Brazilian Supreme Court and the Rule of Law Construction: Building the Legislative Quality Index (lqi)
Abstract: The Brazilian judicial review system allows nine actors between political, institutional, subnational and federal ones to claim on the Supreme Court federal and state's law by their adequacy to Federal Constitution. So, who is more powerful? The political or the institutional actor? There is some difference on national or subnational actor hole? This research focuses on measuring in national and subnational levels, the quality of Brazilian legislative production based in the results of constitutional actions (Adins) judged by Brazilian Supreme Court, where Federal or States' laws were considered totally or partially unconstitutional. The Legislative Quality Index (LQI) is a proportion between the universe of suited actions and the amount of laws totally or partially contrary to Brazilian Federal Constitution, in a scale from 0 to 1, as a continuous variable, driven to statically estimate when, and where, better or worse legislative acts were produced. That index will be explored to test the hypotheses that Brazilian Supreme Court is more receptive to political actors claims and that national actors are powerful to obtain the exclusion of unconstitutional laws than subnational ones.
