Participatory Democracy in Brazil

Socioeconomic and Political Origins

J. Ricardo Tranjan

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780268093792
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The largely successful trajectory of participatory democracy in post-1988 Brazil is well documented, but much less is known about its origins in the 1970s and early 1980s. In Participatory Democracy in Brazil: Socioeconomic and Political Origins, J. Ricardo Tranjan recounts the creation of participatory democracy in Brazil. He positions the well-known Porto Alegre participatory budgeting at the end of three interrelated and partially overlapping processes: a series of incremental steps toward broader political participation taking place throughout the twentieth century; short-lived and only partially successful attempts to promote citizen participation in municipal administration in the 1970s; and setbacks restricting direct citizen participation in the 1980s. What emerges is a clearly delineated history of how socioeconomic contexts shaped Brazil's first participatory administrations.

Tranjan first examines Brazil's long history of institutional exclusion of certain segments of the population and controlled inclusion of others, actions that fueled nationwide movements calling for direct citizen participation in the 1960s. He then presents three case studies of municipal administrations in the late 1970s and early 1980s that foreground the impact of socioeconomic factors in the emergence, design, and outcome of participatory initiatives. The contrast of these precursory experiences with the internationally known 1990s participatory models shows how participatory ideals and practices responded to the changing institutional context of the 1980s. The final part of his analysis places developments in participatory discourses and practices in the 1980s within the context of national-level political-institutional changes; in doing so, he helps bridge the gap between the local-level participatory democracy and democratization literatures.

CHAPTER ONE

The Brazilian (Un)Representative System

The participatory ideals fuelling participatory democracy in Brazil emerged in the 1970s in response to the façade democracy of the military regime and earlier forms of political exclusion. This chapter focuses on the evolution of the Brazilian representative system, here defined as the set of institutions and processes that together permit cities, states, and the country to be governed by legislative representatives and executive leaders chosen through elections. In representative systems, the scope of suffrage, the integrity of elections, the autonomy of legislative members, and the commitment of executive leaders to the rights of citizens may vary considerably, as the Brazilian case illustrates. This chapter describes how landed oligarchies controlled the political system from the establishment of the republic in 1889 to the end of the 1920s. It then examines the slow and uneven process of political incorporation that started with the 1930 Revolution and was halted by the 1964 coup d’état. The controlled character of democratization in this period is fundamental for understanding the participatory movements that emerged in the 1970s. Before delving into this historical journey, it is necessary to discuss the concepts used here to analyze democratization processes. The first section presents a conceptual framework, and the second section applies this framework to the Brazilian case.

THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

The framework adopted in this book is inspired by Victor Nunes Leal’s seminal work, Coronelismo: The Municipality and Representative Government in Brazil (1949/2009). The local-level despots of Brazilian hinterlands are known as coronéis. The political system that is based on their power is referred to as coronelismo.1 Leal argued that coronelismo was not a widespread local phenomenon but a national political system based on compromises between coronéis, state governors, and federal representatives. This resulted from the diminishing economic power but persistent political influence of the country’s landed oligarchy. In other words, local-level despotism relied on the national political-institutional context and the country’s economic structure to survive. If one agrees with Leal’s interpretation, the logical step is to try to understand the emergence of local-level participatory democracy as a transformation of those same conditions. This book presents the emergence of participatory democracy as a nationwide phenomenon grounded on local dynamics. To fully comprehend this emergence we must take into account the economic and institutional changes the country underwent since the 1930s as well as the ways in which local actors responded to them.

More important, the account presented in this book regards the evolution from less to more democratic state-civil society relations. Three conceptual definitions are necessary: the assumed nature of the evolution of state-society relations, the defining characteristics of democratic societies, and the key drives of changes toward a more democratic society. The framework used in this book draws elements from three theoretical approaches to understanding democracy. With concerns to state-society relations, this book sides with the political economy perspective of civil society, using as a key reference Oxhorn’s (2006, 2011) work on Latin America. As part of the historical institutionalist school, North, Wallis, and Weingast (2009) defined traditional and democratic societies in a manner that is consonant with Leal’s work on Brazilian coronelismo. However, the analytical framework to which these definitions belong does not provide adequate tools to examine democratic transitions—a charge that can also be directed at Leal’s work. Structuralist analyses of democratization provide useful insights and concepts in examining democratic transitions, especially the seminal work of Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (1992).

