Electoral campaign contributions: an obstacle to health-related sugary drinks regulation in Brazil? The case of the Chamber of Deputies

Objective: To assess corporate electoral campaign contributions from industries related to sugary drinks production and the characteristics of the elected officials financed by the sector. Design: Cross-sectional analysis of electoral campaign contributions from corporations related to sugary drinks production (sugary drink industries and sugary drink input industries) to candidates to the Chamber of Deputies, Brazil. Setting: Elections to the 55th Congress (2015-2019), held in October 2014. Participants: Candidates to the Chamber of Deputies, Brazil. Results: Forty-nine companies or corporate groups that produce sugary drinks and 52 corporations that produce inputs for sugary drinks manufacturing contributed to electoral campaigns of candidates in the 2014 Election. Contributions from this industry sector represented 7.3% of all corporate contributions and helped finance 11.7% of the candidates and 46.2% of the elected officials. The transnationals Ambev and Coca-Cola were the first and second biggest donors, respectively. Revenues mediated by political parties, from sugary drink industries, and from corporate members of some industry associations (Abir, Unica and CitrusBR) were more prevalent. Among elected officials, a significant association was found between being financed by the sector and representing the Southeast region, having higher education level and referring themselves as being professional politicians. In the multivariate model, financed candidates were 27% more likely to be elected. Conclusions: Corporations related to sugary drinks production have contributed to the electoral campaigns of almost half of the Federal Deputies in Brazil in 2014. This possibly facilitates access to decision-makers and could help buy influence on legislative proposals, including health-related food policies.

Ekspresja i empatia. Tauromachia okiem Reymonta ("Los toros")

Reymont wrote the short story, 'Los toros', in the year 1907 after coming back from Spain, where he witnessed a corrida in San Sebastián. The choice of the genre was intentional. The writer used it to reflect the realities of life and depict a group portrait of Spaniards, in which he succeeded without a doubt, using all with his literary imagination and ability to make his works metaphoric. Baffled by the corrida as an element of Spanish culture, Reymont did not express his moral approval of torturing animals (bulls and horses) on stage. On the contrary, his narration is full of sympathy and expressions that indicate emotional engagement. The turning point, the act of pardon performed by the young shepherd and the narrator’s friend towards the bull, indicates that Reymont’s reception of the corrida was empathic. Now, we had two conclusions on the contesting of the phenomenon. Reymont’s work was used by the French Chamber of Deputies as a literary example of disapproval of bloody spectacles that are justified by tradition.

An Information Retrieval Pipeline for Legislative Documents from the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

This work investigates information retrieval methods to address the existing difficulties on the Preliminary Search, part of the law making process from the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. For such, different preprocessing approaches, stemmers, language models, and BM25 variants were compared. Two legislative corpora from Chamber were used to build and validate the pipeline. All texts were converted to lowercase and had stopwords, accentuation, and punctuation removed. Words were represented by their stem combined with word unigram and bigram language models. Retrieving the bill that was originated from a specific job request, the BM25L with Savoy stemmer reached a R@20 of 0.7356. After removing queries with inconsistencies or which made reference exclusively to attachments, to other job requests, or to bills, the R@20 increased to 0.94.

Assessing the Impact of Stemming Algorithms Applied to Brazilian Legislative Documents Retrieval

The main purpose of stemming is to reduce the inflected words into its root form or stem. Thus, words can be mapped to the same concept, improving the process of information retrieval, regarding its ability to index documents and to reduce data dimensionality. However, the efficiency of those algorithms varies according to different aspects. Also, studies in the field area reached contrasting conclusions. This work assesses the use of stemmers in the retrieval of legislative documents written in Portuguese. Four stemmers together with BM25 were evaluated in two legislative corpora from the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. RSLP-S and Savoy stemmers showed the best improvements in the information retrieval pipeline.

