Legislative Coordination and Institutional Change

A Bipartite Network Analysis of Coalition Dynamics in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

Author: Andéliton Soares (PhD Candidate, University of Brasília, UnB) Presented at: 19th Political Networks Conference (POLNET 2026), University of Manchester, August 2026 Status: working paper, conference version (28 July 2026).

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What is in this repository

This is the public companion to the POLNET 2026 talk. It contains:

• the working paper — a reading version (paper/paper_leitura.md and paper/paper_leitura.html) and the compiled PDF (paper/Legislative Coordination and Institutional Change (working paper).pdf);
• the figures — every figure in reading order (figures/, indexed in figures/README.md);
• the slides as presented, in light and dark themes (slides/talk_obsidianite_light.pdf, slides/talk_obsidianite_dark.pdf).

The analysis code and data are not included here yet. They will be released as a full replication package, with an environment-locked pipeline, together with the journal version of the paper.

The paper in one paragraph

How does an increasingly polarized legislature stay governable? Across six legislatures of roll-call voting in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies (2003 to 2026), the paper reconstructs coordination as bipartite networks of agreement and shows that the chamber organizes by position relative to the executive of the day, not along a fixed ideological axis. Its pragmatic center, the Centrão, is a long-standing governista bloc whose position changed during the 2014 to 2016 crisis: once a disciplined agent of the presidency, it became an autonomous pivot that sits in the largest coordinating community under every government and, net of the president's party, supplies the marginal majority on contested votes. Because the institutional shocks of the period are collinear, the design does not estimate a single causal effect; it eliminates the main observable rivals and reads the structure that survives.

Layout

POLNET2026_git/
├── README.md
├── LICENSE                 <- CC BY 4.0 (slides and figures)
├── CITATION.cff
├── paper/
│   ├── Legislative Coordination and Institutional Change (working paper).pdf
│   ├── paper_leitura.md    <- reading version (POLNET short paper)
│   └── paper_leitura.html
├── figures/                <- every figure, in reading order, with an index
└── slides/                 <- the presentation deck, light and dark themes

Figures

The figures are named in reading order (figure_01_... to figure_07_...) plus the appendix figures (figure_B1_..., figure_F1_..., figure_G1_...). See figures/README.md for what each one shows and which analysis step produced it.

Citing this work

Soares, A. de O. (2026). Legislative Coordination and Institutional Change: A Bipartite Network Analysis of Coalition Dynamics in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. Working paper presented at the 19th Political Networks Conference (POLNET 2026), University of Manchester.

License

The slides and figures are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0); see LICENSE. The working-paper text (everything under paper/) is © 2026 Andéliton de Oliveira Soares, all rights reserved pending journal publication: it may be read and cited, but not otherwise reused without permission. The analysis code and data will be released, under an open license, with the journal version.

Contact

Andéliton Soares, University of Brasília (UnB) — andelitons@gmail.com. Comments and questions welcome.