Agenda-setting: análise do comportamento do Supremo Tribunal Federal no controle de constitucionalidade concreto

Abstract

The judicial review was criticized since it was created on the grounds that represent an empowerment of the judiciary in comparison to other government institutions, especially regarding the exercise of the power to remove from the law any rule that "supposedly" is defying the constitution, on the basis of fundamental rights protection and with the scope to prevent a tyranny of the majority. The judicial review is defended by legal philosophers and questioned by political philosophers, among them, Jeremy Waldron, which rejects the use of judicial review arguing the equality of citizens that should, by themselves or through their representatives, discuss and resolve disagreements. In Brazil, the concrete judicial review portrays the empowerment of the judiciary, since the constitutional amendment n. 45/2004 created a filter of general repercussion subsequently regulated in 2006, gives the Brazilian Supreme Court the power to select which cases will be analyzed through the appeals. These choices can be explained by agenda-setting theory, which provides hypothesis of explanation of any changes in the political agenda from its suitability to the agenda of its recipients. Thus, we applied these theories to the Brazilian judicial review in order to identify the existence of a selective behavior in Brazilian Supreme Court towards the procedure of case selection (repercussão geral) and saw which subjects tended to be accepted by the court, verifying finally if this kind of selection bias seeks to the protection of fundamental rights and the tyranny of the majority s prevention. Therefore, we designed a database with all the appeals that had the repercussão geral recognized since 2006, and used descriptive statistics to confirm the court's selectivity and to check the tendency of the court to recognize the general implications of the processes that result some kind of budgetary impact, making the Supreme Court almost a filter for of government agencies future expenses, and showing a lack of commitment to the protection of fundamental rights.