Business Political Action: Voting Trends of Businesspeople-Parliamentarians in the 56th Legislature

Abstract

This study investigates the voting behavior of businesspeople-parliamentarians in the 56th legislature of Brazil on specific legislative topics. To this end, we identified the parliamentarians who declared themselves as businesspeople (203) and compared their voting patterns in Plenary meetings against the group of non-businesspeople (420) in the period 2019-2023. The legislature comprises a total of 623 voters, including substitutes. Rather than undertaking a comprehensive diachronic analysis encompassing all votes, we opted for a synchronic approach, concentrating on four key thematic areas: economy, education, environment, and societal norms. Within each thematic category, we selected emblematic bills that underwent “nominal voting” (open ballot) in Congress: pension reform (2019), Fundeb (2020), renewable energy (2021), and homeschooling (2022). Our underlying hypothesis posits that while party affiliation may explain general legislative behavior (as the literature has shown), societal variables (such as occupation, a proxy for "class"), may gain relevance in specific thematic contexts. Our findings did not support our hypothesis. After comparing the votes of businesspeople-parliamentarians against non-businesspeople, using the Rice Index and W-Nominate, pairing them with Propensity Score Matching (PSM), we did not identify statistically significant differences between the two groups. These findings suggest that, for the topics under investigation, it is not possible to support the existence of a distinct business caucus within the Brazilian Congress.