Choosing the Form of Government: Theory and Evidence from Brazil

This article proposes a model to study the main factors that influence the preferences of different population groups between presidential and parliamentary systems. Ceteris paribus, the poor groups in the population tend to prefer a presidential system relatively more than the rich, as the lower quality of their local accountability institutions (e.g. local media and judicial courts) makes them more vulnerable to the expropriation of rents by their legislators. The model is able to account for the main stylised facts emerging from an analysis of referendum data from Brazil.