Oxhorn’s (2006, 2011) arguments stand in juxtaposition to Marshall’s (1950) classic work on citizenship. Marshall posits that different categories of citizenship rights are extended to citizens in a consecutive order, with each step of the process supporting the next. In the British context, from which the author draws his analysis, civil rights where achieved first, followed by political, and only later social rights. In this approach, all sectors of a society concomitantly go through the gradual process of citizenship inclusion. Oxhorn (2011) argues that in Latin America, urbanization, industrialization, and the adoption of distinct development models has led to the recognition, controlled inclusion, or repression of different socioeconomic groups. In his view, distinct models of state-society relations, founded on broader economic policies, spur the extension of certain types of rights to some socioeconomic groups, often to the detriment of other types of rights and other socioeconomic groups. Hence, this process varies from case to case, as opposed to the rigid model described by Marshall.

Scholars who adopt Marshall’s schema tend to find the trajectory of citizenship rights in Brazil an anomaly. Carvalho (2001), for example, argues that the submissive incorporation of the masses, that is, the granting of social rights before political rights, cursed the country with a passive citizenship. Carvalho sees populism as emblematic of this passive citizenship, which was in part made possible by the subservient political culture of rural populations. Oxhorn (2011), on the other hand, argues that “populism was the hallmark of controlled inclusion” (44). In several Latin American countries, populist leaders rose to power by mobilizing the subaltern groups, but once there they “sought concessions from upper classes rather than their overthrow” (44). In the first perspective, the Brazilian trajectory is essentially derailed; whereas in England one advance led to another, in Brazil, each slip took the country farther from the right path. In the second perspective, the shortcomings of inclusion are presented as conjunctural, not congenital.

The latter perspective is more helpful in the analysis of the emergence of participatory democracy in Brazil, especially since this book contrasts different socioeconomic contexts. The economic policies adopted at the federal level had distinct impacts on state-society relations in the three examined states. As a result of the interaction of federal policies and local contexts, some groups were included, others excluded, and yet others became controlled by the state. These processes directly impacted the form of participatory innovation in different parts of the country.

In Violence and Social Orders (2009), North, Wallis, and Weingast propose an analytical framework to explain how societies controlled by small and powerful elites become open to the economic and political participation of all citizens. The authors call these two types of societies limited access order and open access order. In the former, elites control valuable resources and profitable activities and are capable of preventing nonelite members to access them. The means for limiting access to lucrative activities are the overt use of violence and the safeguarding of the privilege of forming social organizations. Only elites are able to form social organizations, which further strengthens them vis-à-vis others; these organizations facilitate collaboration and avoid violent struggle within the dominant elite coalition. From time to time internal or even outside contenders may successfully challenge elite arrangements, causing temporary turmoil without altering the fundamental features of this social order. In other words, elite members move up and down elite hierarchies, and new members may even replace old members, but at the end a powerful elite continues to dominate the rest of society.

In limited access orders, patronage is the main type of relationship between elite members (patrons) and nonelite members (clients). “The patrons’ privileged position within the dominant coalition enables them to protect their clients from injuries caused by clients or other patrons (whether that protection is legal or physical) and their ability to distribute rewards and levy punishments among their clients” (36). Limited access societies are comprised of several patron-client networks; the larger the network and the greater the resources it controls, the higher the position of its head in the dominant elite coalition. The heads of the more powerful patron-client networks constitute the organization that governs the society; if this organization is not the state per se, it has much influence over it. In this type of society, the majority of individuals participate in political life only through subservient relations with patrons, who participate in intra-elite arrangements.

In turn, “an open access order exists only if a large number of individuals have the right to form organizations that can engage in a wide variety of economic, political and social activities” (23). Impartial institutions regulate peaceful competition for resources and political control. “The ability of political actors to use organized military or police power to coerce individuals is constrained by the ability of economic and other actors to compete for political control” (22). Whereas in a limited access order the dominant coalition includes the heads of the military forces, in an open access order the state controls the coercive apparatus, and social and economic groups are able to compete for control of the state. Moreover, constitutional arrangements deter groups in control of the state from using violence in unlawful ways.

In an open access order, state institutions treat citizens impersonally and extend to them access to the law and to at least basic levels of infrastructure, education, and social insurance. In this type of order, a market economy makes entry in the economic realm open to any citizen with the necessary resources and skills. The political system has political parties that represent diverse ideologies, and there is no restriction on the formation of civil society organizations. Whereas in limited access orders individuals’ well-being depends on relationships with patrons, in open access orders citizens have alternatives for pursuing their needs and interests.

