This research intends to produce a better understanding of the Brazilian budget process. The focus is on understanding the impact and the logic behind budget amendments made by state representatives as there is virtually no research about this issue. The literature that discusses the Brazilian budget process has been focused on the analysis of individual amendments and their connection with the electoral system. This investigation, on the contrary, understands that the budget process cannot be reduced to these questions only because the level of complexity is so high that it goes beyond the capacity any single investigation. The empirical part of the research consists in collecting the amount (N and sums) of amendments presented by each State in Brazil in the 1996 – 2011 period, the sums of executed/spent amendments, a qualitative analysis of these amendments in order to group them by type of program and area and, finally, an analysis of the party composition of the congressmen forming these state delegations to verify if a relationship between parties and the allocation of amendments exists.
From Carla Araujo Voros.