Berkeley Program in Law and Economics

This project aims to analyze the effect of the new institutional design of the public prosecutor’s office on policy making. The key moment of institutional change was in 1988 when the new constitution vested the Procuracy with great powers. The Procuracy has undergone a radical redefinition in its institutional design, with a very significant extension in its powers, which is unparalleled in the world, as far as this researcher has been able to establish (Voigt 2003). It has become a very important veto player. A polity’s ability to change or to commit to policy depends on the effective number of vetoes in political decision making (Cox and McCubbins 2000). This research aims to investigate the effects of the new incentive structure on policy-making. The institutional arrangement of Procuracy is a relevant independent variable to explain the quality of the political outcome, the governability, and considering its increasing role in combating crimes, the propensity of politicians to commit crimes. In Brazil, there are unique features in its design, the most important of which is its decentralized nature. Members of the Procuracy are granted unparalleled functional independence and they are not subordinated to the Attorney General. Each prosecutor has unrestricted freedom, only limited by the law. This design implies that each individual prosecutor is a veto player, with different purpose. It is hypothesized that the larger the number of veto players personalized in each prosecutor’s figure, the weaker the Procuracy gets institutionally, the higher the transactions costs are, policy instability. The low level of institutionalization of the Procuracy opens up the possibility of manipulation of prosecutors as instruments for the achievement of interest groups. This vulnerability affects its de facto independence. The Procuracy’s behavior will be investigated strategically in relation to other relevant political actors in the executive and legislative branches. It is hypothesized further that, paradoxically, the institutional change in 1988 produced unintended consequences and may have weakened rather than strengthened the Procuracy.