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Politics in Brazil: From elections without democracy to democracy without citizenship Daedalus; Boston; Spring 2000; Leslie Bethell; Vol. 129; No. 2; pp. 1-27.
Abstract: Bethell discusses the political climate in Brazil. If Brazil's still relatively new democracy fails to deliver not only economic benefits to the population as a whole but at least the beginnings of a more equitable distribution of wealth and power, it will always be fragile and will always struggle to command popular support.
Full Text: Copyright American Academy of Arts and Sciences Spring 2000

LITTLE OVER TEN YEARS AGO, Brazil became, for the first time in its history as an independent state, a fully fledged democracy with regular free, fair, and competitive elecdons for both the executive and legislative branches of government based on the principle of one person, one vote. When Francis Fukuyama first began to formulate his ideas on the latetwentieth-century triumph of liberal democracy (and free-market capitalism) worldwide-"the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government"not only were China, the Soviet Union, and much of Eastern and Central Europe still under Communist rule, but, in the Western Hemisphere, besides the notoriously complex case of Mexico, Brazil-the fifth largest country in the world, with the fifth largest population ( 150 million)-was a not insignificant exception to Fukuyamian triumphalism. The painfully slow process of political liberalization and finally democratization at the end of two decades of military dictatorship-part of Samuel Huntington's so-called third wave of global democratization, which had started in southern Europe in the 1970s and spread to Latin America in the 1980s-was still by no means complete. And the Brazilian economy remained one of the most closed and state-regulated-with one of the largest public sectors-in the capitalist world. By the time Fukuyama published his book The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, however, not only had momentous events taken place in Moscow and Berlin, but with the presidential elections of November-December of 1989 Brazil could unquestionably be counted a democracy-after India and the United States the third largest democracy in the world. It was also in the late 1980s and more particularly in the early 1990s that Brazil took the first steps toward the liberalization and deregulation of its economy and the privatization of its state industries and public utilities.
Brazil's new democracy, though like all democracies flawed, has so far survived, despite fears that it might not and little in the past to justify much optimism that it would. Whether a decade of democracy and neoliberal economic reform has made Brazil significantly more prosperous and less socially and racially unequal and divided, and what the implications are for the future of democracy in Brazil if it has not, are questions I will address briefly at the end of this essay.
I Unlike the thirteen colonies in British North America, but like colonial Spanish America, Brazil served no significant apprenticeship in representative self-government under Portuguese colonial rule. For three centuries Brazil was governed by Crownappointed governors-general (or viceroys), captains-general (or governors), high-court judges, magistrates, and other lesser bureaucrats.1 The first elections held in Brazil-the election of delegates to the Cortes summoned to meet in Lisbon in the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution of 1820-did not take place until May-September of 1821. By that time, as a consequence of the transfer of the Portuguese court from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro in 1808 during the Napoleonic Wars-an event unique in the history of European colonialism-Brazil was already no longer strictly speaking a Portuguese colony but an equal partner in a dual monarchy. A year later, in June of 1822, there followed elections-indirect elections on a strictly limited suffrage after the extreme liberals or radicals of the period (many of them republicans) failed to secure direct popular elections-to a Constituent Assembly in Rio de Janeiro as Brazil finally moved toward full separation from Portugal.
