The institutional imbalance between the Republican Powers

structural and circumstantial elements and the phenomenon of the judicialization of politics

Abstract

The current Brazilian State was structured under a constitutional order with a functional division into three bodies, legally called powers. Despite the fact that the constitutional normative organization seeks to ideally reproduce the theoretical plan of the notion of separation of functions and the mechanisms of “checks and balances” between the constituted powers, it is observed that the balance of forces between them in the practical plan of the Brazilian reality demonstrates that this expected balance does not work exactly as abstractly thought, with cases of frank hypertrophy cycles of one power over the others being frequent, or even of general disarray between all the constituted powers, as recently occurred in the case of the judgment by the STF of the secret budget, a matter that involved the simultaneous balance of forces between the three powers, culminating in a scenario that greatly disorganized the proper functioning of the Brazilian State and its institutions. Under these theoretical premises, the objective is to analyze, through a legal-political approach, the contributory elements for the formation of the current dynamic balance of forces that involves the three republican powers. Specifically, the objective is to investigate some of the institutional and political factors that potentially contribute to the imbalance of forces between the powers, seeking to answer whether the imbalance of forces between the powers has circumstantial causalities, at the moment, or if they are due to bad institutional design of the separation of powers, hence of structural causalities. As a methodology, basic bibliographical research is adopted, approaching the themes with a legal-political analysis focus, however without intending to focus on the in-depth theoretical examination of dogmatic categories.