Lucas Couto
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lucascoutoz.bsky.social
Lucas Couto
@lucascoutoz.bsky.social
270 followers 500 following 70 posts
PhD Student in Political Science at Aarhus University.
Fond of Data Viz and Sports.
https://lucascoutoz.netlify.app/
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lucascoutoz.bsky.social
In contrast, when legislative polarisation is less pervasive, presidential parties are faced with less bargaining complexity and can opt to exclude PEC members from the upcoming government, as exemplified by the Brazilian example below.
Picture depicting the Brazilian party system as of 2010 in the right-hand, and Rousseff's PEC in the left-hand of the figure. Of note is that the PSC and the PRB were left out without any government ministry.
September 23, 2024 at 11:19 AM
lucascoutoz.bsky.social
My argument is that in highly polarised settings, presidential parties have less margin for manoeuvre to rearrange their multiparty coalitions and have an extra incentive to reward their PEC members with government ministries, as demonstrated by the Chilean example below.
Picture depicting the Chilean party system as of 2010 in the right-hand, and Pinera's PEC and first cabinet in the left-hand of the figure.
September 23, 2024 at 11:18 AM
lucascoutoz.bsky.social
🚨My first solo-authored paper is out 🥳: I find that the effect of pre-electoral coalitions on government formation processes in presidential democracies increases as legislative polarisation grows stronger.

doi.org/10.1017/lap....
Part of the first page of my first solo-authored paper!
September 23, 2024 at 11:18 AM
lucascoutoz.bsky.social
Bluesky now has over 10 million users, and I was #1,187,692!
September 17, 2024 at 5:46 AM
lucascoutoz.bsky.social
Hello everyone! I'm proud to announce that I'll begin as a PhD Student at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University next week! Very excited about this next chapter in my academic career 🙂 Thank you to all who have helped me get this far 😊
Picture of myself at the campus. Photo depicting one of the buildings at Aarhus University along with a sign.
August 30, 2024 at 11:12 AM
lucascoutoz.bsky.social
The authority of regional governments in East Asia based on RAI scores 📊!

P.S.: missingness for North Korea 😣

Blogpost: lucascoutoz.netlify.app/posts/g2024_...
The picture is a bichoropleth map where the two dimensions are self-rule and shared rule, both from the Regional Authority Index (RAI). The former captures to what extent each regional government can exercise power within its borders, and the latter to what extent regional governments have a say on national matters. Only two countries sufficiently score in both dimensions: Malaysia and Myanmar. Even still, they are far apart from the scores of some Western democracies, like Belgium and Germany.
July 24, 2024 at 1:39 PM
lucascoutoz.bsky.social
How are left-of-centre parties spread out in Brazil's ideological space over the years?

This should be a GIF, but, unfortunately, BlueSky still do not support it =(

The animated version can be found here: lucascoutoz.netlify.app/posts/f2024_...
The figure is an animated line plot depicting how Brazilian left-of-centre parties' policy positions evolved over time.
June 20, 2024 at 6:52 PM
lucascoutoz.bsky.social
No longer dominant? The presidential share of all enacted laws is at an all-time low following Piñera's second term! This begs the question: is Chile still a hyper-presidential system?

Blogpost: lucascoutoz.netlify.app/posts/e2024_...
The figure is a line plot with a shaded area beneath it. It plots the presidents' share of all enacted laws in Chile over time. Presidential terms are on the x-axis, whereas the presidents' share is on the y-axis. From the graph, we can see that there's been a trend in Chilean politics since Bachelet II: presidents are losing ground to the legislature in the lawmaking process.
May 27, 2024 at 4:17 PM
lucascoutoz.bsky.social
The ideological positions of New Zealand's parties based on their manifestos in recent elections! 📊

Interesting to see the convergence between ACT and National. A bit more on:
lucascoutoz.netlify.app/posts/d2024_...
The figure displays a line plot portraying the ideological positions of New Zealand's parties based on their manifesto in the last three elections.
April 24, 2024 at 6:01 PM
lucascoutoz.bsky.social
The ideology of heads of government in Latin America over the years! My first successful animated map as well =) Data from @bastianherre.bsky.social. Kudos to him!

Blogpost and gif on: lucascoutoz.netlify.app/posts/c2024_...
This plot is a snapshot of a GIF depicting the ideology of heads of government in Latin America over the years. As Bluesky does not support GIFs yet, the animated version can be seen in my blog post: https://lucascoutoz.netlify.app/posts/c2024_3/ideology-head-of-gov. Heads of government are classified according to their position on an economic scale as "Leftist" — red, "Centrist" — purple, or "Rightist" — blue. Regional trends can be seen in some periods.
March 14, 2024 at 8:56 PM
lucascoutoz.bsky.social
This month, I've taken a look at the FISTS, a dataset dedicated to reporting physical fights in parliaments, garnered and organised by @moritzschmoll.bsky.social and @kiwiting.bsky.social (kudos to them for that!). A couple of visualisations below 📊.

Post: lucascoutoz.netlify.app/posts/b2024_...
This table looks at which countries have most often registered at least one incident of fighting among lawmakers per year. The data come from the FISTS dataset, and the variable used here was countb. The second column represents how many years witnessed at least one instance of reported fighting. The third column represents the percentage of years with fighting compared to all the years in the sample. The plot depicts the dispersion of parliamentary brawls over time for four countries, all of which are "famous" for legislative violence. Each dot represents a year with at least one reported incident of fistfighting among parliamentarians. While a somewhat more complete analysis can be found in the blog post, it's interesting to see how Taiwan had a very consistent pattern of legislative violence all the time. The patterns for the other three countries are different: in Ukraine, fighting started to be more common in the late 1990s; in South Korea, it went downward in the late 2010s and began to be a thing in Türkiye around the same time.
February 27, 2024 at 6:26 PM
lucascoutoz.bsky.social
Hi there! I've just made my first graph of the year: examining to what extent coalition governments in Western Europe have written coalition agreements! There's also a blog post about some of my plans for 2024 and a bit more about coalition agreements.
lucascoutoz.netlify.app/posts/new_bl...
The picture depicts a series of bar plots examining the degree to which coalition governments in Western Europe put the terms of their multiparty bargaining on paper. Interestingly, most countries have multiparty governments that habitually write and disclose public coalition agreements!
January 16, 2024 at 6:14 PM
lucascoutoz.bsky.social
The Brazilian inter-branch relations are currently fraught with tension between the legislature and the judiciary. It's been claimed that the Supreme Court's been using monocratic decisions excessively. However, the data tell us that the n. of monocratic decisions has actually declined since 2018!
The plot reveals the number of monocratic decisions the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court made over the years. In spite of the fact that several lawmakers have claimed that the judges are overly relying on monocratic decisions, the number of monocratic decisions has declined since 2018, as shown by the figure.
October 11, 2023 at 2:18 PM