Business interests and parliamentary behavior in Brazil

The Brazilian business community closely monitors national legislative process by way of interest groups. These organizations perform a sophisticated scrutiny and analysis of legislative propositions, classifying them according to the interests of the sectors they represent. In this article, using multivariate negative binomial regression, we assess and compare the impact of six factors on the behavior of Brazilian federal deputies in the 55th legislature (2015–2019) that may have prompted them to present bills classified as favorable to three business sectors: industry, agriculture, and commerce. The factors are: (i) campaign donations made by companies from these three sectors; (ii) the importance of each business sector as a source of jobs for the electorate; (iii) the ideological profile of each federal deputy; (iv) whether the federal deputy is an entrepreneur; (v) whether the parliamentarian belongs to standing committees that handle issues related to the three business sectors; and (vi) the parliamentarian’s time in office. The results show that the introduction of favorable bills is strongly connected to the following factors: being a member of standing committees (committees that handle issues related to business sectors seem to attract more deputies in favor of these sectors), ideology (center and right-wing deputies present more favorable propositions than those on the left), and time in office (deputies with more time in office introduce a greater number of favorable projects). The evidence regarding the effect of the remaining three factors is mixed, as they seem to matter more to some business sectors than others.