The independence of Brazil in 1822 can be regarded as part of the so-called democratic revolution of the Atlantic world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the sense that liberal democratic ideas were widely proclaimed in the struggle against Portuguese colonialism and absolutism. There was, however, never any intention of establishing in Brazil, a society built on slavery, anything that, even at the time, looked remotely like liberal representative democracy based, however theoretically, on the sovereignty of the people. (Brazil's population at the time, in a vast territory of three million square miles, was between four and five million, less than a third white, more than a third slave. ) Unlike the newly independent Spanish American states, Brazil did not even become a republic. Uniquely, Brazil proclaimed itself an empire, with Dom Pedro I, the son of King Joao VI of Portugal and heir to the Portuguese throne, becoming independent Brazil's first emperor (succeeded on his abdication in 1831 by his five-year-old son, who eventually became Dom Pedro II).2
Since independence Brazil has had a long history of elections that compares favorably with most countries in the world. Under the empire (1822-1889), under the First Republic (18891930), in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1930, in the period after World War II (1945-1964), even under military dictatorship (1964-1985), elections were regularly held in Brazil. There has in fact been only one period of more than a few years in the entire modern history of Brazil when there were no elections: the Estado Novo (1937-1945). Until ten years ago, however, Brazilian elections were not always for positions of political power, executive or legislative; they were rarely honest and usually not freely contested; and the level of participation always fell some way short of universal suffrage. Historically, elections in Brazil had more to do with public demonstrations of personal loyalties, the offer and acceptance of patronage, the reduction of social (and regional) tensions and conflict, and, above all, control of a patrimonial state and the use of public power for private interests without resort to violence than with the exercise of power by the people in choosing and bringing to account those who govern them. Before 1989 Brazil was a case study in elections without democracy. Under the political system of the empire, Brazil had an elected Chamber of Deputies. But governments were only to a limited extent responsible to it. Power was concentrated in the hands of the hereditary emperor himself, his chosen ministers, the counselors of state he appointed (for life), the provincial presidents he also appointed, and a Senate (with senators appointed, also for life, by the emperor, though from lists of three submitted by each province). It was only when Brazil finally became a republic in 1889 that the executive (president, state governor, municipal prefeito) as well as the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies, state assemblies, and municipal councils were all elected. Presidential, congressional, state, and municipal elections were a feature of both the First Republic and the period after World War II. During the recent military dictatorship, presidents were "elected" for a fixed term, which is unusual in military regimes, but they were indirectly elected by an Electoral College in which (until 1984 at least) the regime could count on a majority. In practice, all five military presidents were imposed by the military high command. State governors (until 1982) and mayors of state capitals and other cities of importance to "national security" were appointed by the military. Congress and state legislatures, which continued to function under the military regime (apart from one or two brief closures), though with their powers much reduced, alone continued to be directly electedon schedule every four years.
During the empire, voting in elections was open (and oral). Fraud, intimidation, violence, and the exercise of patronage by local landowners and agents of the Crown were widespread. Elections under the First Republic-a highly decentralized federal republic-were not much less dishonest, possibly more so, controlled as they were for the most part by state governments and coroneis (local political bosses) representing powerful landed oligarchies, especially in the more backward states of the Northeast and North. Not until 1932 was the ballot made secret and a system of electoral supervision (justica eleitoral) introduced. In practice, however, the new electoral legislation was not fully implemented until after World War II-and then for less than twenty years. Under the military dictatorship, electoral rules were frequently manipulated in the most arbitrary and blatant ways to guarantee majorities for the pro-military ruling party.
There has always been some measure of contestation between different parties, programs, and candidates in Brazilian elections. In the parliamentary elections of the empire the choice was between Liberals, Conservatives, and, finally, Republicans. During the First Republic, elections were contested but only by state parties, and in each state the Republican party was dominant. The outcome of the presidential elections was predetermined by agreements between state governors (a politica dos governadores). No "official" candidate backed by the governors and Republican political machines of at least one (and it was usually both) of the two states with the largest electorates-Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais-and two or three of the largest second-rank states (Rio Grande do Sul, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, and Pernambuco) ever lost, and no "opposition" candidate ever won, a presidential election. Apart from the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), founded in 1922 and immediately declared illegal, and the fascist Integralistas, founded in 1932 and declared illegal along with all other political parties during the Estado Novo, there were no national political parties or political movements until 1945. In the postwar period more than a dozen national parties for the first time competed for office. But in May of 1947, at the beginning of the Cold War, the PCB, the only significant party of the Left, was once again declared illegal by Congress after eighteen months of de facto legality. The PCB, which was itself not fully committed to legal strategies and the electoral road to power, was effectively excluded from democratic politics-and remained so for the next forty years. For most of the period of military rulebetween the party "reforms" of 1966 and 1979-only two parties, the pro-government ARENA (later PDS) and the opposition Movimento Democratico Brasileiro (MDB, later PMDB), were permitted to contest elections. