ABSTRACT
The aim of the following article is to analyze how the composition of the cabinets affects the creation of centralized bureaucracies in the Presidency of the Republic of Brazil. I argue that the higher the cost of managing the coalition, the greater the likelihood of the centralization of public bodies in the Presidency. The study analyzes 172 bodies created by the Brazilian federal public administration from 1990 to 2009, with individual bodies serving as the unit of analysis. With the aim of gauging the extent to which centralization shapes the Presidency, my binary dependent variable is whether a body created within the hierarchy of the Presidency or reallocated from the ministries to the Presidency. In order to assess the effects of the degree of conflicts among the coalition’s preferences on the probability of presidential centralization, four binary logistic regression models were estimated, with the degree of ideological dispersion in the cabinet; the degree of politicization in the coalition; the degree of party fractionalization in the cabinet, and the degree of ideological extremism analyzed as key factors to the study.
presidents; ministers; centralization; public servants; public bureaucracy
