Authors:

Sávio da Silva Abreu e Taís de Cássia Badaró Alves

Abstract:

This article assumes that the Federal Legislature constituted the strategic arena for the political game in the First Republic. Likewise, it considers the permeability of the State towards other interests that have not been reduced to the demands of coffee growing as the dominant sector. As an objective, it is intended to trace the biographical profile of the Lower Chamber in the years 1898 to 1906, marked by an economic policy of retraction of income and credit in order to infer a correspondence to the interests of the industrial sector. The aim is to make sense of how economic groups act within the specificities of a given model, at a time and in a place according to the advantages defined within the scope of neoinstitutionalism. As a methodological tool, this study uses prosopography to verify the origins of political action. However, although biographical aspects do not act as a variable that explains the interest representation of industrial entrepreneurs, we bet on this correlation in the form of individual action in parliamentary debates and speeches – challenges that present themselves in the broader research panorama.