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century (the golden age of the empire), the level of political participation was surprisingly high: men (not women, of course) who were twentyfive years old (twenty-one if married), Catholic, born free, and with a quite low annual income from property, trade, or employment had the right to vote in elections for the Chamber of Deputies. Richard Graham has calculated that in 1870 one million Brazilians out of a total population of a little under ten million (i.e., half of the free adult male population, including many of quite modest means, those who were illiterate, and even blacks) could vote.3 (This is a far higher proportion of the population than in England, for example, after the Reform Act of 1832 and even after the Reform Act of 1867.) The elections, however, were indirect. The so-called votantes elected eleitores (who were required to have a higher annual income), and only eleitores-some twenty thousand of them in 1870-had the right to vote for deputados. Moreover, the turnout was generally low. This was hardly democracia coroada, crowned democracy, the title of historian Joao Camillo de Oliveira Torres's book published in 1957 on the political system of the empire: Moreover, the level of political participation under the empire was severely reduced in 1881. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, as the coffee economy expanded and the shift from slave to free labor finally gathered momentum, making the final abolition of slavery increasingly inevitable, there was a growing fear among the dominant political class, even reform-minded liberals, that former slaves ("barbarians")in the rural areas but more particularly in the rapidly expanding urban areas-would readily acquire the low income sufficient to secure the right to vote. Under the Saraiva Law of 1881, elections for the Chamber of Deputies were made direct and the voting age was lowered to twenty-one; the property/ income qualification to vote was removed; non-Catholics, naturalized citizens (though not resident foreign immigrants), and even former slaves (freedmen) were eligible to become voters. However, undermining these apparent liberal/democratic advances, a new requirement for voter registration was introduced for the first time: namely, education as measured by a literacy test-in a country in which 80-85 percent of the population was illiterate. (In England, John Stuart Mill, the great apostle of liberal democracy, also argued against giving the vote to illiterates, but Mill at least believed in the rapid expansion of public education to reduce the level of illiteracy, not something advocated by many people in Brazil in the late nineteenth century.) Thus, after 1881, while the number of eleitores increased (initially to around 150,000), the vast majority of Brazilians, even most free males, who had previously had the right to vote, albeit only as votantes in indirect elections, were consciously and deliberately excluded from political participation.4 Liberalism may have been the dominant ideology in nineteenth-century Brazil, but, as in Spanish America, it was liberalism of a predominantly and increasingly conservative variety as it was forced to adjust to the realities of an authoritarian political culture, economic underdevelopment, and, most of all, a society deeply stratified (and along racial lines).
The Republic, like the empire, excluded from politics the great mass of adult Brazilians by denying the vote to illiterates (still 75 percent of the population in 1920, such was the neglect of public education during the First Republic). In the Constituent Assembly of 1891 a greater effort was made to extend the suffrage to women than to illiterates. Not surprisingly, it failed. Nevertheless, the presidential and congressional elections of the early Republic did represent a substantial advance in direct popular political participation compared with the late empire: in 1898, for example, almost half a million Brazilians voted, including sections of the emerging urban middle class and even some urban workers in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Porto Alegre, and elsewhere.s However, even in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the capital of the Republic, with a population of half a million in the early part of this century, Jose Murilo de Carvalho has calculated that only about one hundred thousand people had the right to vote, that only 25 to 35 percent of these ever registered to vote in national elections between 1890 and 1910, and that only between 7 and 13 percent (5-10 percent of the adult population) actually voted.6 In the country as a whole, in even the most competitive presidential elections with the greatest degree of political mobilization-for example, the elections of 1910 and 1919 in which Rui Barbosa, the great liberal jurist, stood as a civilista opposition candidate (and lost)-less than 5 percent of the adult population voted. It was not until 1930 that more than 10 percent of the adult population voted in a presidential election.7 What has been called oligarchical democracy (surely an oxymoron) is, as a description of the political system of the Old Republic, as hard to swallow as is crowned democracy for the empire.
From the 1930s, wider sections of the Brazilian population were gradually incorporated into the political process. The 1932 electoral law lowered the voting age to eighteen and, more important, for the first time gave women the vote (always provided they were literate).8 Brazil was second to Ecuador in Latin America in extending the suffrage to women-ahead of, for example, France. Women were slow to register, however; only 15 percent of those eligible to vote in the elections for a Constituent Assembly in May of 1933 did so, and only one woman, Carlota Pereira de Queiroz from Sao Paulo, was elected. As part of "democratization" in1945 a new electoral law included automatic voter registration for employees, male and female, in public and private companies (many of whom were in fact illiterate)-a measure designed to extend the vote to wider sections of the urban working class while still excluding the rural population, around 60-70 percent of the total. The elections of December of 1945 were the first reasonably honest, competitive (even the Brazilian Communist Party was allowed to take part), relatively popular elections ever held in Brazil. Seven and a half million Brazilians registered to vote (more than half in the city of Rio de Janeiro, the Federal District, and around a third in the states of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro by means of the ex-officio registration through the workplace). This was four or five times the number who had registered to vote only fifteen years earlier and a substantial proportion (35 percent) of the adult population. A little more than six million actually voted.9 Under the "democratic" Constitution of 1946, however, more than half the adult population of Brazil remained disenfranchised by its illiteracy. And Congress in 1950 restored individual responsibility for voter registration-on the face of it a liberal measure but in the circumstances of Brazil at the time a blow aimed at the political participation of the urban working class.
