Agenda control and fast-track approval in Brazil's chamber of deputies (1987-2022)

Deputies from the Chamber President's party have 1.5 to 1.9 times higher odds of seeing a bill approved in the same legislature, and each additional legislature of seniority adds 11 to 13 percent to those odds. Membership in the government coalition has no detectable effect. Using 65,592 individually authored bills from Brazil's Chamber of Deputies (1987-2022) and logistic regression with standard errors clustered by deputy, this article asks what explains fast-track approval. Agenda-control theory expects procedural access to matter most, and the results agree: speed depends on a deputy's party position and accumulated experience inside the House, not on belonging to the governing coalition. The findings hold when honorific bills are excluded and when prior trajectory, gender and bill theme are controlled.