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Political Survival Strategies: Political Career Decisions in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2004

EDUARDO LEONI ,
CARLOS PEREIRA  and
LÚCIO RENNÓ
EDUARDO LEONI
Affiliation:
Columbia University
CARLOS PEREIRA
Affiliation:
Fiocruz Foundation and Cândido Mendes University, Rio de Janeiro
LÚCIO RENNÓ
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh.
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Abstract

As Brazilian federal deputies approach the end of their legislative terms, they have four major political career options: to retire from electoral politics; to run for state legislative office (regressive ambition); to run for re-election (static ambition); or to run for higher offices (progressive ambition). We developed a model that focuses on the determinants of political career choices by incumbent federal deputies in the 1998 Brazilian election. We argue that it is not the nature of political ambition that determines the career choices of federal deputies, but the evaluation of the risks and costs. A nested logit regression was used to estimate the impact of the distinct political strategies used by incumbents during their terms and their previous electoral campaigns in their choices of career. The main findings suggest that an incumbent's career choice is decisively influenced by the strategies they adopt to effectively use their resources.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , February 2004 , pp. 109 - 130
Copyright
2004 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

Previous versions of this article were presented at the conference ‘Brazilian Political Institutions in Comparative Perspective: The Role of Congress in Presidential System.’ Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford, 28–29 May 2001; at the XXIII International Congress of Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Washington, DC, 6–8 Sept. 2001; and at the Fifth Annual Conference of the International Society for New Institutional Economics (ISNIE), San Francisco, 13–15 Sept. 2001. We are grateful to Laurence Whitehead, Mark Jones, Philip Keefer, David Samuels, Brook McNally and the three anonymous referees of this journal for their comments and suggestions.