Tertulia Visiting Scholars Maria and Pedro

What’s the logic of the parliamentary allocation? A study of 20 years of Congressional amendments in Brazil.

Maria Dominguez

In recent years, there have been significant changes to the rules that guide the budget process in Brazil, especially regarding the allocation of budget amendments by members of Congress. Nowadays, legislators don’t need the Executive’s approval to receive their budget amendments and count on a bigger amount of resources that are sent to their constituents. Despite its importance to the relationship between the Executive and Legislative Powers and to Brazilian presidentialism, the patterns of allocation of these amendments, and the effect of the recent constitutional changes, are still unknown. This talk will share the preliminary results of a study of 20 years of Congressional amendments (2003-2023), with a dataset of more than 320.000 observations (individual amendments) analyzed to understand the allocation of these resources through the geographic, partisan, and policy areas perspectives. Also, the effects of the changing on the rules that affected the budgeting process in Brazil will be addressed.

Brazilian financial Twitter as an Online Community With Political Allegiances.

Pedro Bruzzi

This research studies a community of financial professionals on Brazilian Twitter called #Fintwit. These individuals include financial coaches, investors, investment bankers, and fund managers, who engage in discussions about the financial market and often advise and allocate resources for third parties. The research investigates how these individuals, typically associated with technical knowledge and rational decision-making, express their political preferences through social media, particularly during times of crisis that intersect politics and economics. We collected data digitally and analyzed the Twitter activity of the #Fintwit community. We found that most members of this community tend to hold right-leaning political views and use social media to express these views during moments of crisis, revealing their political preferences. The research also highlights how fintwitter establishes a storyline that influences political and economic debates due to their disproportionate media representation.

Host or Publisher UC San Diego Latin American Studies