Nevertheless, as a result of the dramatic growth in the population (from 40 million in 1940 to 70 million in 1960 and 120 million in 1980), rapid urbanization (35 percent of the population was classified as urban in 1940, 45 percent in 1960, 70 percent in 1980), and, in the 1960s and 1970s, for the first time, real progress in the direction of universal basic literacy, the electorate grew steadily. It reached eighteen million in 1962, and, despite the breakdown of Brazil's postwar limited form of democracy in 1964, it grew again to over sixty million in 1982 (which means that the electorate actually grew fourfold during the military dictatorship). However, not until the return to civilian rule in 1985, in one of a series of constitutional amendments passed during the first months of the Sarney administration, were illiterates (still over thirty million of them, comprising between 20 and 25 percent of the population, with a large proportion being black) finally enfranchised. The Constitution of 1988 then extended the vote to sixteen- and seventeen-yearolds: the so-called voto facultativo.
The municipal elections of November of 1985 and the elections for Congress and state governor a year later were the first elections in Brazil based on universal suffrage, although few analfabetos had time to register to vote in the first and only half registered to vote in the second.10 Nevertheless, the 1987-1990 Congress not only had twenty-six women members, a small number but more than had been elected in the entire period from 1932-1986, but also nineteen blacks, including the first black deputada, Benedita da Silva (PT, Rio de Janeiro). Finally, in 1989, the first direct presidential elections in thirty years were the first in the history of the republic based upon universal suffrage. They were held symbolically on the centenary of the Republic (November 15, 1989). The electorate now numbered eighty-two million, and, since voting has been mandatory in Brazil since 1945 (under the Constitution of 1988 for those over eighteen and under seventy only), the turnout, as always, was extremely high (88 percent). Candidates of twenty-two parties from across the political spectrum, from the far Right to the far Left, contested the first round. In the second round Brazilians were offered a straight choice between the Right (Fernando Collor de Mello, Party for National Renovation, PRN) and the Left (Luis Inacio `Lula' da Silva, Worker's Party, PT). By a narrow margin they chose Collor.11
Brazil's new democracy showed early signs of fragility, and from September to December of 1992 Brazilians suffered the trauma of the impeachment (on corruption charges) of their first democratically elected president less than halfway through his term of office. In the end, however, the successful impeachment of Collor can perhaps be seen to have demonstrated more the maturity than the fragility of Brazilian democracy.12 Twice before the end of the decade Brazilians then went to the polls78 million (82 percent of the electorate) in 1994, 83 million (78 percent) in 1998-in remarkably free, honest, and orderly super-eleicoes (presidential, gubernatorial, Congressional, and state-assembly elections held on the same day). Both presidential elections were won handsomely by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a distinguished sociologist with an international reputation and a politician with impeccable democratic credentials and advanced social democratic ideas, though on each occasion, as we shall see, the candidate of a Center-Right coalition. (The defeated candidate in both elections, as in 1989, was Luis Inacio `Lula' da Silva.) In 1998 Cardoso thus became only the second elected civilian president since 1930 to serve a full term (the other was Juscelino Kubitschek in the 1950s), the first elected by universal suffrage-and the first to be re-elected.
