When the government seems slow and messy, it’s often because the smartest people there have decided that being 'inefficient' is actually the best move.
March 27, 2026
Original Paper
Inefficient Checks and Balances and Defensive Institutional Behavior in Brazil
SSRN · 6215059
The Takeaway
Using Law and Economics to study Brazil, this paper argues that when the personal cost of fixing a system is high and the benefit is spread across everyone, the smartest move for an official is 'the silence of the innocent.' This creates a stable equilibrium where everyone follows the herd into inefficiency because the incentives for reform are systematically neutralized.
From the abstract
This article examines the functional inefficiency of checks and balances in Brazil through an economic-institutional perspective. Rather than attributing institutional imbalance to normative gaps or democratic erosion, the paper argues that the Brazilian experience reflects a misalignment of incentives that encourages defensive institutional behavior, jurisdictional expansion, and fragmented accountability. Drawing on Public Choice theory, Law and Economics, and New Institutional Economics, the