, slightly below legislative initiative capacity and the availability of commissioned positions in the ministries. As in the original estimate, 'positions' and 'legislative   (2017)     The first aspect that stands out in Graph 03 is the lower score that the index with 'media' gives almost all ministries than in the index without 'media'. In the ministries of Planning and Welfare, for example, scores with 'media' are much lower than scores without 'media', which increases the distance of these ministries from civil-service-examination-selected) bureaucracy and is therefore not very attractive for political parties. However, the MRE is usually described as very prestigious (CHEIBUB, 1989;BURGES and BASTOS, 2017). Its high media exposure (the fifth largest) is an objective indicator of this prestige. As Batista (2017)  The most obvious and useful aspect to bear in mind when analyzing of the utility of the aggregate index is that it presents no significant variability between ministries by presidential term. In other words, the measure 'importance of ministries' is satisfactorily stable over the years. The Ministries of Finance and Social Security showed the greatest variability, with higher scores in Lula's first term. The stability of the index over the three presidential terms reveals low sensitivity to external shocks, such as economic crises and corruption scandals.