North et al.’s framework provides useful empirical categories that capture the economic, social, and political aspects of exclusion and participation, but its casual explanation of the transition from limited to open access orders neglects crucial aspects of democratization. In this approach, transition is the result of the establishment of rules and institutions that facilitate nonviolent interpersonal exchanges; at first, formal arrangements include only elite members but are gradually extended to all citizens. According to North et al., this process is controlled by the elites themselves, who come to see it as in their interest to have intra-elite relations arbitrated by formal institutions, and then slowly allow these institutions to include other groups. The authors pointed out that in England and France incorporation stemmed from the frustration of certain elites with their inability to form the corporations needed for economic undertakings, which was until then a privilege reserved to the more traditional elites. They also noted that this tension was the result of changes in the economic organization of these countries. However, this institutionalist framework does not include the economic processes fueling intra-elite conflict as a condition of the transition to an open access order. Likewise, it minimizes the influence of social and political pressures from below, emphasizing instead the calculations of elite members. Material processes spurring intra-class conflicts and empowering subordinate groups are crucial in the transitions examined in this study, and examining them requires drawing on another theoretical tradition.

Structuralist analyses of democratization processes provide useful concepts to examine the transition from a limited toward a more open access order in Brazil. In their seminal study, Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens (1992) argue that, “capitalist development affects the chances of democracy primarily because it transforms the class structure and changes the balance of power between classes” (47). According to these authors, the proponents of democracy are most likely to be the marginalized social classes that can most benefit from political opening; they are called the subordinate classes and include the urban working class, small farmers, and agriculture labors. The fiercest opponent of democracy has historically been the large land-owning class. Rueschemeyer et al. argue that “capitalist development enlarges the urban working class at the expense of agricultural labors and small farmers; it thus shifts the members of the subordinate classes from an environment extremely unfavorable for collective action to one much more favorable” (58). In other words, capitalist development frees a large portion of the subordinate classes from the direct control of the opponents of democracy.

Moreover, Rueschemeyer et al. posit that the role of the bourgeoisie, that is, owners of capital other than large landowners, in democratization processes varied according to the context. In some cases, the bourgeoisie rallied the subordinate classes against the large land-owning class, and in other cases it made alliances with landlords and the military in order to secure its material advantages. In South America, the latter has been the most common. Capitalist development in this continent gave origin to two types of political parties. In clientelist parties, middle-class groups forged broad alliances, including with traditional elites, and promoted limited political inclusion. In mass radical parties, middle-class groups joined the subordinate classes and pushed for full democratization. Radical parties were only successful where the urban working class was strong; otherwise elites were capable of reversing democratic advances.

Structuralist analyses offer richer accounts of democratic transitions than North et al.’s analytical framework. The limitation of Rueschemeyer et al.’s approach from the point of view of the present analysis is that it treats economic, social, and political processes separately. The focus is on how economic changes and ensuing social groups increase or not the chances of the establishment of a real democracy, which is defined as a stable representative system with universal suffrage and strong and autonomous legislative institutions. Although the authors discuss cases that fall in between real democracies and authoritarian regimes, the focus is on processes leading to transitions to real democracy, with less attention paid to what is referred to as restricted democracies. Democratization in Latin America is then presented as a series of advances and regressions between authoritarian and more or less democratic regimes. What this approach only briefly acknowledges and does not properly integrate into its overall arguments is that the gradual opening of spaces for participation in economic and social realms is an integral aspect of a democratization process broadly defined, independent of its role in the transition to a representative system with universal suffrage. Whereas the empirical categories of North et al. encompass the various facets of exclusion, its focus on elite calculation leads to a neglect of the social and political struggles fuelled by economic processes. Rueschemeyer et al.’s analysis pays close attention to the formation of social groups and political alliances in the process of capitalist development, but its conceptualization of democracy as essentially a political system delegates a secondary and instrumental role to participation in economic and social spheres.

Both frameworks can be fruitfully combined. The concepts of limited and open access orders help us to distinguish between two types of societies: one where participation is limited to personal interactions between patrons and clients and another where participation takes multiple forms. In the transition period, new social groups, political strategies, and forms of participation emerge. Populist leaders may try to rally old and new subaltern groups through broad rhetorical appeals to their constituents’ needs and fears. Clientelist political parties extend patron-client networks so as to include new social groups in a more negotiated and less antagonistic manner, whereas radical mass parties bring together elite and middle-class members who try to mobilize subaltern groups in order to push for full democratization. The present study focuses on how the country’s economic structure and policies hindered or spurred inclusion, controlled inclusion or exclusion of distinct groups in varied regions of the country.