The international environment in the 1990s was uniquely favorable to the survival and consolidation of democracy in Latin America. In particular, the United States made support for democracy a central feature of its policy toward the region, as it had done in the past, but this time with rather better results. Furthermore, with the end of the Cold War anti-communism was no longer available as the main justification for the overthrow of democratic (or semi-democratic) governments as it had been in Brazil in 1964 (and even in 1937). Like the Left, the Right-the traditional political class (rural and urban), the more powerful economic interest groups, and the military itself-was, it seemed, now committed to peaceful democratic politics, as it had not always been in the past. The political crisis surrounding the impeachment of Collor in 1992 was the first in the history of the Republic in which the military-whose privileges and prerogatives, including the right to intervene in the political process, are explicitly recognized in the 1988 Constitution-was not an active participant. Of course, it could be argued that the Brazilian "propertied classes" (including broad sections of the middle class) were (and still are) no more than fair-weather democrats. When the costs of overthrowing democracy and resorting to authoritarianism are high and the costs of tolerating democracy low, democracy is likely to survive. But when its interests are threatened by forces favoring a significant distribution of wealth and power, as they were, or were believed to be, in 1964, there is always a possibility that it will look to the military to overthrow democracy. We shall never know whether Brazil's new democracy would have passed its supreme test-the acceptance of victory by Lula and the PT in the presidential elections of 1989 or 1994. As Adam Przeworski once remarked, only where the Left lost the first elections following a process of democratization was democracy truly safe.
II
There can be elections without democracy, but there cannot be democracy, at least not liberal representative democracy, without elections. At the same time, there is, of course, more to democracy than elections, however honestly conducted and freely contested and whatever the level of popular participation. The democratic exercise of power between elections is also important, and democratic political systems vary in the degree to which they facilitate it. Brazil's democratic institutions functioned relatively well in the 1990s. At least there remained no "authoritarian enclaves," parts of the power apparatus of the former military dictatorship not accountable to democratically elected civilian governments: The military itself has so far steadfastly remained out of politics. But Brazilian democracy is not without its flaws.
Some political scientists would go so far as to claim that in Brazil, as in the rest of Latin America, the presidential system itself is a major obstacle to the proper functioning of representative democracy. It is an expression of, and it reinforces, the personalism and authoritarianism deeply rooted in the country's political culture. Moreover, however poor their performance, however weak their support in Congress, however low their standing in the country, presidents can only be removed in advance of the next scheduled elections by extreme measures: for example, suicide (Vargas, 1954), resignation (Quadros, 1961), military coup (Goulart, 1964), or impeachment (Collor, 1992). Brazil had two opportunities to change its system of government during the process of democratization: in March of 1988, after prolonged debate on the issue, the Constituent Assembly voted 344 to 212 in favor of a presidential rather than a parliamentary system; and five years later (April of 1993), in the plebiscite required under the 1988 Constitution, SS percent of the electorate voted for presidentialism and 25 percent for a parliamentary system of government, with 20 percent of the vote spoiled or blank. (In the same plebiscite Brazilians were also offered the opportunity to restore the monarchy: 12 percent voted in favor compared with 66 percent who supported the republic.)
Brazil's electoral system (based on proportional representation, but with large, statewide constituencies and "open" lists of candidates) and its party system have received a great deal of criticism. They are both, especially the party system, high on everyone's political reform agenda. Brazil has been described as the most severe case of party underdevelopment of any democratic country in the world.13 Parties do not, for the most part, have deep historical roots, nor ideological/programmatic consistency (even the PT is deeply divided). Moreover, except for the PT and perhaps these days the PFL led with a firm hand by Antonio Carlos Magalhaes, they are highly undisciplined: almost a third of the deputies elected in 1994 switched parties during the Congress of 1995-1998-some several times!-and those elected in 1998 would appear to be no less volatile. Finally, there are, some would argue, too many parties. Seventy-six put up candidates in nine elections between 1982 and 1996, although thirty-nine of them only once. Thirty or so parties are currently registered; eighteen have seats in Congress, although only eight have more than ten seats in the Chamber of Deputies and at least one seat in the Senate. The largest party in Congress (the PMDB after the 1994 elections, now the PFL) has only 20 percent of the seats. The PSDB, President Cardoso's party, had only 12 percent of the seats after the 1994 elections and still has less than 20 percent. What has been called "permanent minority presidentialism"-no popularly elected president since 1950 has in fact had a majority in Congress provided by his own party-leads inevitably to party alliances, coalition government, and political bargaining in the endless search for majorities for every piece of legislation. Constitutional reform (and the 1988 Constitution is so detailed and all-embracing that almost any major reform has constitutional implications) requires the support of 60 percent of the members of both legislative houses on two separate occasions, which is extremely difficult to achieve, not least because of the high level of Congressional absenteeism in Brasilia. This is all part of the game of democratic politics, no doubt, but it helps to explain why Brazilian presidents in the 1990s have increasingly resorted to the (constitutional but undemocratic) use of medidas provisorias in order to bypass Congress.
