When, How, and Why Political Parties Go to the Brazilian Supreme Court: A New Typology

The paper examines the role of political parties that have activated the Brazilian Supreme Court (STF) directly through constitutional review actions since 1988. We present a new theoretical approach that depicts the interaction between the parties and STF as an institutional symbiosis that evolves through time. Our first hypothesis is that parties activate the Court as an integral part of their broad strategies. Our second hypothesis is that the motivations of parties that go to STF are not related to an intentional transfer of political power to the Court, but rather to the possible gains that the parties may extract from this mutualistic interaction. Thus, judicial empowerment is better described as an unintented side effect of the parties' actions. In order to test our hypothesis, we have gathered all data comprising parties' actions during the terms of Presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002), Luis Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2010), and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016). Furthermore, to examine the motivations behind the parties' actions, we have conducted semi-structured interviews with key-actors. We have found that tiny parties, alongside with oppositional parties, are the ones that most benefit from the interaction with the Court. We have also discovered the phenomena of "surrogacy", by which the "gestation" of some actions occur outside of the parties' structure. At the end, we provide a new typology to illustrate the interaction between parties and STF.