Mayors within Electoral or Legislative Coalitions? Pre-Electoral Agreements in Brazilian Municipal Legislatures

This work examines whether parties politically connected to the elected mayor have a higher probability of securing the local council presidency at the beginning of the legislative cycle. Results underscore that the support of the Executive branch has a significant causal e!ect on the choice of the local Speaker. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that, in Municipalities, the government based on legislative coalitions observed at the federal level falls behind a mechanism of pre-electoral agreements, especially electoral coalitions. Taking advantage of these agreements, mayors influence the choice of the local council president, which allows the Executive to o!set the absence of institutions that are inherent to the legislative coalition government. To investigate this issue, we assembled a novel dataset on the party a"liation of more than 3,600 Brazilian local councils in 2021, which we paired with a Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) based on the 2020 mayoral elections in Brazil.