Argentina

This chapter explores the institutional setting and identifies the critical determinants of parliamentary speechgiving in the Argentine Chamber of Deputies between 2001 and 2016. We understand and describe access to the parliamentary floor as a complex interplay between formal and informal regulations, which govern the distribution of floor time as a scarce resource between, and its allocation within, political parties. The empirical analysis combines textual data on plenary session speeches with both individual and institutional characteristics of over 1000 Argentine MPs. The analysis results indicate that participation in parliamentary debate is driven by a combination of individual traits such as seniority and MPs’ ability to hold institutionally powerful leadership positions such as that of the parliamentary bloc. At the same time, we observe that the government–opposition divide plays no significant role in parliamentary floor access, which speaks to the Argentine Chamber of Deputies’ general characterization as a consensual institution.

Italy

This essay examines speechmaking activity in the Italian Chamber of Deputies from 1996 to 2018. Such a period covers almost entirely the phase called the “Second Republic” following a radical change in the electoral rules and the party system that Italy experienced in the early 1990s. Our analysis of the determinants of speechmaking activity shows that the small percentage of MPs holding leading positions within and for their party in the legislative and executive arena (e.g., committee chairs, parliamentary party groups’ leaders, ministers) do speak more in parliament. Our results largely confirm the hypothesis that, in systems where party government is predominant, floor access is strictly controlled by political parties. This hypothesis receives further support from the analysis carried out in the section of this chapter examining the impact of different electoral incentives on speechmaking activity.

Chile

This chapter examines speech participation in the Chilean Chamber of Deputies. It discusses the rules structuring speech participation, the impact of electoral incentives, and the country’s party system. The empirical analysis examines all speeches delivered on the floor of the Chamber of Deputies between 2006 and 2018. We find that being in the opposition increases the likelihood of delivering a speech and that legislators from more remote districts deliver more speeches than members whose districts are closer to the main metropolitan area of the country. Relevant differences between those on the right and those on the left are also present. There is no evidence—when looking at all speeches delivered without distinguishing between the type of speech or stage of the chamber’s session—that party leaders or committee chairs speak more often than other legislators or that men speak more often than women.

Topic Modeling of Committee Discussions in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

Ensuring that civil society can monitor and supervise the actions of its representatives is essential to build strong democracies. Despite significant advances in transparency, Brazilian National Congress committees are presently complex to follow and monitor due to the lack of open structured data about their discussions and the sheer volume of activity in these committees. This work presents two contributions to this context. First, we create and present an open dataset including structured speeches of the 25 Chamber of Deputies' standing committees over the last two decades. Second, we use Natural Language Processing techniques - especially Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) - to identify themes addressed on these committees. Based on these latent topics, we explore similarities and differences between the standing committees, their relationships, and how their debates change over time. Our results show that committees accommodate conversations - including their main topic and opposing agendas - and describe how the topics discussed in the committees reverberate external events.

Mexico reshuffle aims to facilitate agenda approval

Significance The change preceded the start of the first legislative period of the newly elected Chamber of Deputies on September 1, in which AMLO’s ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena) and its allies no longer hold a two-thirds majority. Impacts AMLO’s popular approval ratings suggest he will remain in office beyond March’s recall referendum. Despite requiring support from at least some of the opposition to pass key bills, AMLO will not abandon his polarising rhetoric. Co-opting opposition figures may become easier towards the end of the current legislature as internal competition for nominations grows.

More than voters: Parliamentary debates about emigrants in a new democracy

There is much research about how migrants engage with politics in their home countries and about how state institutions facilitate this involvement. Yet, we know little about how members of Parliament refer to, and debate, issues related to communities of emigrants. The ways in which legislators give voice to and represent the de-territorialized demos has broad implications for the functioning of contemporary democracies. This article analyzes the ways in which the Romanian parliamentarians refer to emigrants. We focus on the parliamentary speeches from the plenary sessions in the Chamber of Deputies in the two most recent terms in office (2012–2016 and 2016–2020). The study includes 239 parliamentary speeches and uses thematic analysis. Our results identify an ambivalent attitude toward emigrants that transcends political divides. The Romanian legislators express concerns related to the representation of emigrants and their needs and see them as a valuable pool of economic and electoral support.