Ilhas, arquipélagos ou continentes? Uma análise sobre a geografia do Supremo Tribunal Federal

Abstract

In times of institutional crisis between the Executive and Judiciary powers in Brazil, the call for research on the patterns of the Federal Supreme Court is reinforced. Topics such as spatial models of voting, theories of judicial behavior and estimation of ideal points permeate the texts in international research and, recently, began to emerge in the Brazilian scenario. This research brought an innovative approach: the decision patterns implicit in the voting scores related to Habeas Corpus requests judged by the Federal Supreme Court in the period from 2011 to 2022. The votes of Direct Actions of Unconstitutionality are also analyzed. The analyzes are conducted on four parts of the period. The objective was to identify ideological, strategic, or legal patterns and groupings among the analyzed voters, having as a source of data the main judgments of both procedural classes over the period. The proposed methodology involved extracting data, producing a dataset, and employing tools common to Data Science, to integrate them with the techniques common to the spatial analysis of dissidences. Graphic visualizations were created on matrices of distances and similarities, hierarchical groupings as well as multidimensional scaling aimed at analyzing the geography of the court, under the prism of the metaphor of the eleven islands. Several indications were found that corroborate the assumption that the Court has similar dissent patterns in hugely different procedural classes. Other contributions achieved in this work are the sharing of vote counting automation code and answers to usual questions about politicization of the Judiciary in Brazil.