The late twentieth century witnessed the birth of an impressive number of new democracies in Latin America. This wave of democratization since 1978 has been by far the broadest and most durable in ...the history of Latin America, but many of the resulting democratic regimes also suffer from profound deficiencies. What caused democratic regimes to emerge and survive? What are their main achievements and shortcomings? This volume offers an ambitious and comprehensive overview of the unprecedented advances as well as the setbacks in the post-1978 wave of democratization. It seeks to explain the sea change from a region dominated by authoritarian regimes to one in which openly authoritarian regimes are the rare exception, and it analyzes why some countries have achieved striking gains in democratization while others have experienced erosions. The book presents general theoretical arguments about what causes and sustains democracy and analyses of nine compelling country cases.
In 1992, Fernando Collor de Mello resigned the presidency of Brazil to escape impeachment proceedings. Over the next two decades, Brazilian democracy grew stronger. Even as nearby countries were ...sacrificing either the liberal institutions of horizontal accountability or inclusive social policies, Brazil bolstered those institutions while also shrinking poverty, expanding services, and widening the social safety net. It did all this, moreover, without giving way to fiscal irresponsibility. The party system became more stable, with lower rates of electoral volatility and two anchor parties alternating in the presidency. At the time of this writing in May 2016, however, that hopeful storyline has changed, and not for the better. A new impeachment crisis has gripped Brazil. President Dilma Rousseff has been suspended from office while she undergoes trial in the Senate. In one sense, the crisis is not a shock. After a long period of economic growth, Brazil is experiencing the most severe recession it has seen in decades.
This 1996 book is about politics in Brazil during the military regime of 1964–85 and the transition to democracy. Unlike most books about contemporary Brazilian politics that focus on promising signs ...of change, this book seeks to explain remarkable political continuity in the Brazilian political system. It attributes the persistence of traditional politics and the dominance of regionally based, traditional political elites in particular to the manner in which the economic and political strategies of the military, together with the transition to democracy, reinforced the clientelistic, personalistic, and regional basis of state-society relations. The book focuses on the political competition and representation in the state of Minas Gerais.
This article identifies and proposes a framework to explain the responses of Latin America's Roman Catholic churches to a new strategic dilemma posed by religious and political pluralism. Because the ...church's goals of defending institutional interests, evangelizing, promoting public
morality, and grounding public policy in Catholic social teaching cut across existing political cleavages, church leaders must make strategic choices about which to emphasize in their messages to the faithful, investment of pastoral resources, and alliances. The article presents a typology
of episcopal responses based on Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Mexico and explains strategic choices by the church's capacity to mobilize civil society, its degree of religious hegemony, and the ideological orientations of Catholics.
Brazil has long been known as a "democracy with adjectives," in no small part because of its elitist qualities, most notably, the inequality of economic advantage, life's chances, and access to law ...and justice. Even today, as Brazil leads South America's democracies on the world stage in international politics and trade negotiations, and as economic stability and growth have brought greater social progress in the past fifteen years than at any time in Brazil's history, its democracy engenders deep ambivalence among scholars and citizens, principally because of the apparent inability to escape the weighty legacy of unequal citizenship. An impressive collection of recent books opens a remarkable window onto Brazil's march along multiple avenues toward a genuinely democratic society and polity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Running through these disparate works is a set of common threads. Collectively, the works under review move us forward by showing the ways in which the transformation of citizenship and politics is challenging Brazil's paradoxical democracy.
From Patronage to Program Hagopian, Frances; Gervasoni, Carlos; Moraes, Juan Andres
Comparative political studies,
03/2009, Volume:
42, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This article explains the unanticipated emergence of party-oriented legislators and rising party discipline in Brazil since the early 1990s. The authors contend that deputies in Brazil became ...increasingly party oriented because the utilities of party-programmatic and patronage-based electoral strategies shifted with market reforms that created a programmatic cleavage in Brazilian politics and diminished the resource base for state patronage. The study introduces new measures of partisan campaigns, party polarization, and values that legislators attached to party programs and voter loyalty based on an original survey of the Brazilian Congress. Regression analysis confirms that deputies who believe that voters value party programs have run partisan, programmatic campaigns, and those in polarized parties and those who believe voters are loyal to the party are willing to delegate authority to party leaders and do not switch parties. Party polarization and the proximity of deputies' policy preferences to their party's mean explain discipline on 236 roll-call votes in the 51st legislature (1999-2001).
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