Abstract
What determines the dismissal of Ministers? This article analyzes the lot of corruption scandals involving ministers of the first Dilma Rousseff’s administration. The research design combines descriptive statistics and multivariate analysis for test of the hypothesis that news political scandals, political competition, and management of the government’s coalition have a positive effect on the odds of the accused minister to leave the Cabinet. This paper based in construction of a database with 677 headlines of the three major national newspapers: Folha de S. Paulo, O Estado de S. Paulo, and O Globo, over the first seventeen months of Rousseff’s administration. The results show that the greater number of news articles covering the corruptions scandals involving the minister in question, the greater the probability that she/he will be fired. We desire that this case study contribute to the research agenda on the relationship political scandals/democratic institutions/accountability trying to place this phenomenon in recent Brazilian democracy.
scandals; news; corruption; political accountability
