The Congressional Rural Caucus in the Chamber of Deputies has grown in number and influence. Parallel to that, Brazil has continued to become less and less rural. That seeming contradiction suggests two explanations. The first one is that the rural agenda is based on the rural vote, which is overrepresented. The second one is that the rural agenda is justified by other factors external to the elections, mainly campaign financing. The current work analyses and tests these hypotheses aiming to explain what gives support to the rural agenda in the Chamber of Deputies' 54 th Legislature (2011Legislature ( -2015. The main element to be explained is the group of policy proposals formed by Constitutional Amendments, Ordinary Bills, Petitions and Indications. The possible explanations are (i) the rural vote (based on the demographic distribution per municipality), (ii) what I call "agribusiness vote" (based on the distribution of the agricultural GDP per municipality), (iii) the campaign financing, (iv) the declared profession of the representatives and (v) their level of electoral safety. Using the same variables the current research explained the composition of the Agricultural Parliamentary Front, the composition of the Agricultural Permanent Commission of the Chamber of Deputies, and the first round roll call voting for the Forest Code. The results of the empirical tests show that rural representatives are not responsive to the rural vote. However, they are responsive to the agribusiness vote with which the correlation is strongest among the variables. The representatives' campaign financing and declared professions are relevant for prioritizing the rural agenda, and the Agricultural Commission is the political place where it happens. The independent variables applied to explain the representatives' proactive policy propositions cannot be used to interpret the roll call voting of the Forest Code, which could be better explained by the legislative modus operandi than the representatives' electoral context. 14 esta a correlação mais forte. O financiamento de campanhas e a profissão declarada pelos deputados são relevantes para motivar a priorização da agenda rural, e a CAPADR é o espaço político onde esta priorização ocorre. Por fim, as variáveis utilizadas para explicar o comportamento pró-ativo dos deputados não servem para interpretar a votação nominal do Código Florestal, que pode ser melhor explicado pelo ambiente legislativo do que pelas bases eleitorais ou financiamento de campanha dos parlamentares.
KeywordsAlém desta introdução, a dissertação traz, no capítulo 2, um debate teórico sobre representação política, responsividade, mandatos e conexão eleitoral. Tal capítulo foi subdividido em cinco partes que tratam, em seqüência, da conceituação recente da representação política, da representação como mecanismo de produção de políticas, de outras formas de responsividade, da conexão eleitoral e das instituições políticas brasileiras neste contexto. Em seguida, dedico o capítulo 3 para a explicação ...