Considering the legislative studies agenda on the Brazilian Federal Senate, due to its role in the
decision-making process, and the contribution of this agenda to discover the characteristics of
the functioning of parliamentary committees, this research is based on the following problem.
Did the parties coordinate the Executive-Legislative relationship in the legislative production
of the Senate's Committee on Constitution, Justice, and Citizenship (CCJ) from 2003 to 2018?
From this, the objectives are: to verify if there is a positive relationship between senators'
previous political experience and their chances of occupying the CCJ; to observe if the party of
the committee's president tends to appoint rapporteurs from its own party; to examine if there
is a positive relationship between the occupation of the CCJ by the government coalition and
the number of executive projects reported by this group each year; to check if there is a positive
relationship between the degree of ideological heterogeneity of the government coalition and
the frequency of using the terminative power in the CCJ. To do so, it was first discovered who
occupied the CCJ and by which parties at the beginning and end of each legislative session
through the Annual Reports of the Presidency (from 2003 to 2018); then, based on the
biographies of the parliamentarians, data related to prior expertise (political career [number of
mandates of the parliamentarian when occupying the CCJ and previous passage through
elective positions in the Executive or Legislative branches], level of education, and profession)
of these occupants were observed; finally, based on the results of the CCJ's deliberative
meetings, information on authorship, rapporteurship, and opinions of each legislative
proposition was collected - this stage, when necessary, was complemented by biographical
research about federal deputies (in order to discover their respective party affiliations at the
moments of voting on the matters, when the authorship was by a deputy). All the necessary
documents and information to fulfill the described steps are available on the websites of the
Federal Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. The data treatment was done using Excel
spreadsheets, resulting in tables and graphs on the CCJ's occupation and legislative production
throughout the established time frame. It is concluded that: the CCJ is mostly occupied by
coalition government parties, but it presents equal chances of being chaired by both this group
and the opposition, with the overall occupation characterized by senators in their first term in
the Senate and with previous passages through both the Executive and Legislative branches,
who remain in the committee for just over four years, have higher education, and are lawyers
or professors, aged between 50 and 69 years, representing the male gender; the parties in the
committee's presidency appoint more rapporteurs from their own parties, with a dominance of
the coalition, both in rapporteurship and in proposition, and it also dominates the rapporteurship
of executive initiatives; the results indicated by the rapporteurs are mostly for approval without
changes (39.2%), but are closely followed by approval with alterations (amendment/substitute,
36.7%), and the voting on these opinions results in approval in 98.6% of cases, mostly with the
non-terminative decision type (64.1%), while the percentage of terminative decisions seems
negatively related to the degree of ideological heterogeneity of the coalition.
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