O deslocamento e julgamento de decisões políticas pelo Supremo Tribunal Federal: uma análise empírica das ações diretas de inconstitucionalidade entre 2010 e 2019

Abstract

Since the re-democratization, the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court (STF), has assumed remarkable institutional roles foreseen in the Federal Constitution from 1988. Over time, the Supreme Court's decisions started to have greater repercussions on the political scene. Many studies in the field of political science have been developed with the aim of understanding how institutions in Brazilian constitutional democracy are related. To this end, the Supreme Court has become an institution widely used by national literature in political analysis, with a special focus on the form and frequency that political agents call the Court and how it judges actions that make up the Brazilian Institute for Concentrated Control of Abstract Constitutionality, highlighting Direct Actions of Unconstitutionality (ADIs). The actions that make up concentrated control directly interfere in national political life, as they allow the maintenance and even exclusion of legislative norms and governmental acts from the Brazilian democratic system. In the analysis of these actions, some authors have argued that the STF has acted with restraint in deciding actions of political impact. Other studies, however, have pointed out that institutes internal to the Supreme Court allow individual ministers to act to impact political decisions. The present work has the following problem: what is the pattern of displacement and judgment of political decisions by the STF, in the context of ADIs, between the years 2010 and 2019? ADIs are adopted as an analysis variable because they allow the removal of norms of the legal democratic order, and also because they make up the majority of concentrated constitutionality control actions in the period considered. Descriptive in character, the present work adopts as instruments of descriptive statistics the measures of central tendency (mean and median), the measure of dispersion (standard deviation), and the measure of position (relative frequency distribution), in order to understand the problematized phenomenon. From the survey of data on the ADIs assessed and decided, the interpretations on the displacement and the judgment of political decisions by the STF are studied. With the analysis of the pattern of displacement and judgment, the objective is to understand how the Supreme Court processed and judged the ADIs, between 2010 and 2019, studying how the literature has interpreted the Court's performance, and discussing whether there was a restrained performance Court in the period considered. The analysis of data and literature seems to suggest that, in the context of ADIs, between 2010 and 2019, the STF attributed mostly final decisions to the processes filed by governors and associations in matters of administrative law, interfering more in state organizational matters and associations than federal, partisan and confederative issues. Furthermore, most of the final decisions were collegiate and did not assess the merits of the actions. The STF acted with restraint. Still, the demonstration that most internal decisions in the ADI processes were monocratic, and that ministers use internal institutes to promote political impact, may suggest a huge power of ministers, individually. In this sense, the ministers, individually, were not restrained in their performance.