The most undemocratic, or, as political scientists would say, demos-constraining, feature of Brazilian democracy-and the most difficult to reform-is a federal system that rewards a great number of poor, less populated, less developed, more politically traditional and conservative (that is to say, clientalistic and corrupt) states with extreme over-representation in Congress. The problem here is not simply that, as in the United States, all twenty-seven of Brazil's states regardless of population have an equal number of seats in the Senate (three), but that representation in the lower house is not proportional to population or electorate. There is for the Chamber of Deputies currently a minimum "floor" (eight seats) and a maximum "ceiling" (seventy seats) for each state. Thus, Sao Paulo, with an electorate of over twenty-two million, has seventy seats (only recently raised from sixty); the former federal territory of Roraima, with an electorate of 120,000, has eight. Brazil's seven smallest states (by population, not size), which together account for only 4 percent of Brazil's population, elect 25 percent of the Senate and over 10 percent of the Chamber.la The system also favors the parties that are strongest in the more backward states. With only two or three percentage points more of the popular vote nationwide than the PT in 1994 and 1998, the Center-Right PFL elected three times as many senators and almost twice as many federal deputies.
An even greater cause for concern is the fragility of the rule of law in Brazil after more than a decade of democracy. Although no government in Brazilian history has been more supportive of civil and human rights than that of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, for a large proportion of the population basic civil liberties remain inadequately protected and guaranteed by the courts, and there are frequent gross violations of human rights, many of them perpetrated by the state military police.15 Brazil is a democracy of voters, not yet a democracy of citizens.
Brazilian democracy has not so far been broadly or deeply legitimated. Public opinion polls throughout the 1990s have consistently indicated a widespread lack of trust not just in politicians, political parties, and political institutions but in democracy itself. Equally noteworthy are the large numbers of Brazilians who fail to vote in elections, even though the vote is technically mandatory, and those who vote but vote nulo (spoiled ballot) or branco (blank ballot)-practices common (and understandable) during a period of military rule but disturbing in a democracy. Abstentions rose from 11.9 percent in 1989 to 17.7 percent in 1994 and 21.5 percent in 1998. In the presidential elections of 1989, 6.4 percent of those who turned out voted branco and nulo; 18.8 percent in 1994; and 18.7 percent in 1998. In 1998 38.4 million Brazilians either abstained or voted nulo or branco-more than those who voted for Fernando Henrique Cardoso. The number voting branco or nulo in Congressional and gubernatorial elections was around 30 percent (and in some states-e.g., Maranhao, Bahia, and Para-as high as 50 percent), and even higher in state-assembly elections. These figures are extraordinarily high by the standards of any democracy in the world.
Brazilian democracy may be imperfect and "shallow," but a democracy it is nonetheless. There may be no justification for indulging in end-of-history democratic triumphalism as far as Brazil is concerned, but there is at the same time no reason to dismiss, as some still do (especially on the Left), the establishment of democratic institutions, the extension of political rights to all Brazilians, and even the slow but steady progress that has been made in the field of civil and human rights as merely constituting "formal" democracy. Nevertheless, those who argue that Brazilian democracy is not yet "substantive," that it neglects economic and social "rights," have a serious point. Brazil is a country with remarkably few of the regional, national, racial, ethnic, linguistic, and religious divisions, tensions, and conflicts that pose a threat to democracies, old and new, throughout most of the world. In this respect it is uniquely fortunate. But with the eighth, ninth, or tenth largest economy in the world, Brazil is sixtieth or worse in international league tables of human development and is a strong contender for the title of world champion in social inequality. Can democracy be healthy, can it properly function, can it even survive in the long run, when, as in Brazil, a third of the population (some would put it much higher) live in conditions of extreme poverty, ignorance, and ill health and are treated at best as second-class citizens?
Poverty, inequality, and social exclusion (which despite Brazil's claim to be a racial democracy have a clear racial dimension) have their roots in Portuguese colonialism (especially the system of land ownership), in slavery (both colonial and postcolonial), in (some would still argue) postcolonial economic underdevelopment and "dependency," in mass immigration to Brazil in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in rapid urbanization after 1940-but also, perhaps above all, in past failures to address the "social problem." Brazil, as Eric Hobsbawm once said, is a monument to social neglect. There was some reduction of poverty and exclusion (possibly even of inequality) as a consequence of economic growth, upward social mobility, and social policy from the 1930s to the 1970s. But the situation worsened with the economic difficulties of the 1980s (the socalled lost decade in terms of economic growth) and the (albeit necessary) structural adjustment policies and continuing lack of growth of the early 1990s. And despite the clear benefits to the poor of the 1994 Plano Real (Brazil's national economic stabilization plan), at least in its first years, and the rhetoric, and in some areas policies, of the Cardoso administrations, democratic government is perceived by many as having so far failed to promote a much-needed social transformation in Brazil. In this respect it is in danger of being regarded as no different from the nondemocratic governments of the past.