THE FIRST REPUBLIC: A LIMITED ACCESS ORDER

In the colonial period (1500–1823), Brazil was divided in captaincies, which were vast portions of land the Portuguese crown trusted to noblemen and military officials deemed to have the necessary means to secure and exploit them. Captaincy generals had absolute administrative and military authority over their domains and responded only to the governor general, who was the representative of the crown in the colony. Captaincies were hereditary for most of the colonial period. During the Empire period (1823–1889), a representative system was put in place, with a relatively broad suffrage for the time, but the Emperor (the son of the King of Portugal) had the prerogative to dismiss legislatures at his discretion. The focus of this section is the period from 1889 to 1930, known as the First Republic, wherein the logic of a limited access order permeated and corrupted the representative system, leading Buarque de Holanda (1936/2002) to call democracy in Brazil a “lamentable misunderstanding.”

In the 1880s, the city of Rio de Janeiro was the capital of Brazil; Minas Gerais was the most populated and politically important province; the province of São Paulo was a burgeoning coffee-based economy; the province of Rio Grande do Sul was a military force; and the province of Pernambuco was a regional leader in the Northeast. Republicanism started with a manifesto signed in 1870 by Rio de Janeiro professionals who advocated for progressive social reforms, the end of slavery, and a peaceful transition to a new political system. Republican parties in São Paulo and Minas Gerais defended the movement in the political sphere, but the actual overthrow of the Empire was carried out by militaries from Rio Grande do Sul and Rio de Janeiro (Fausto 1999).

The new republican governing elite was divided between those espousing a liberal state with great provincial autonomy and those defending the need for a strong central power capable of imposing order and promoting progress. The former group prevailed. The 1891 constitution transformed Brazil into a federative republic, and provinces, now called states, were granted fiscal autonomy and the right to organize their own military forces. Citizens elected the president directly. The legislative power was comprised of a lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, and an upper house, the Senate; in the former, seats were distributed according to demographic representation, whereas in the latter every state had an equal number of seats. Financial requirements for voter registration were removed, and any Brazilian citizen over twenty-one years of age who was not a beggar or a military man could vote as long as he was literate. That women could not vote was felt to be so obvious that it did not even deserve mention in the legislation. According to 1872 statistics, 99.9 percent of slaves and 80 percent of the free population were illiterate (Fausto 1999, 142). Votes were not secret. In the almost forty years of the First Republic, voter turnout in presidential elections varied from 1.4 to 5.7 percent of the total population (Fausto 1999, 159).

Low political participation in this period was not only the result of restricting legislation but also the outcome of a political-institutional arrangement that made votes irrelevant. The new constitution was followed by political instability. Disagreement between republicans and intrastate disputes evolved into national-level clashes, an attempted coup, the forced resignation of a president, federal intervention in states, and an armed revolt staged by federalists in Rio Grande do Sul. Debts inherited from the previous period, high military expenditure, and low coffee prices strained the country’s finances, making the political scenario unstable. Campos Sales, a paulista (from or pertaining to São Paulo) elected president in 1898, devised a shrewd political arrangement known as “governors’ policy” that balanced state autonomy and central authority. The Chamber of Deputies was responsible for verifying the legitimacy of legislative elections through its Commission for Verification of Power. The Chamber’s rules determined that its eldest member served as chair of the Commission and chose four deputies to work with him. President Sales introduced a small but substantial change: the president of the chamber became the head of the Commission, as long as he was re-elected for a new mandate. In other words, the chair was a member of the legislative majority with vested interests in maintaining the political status quo (Silveira 1978).

To understand the significance of th...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Glossary of Foreign Terms
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One. The Brazilian (Un)Representative System
• Chapter Two. Participatory Movements under Authoritarian Government
• Chapter Three. MDB Autênticos in Lages
• Chapter Four. CEBs in Boa Esperança
• Chapter Five. The PT in Diadema
• Chapter Six. The Tempering of Participatory Ideals and Practices
• Chapter Seven. The Making of Participatory Democracy in Brazil
• Notes
• Works Cited