ABSTRACT
This article’s aim is to evaluate the behavior in role-call votes of Brazilian senators between 1980 and 2010. The central issue to be responded is how many and which dimensions are necessary to reasonably represent the preferences of our senators. The authors show that a single dimension expressing the conflict between government and opposition is sufficient. In order to verify this, techniques estimating the ideal points based on the spatial theory of votes are employed as well as the non-parametric optimal classification method.
Legislative; Senate; estimation of ideal points; Optimal Classification; coalition