Explaining the determinants of Foreign Policy voting behaviour in the Brazilian Houses of Legislature, with a focus on the Senate

• Ano de defesa: 2016
• Autor(a) principal: McDonnell, Robert Myles
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Bayesian item response; Brazilian Legislative Politics; Foreign Policy; Política Externa; Política Legislativa brasileira; Resposta ao item Bayesiana
• Link de acesso: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/101/101131/tde-10082016-162926/

This thesis seeks to analyse nominal voting patterns in the Brazilian houses of legislature, in particular the Federal Senate and with a focus on foreign policy issues. Foreign policy analysis through nominal votes has often been focused on the Chamber of Deputies, and so a primary objective of this thesis is to extend the discussion to the Senate, which is in many ways the more powerful institution in this area, in a way that is formally comparable. In order to do so, ideal points estimated through Bayesian Item-Response models are employed, including some novel adaptations and the use of certain aspects of the model that have not often been used to analyse nominal voting patterns before. The hypotheses posited in the literature for being determinants of voting behaviour are systematically examined and tested, using methods either new to the ideal-point literature in Brazil or rarely used, leading to findings contrary to the majority of the literature on several points, and in accordance with other studies on others.