III
Throughout modern Brazilian history every change of political regime-from the establishment of an independent empire in the early 1820s to the establishment of a modern representative democracy in the late 1980s-has demonstrated the extraordinary capacity of the Brazilian elites to defend the status quo and their own interests by controlling, co-opting, and, if necessary, repressing the forces in favor of radical social change, or, if you prefer, the extraordinary capacity of the Brazilian people for tolerating poverty, exclusion, inequality, and injustice and thus collaborating in their own subordination. Not only has there been no social revolution in Brazilian history comparable, for example, to those of Mexico, Russia, or China; there has been remarkably little popular mobilization of any kind for political and social change. On the rare occasions when popular forces were mobilized and organized to challenge the status quo, especially after 1930, whether through elections or occasionally on the streets, the Brazilian elites (always with the military) have been prepared to take the necessary measures to contain them and even to support and maintain long periods of antipopular, authoritarian government, as in 1937-1945 and 1964-1985.
Brazilian independence in 1822 was more the outcome of political and military developments in Europe and their repercussions in the New World than some kind of "general crisis"economic, political, ideological-of the old colonial system producing a popular anticolonial political movement. As late as 1820 there was no widespread desire in Brazil for total separation from Portugal. The main aim of the leaders and supporters of Brazilian independence in 1821-1822-fazendeiros (plantation owners), especially in the province of Rio de Janeiro but to a lesser extent also in Bahia and Pernambuco; merchants in the principal cities; and some bureaucrats-was to achieve political and economic autonomy for Brazil without sacrificing the stability so crucial for the maintenance of its territorial unity and existing socioeconomic structures built, above all, on African slavery. But once decided upon, independence was secured quickly and peacefully-without a long and bloody war with the colonial power or civil war (in sharp contrast to events in Spanish America), and without significant social mobilization or social upheaval. The popular forces were in any case weakand divided by class, color, and legal status; no significant concessions had to be made to the underprivileged groups in society. The transition from colony to independent empire was characterized by political, economic, and social continuity. The existing Portuguese state apparatus never ceased to function. The economy suffered no major dislocation. Above all, as well as the existing pattern of land ownership, the institution of slavery survived-in all regions of the country and, while heavily concentrated in plantation agriculture, in all sectors of the economy and society, rural and urban.16
No far-reaching land reform (at least in terms of the distribution of land) has ever been effected in Brazil. But Brazil did eventually abolish slavery-although not until 1888. The greatest threat to slavery in the nineteenth century, however, had come not from opposition within Brazil (which was always weak) but, given Brazil's dependence on massive annual imports of new slaves, from outside in the form of the unrelenting and finally successful pressure from Britain to end the transatlantic slave trade. From the middle of the nineteenth century slavery began to decline, but there were still over one and a half million slaves in Brazil in 1870 (more than at independence) and over a million in 1880. The Brazilian abolitionist movement of the 1880s represented the highest level of urban middle-class (and, to a lesser extent, popular) mobilization for social change seen thus far in Brazil. But it played a relatively minor role in the final abolition of slavery, which was more the result of the cumulative effects of long-term economic and demographic change, mass flights by slaves and voluntary liberations by slaveowners, the supply of an alternative source of labor in the form of Italian immigrants, and political decisions made by the imperial government.17
Brazil was not only the last independent state in the Americas to abolish slavery; it was also the last to declare a republicone year later in 1889. It was no accident that the republic was finally proclaimed in the centenary year of the French revolution. The ideology of republicanism, especially radical republicanism, supported by progressive urban middle-class intellectuals, was profoundly French-inspired. But there was no revolution in Brazil in 1889. As Louis Couty, a French resident in Rio in the early 1880s, remarked, "Brazil has no people," that is to say, no popular forces that could be organized and mobilized for political ends.18 The Brazilian republic came out of a military coup born of a conspiracy between a small number of army officers and representatives of the rising coffee-producing landed oligarchy of the state of Sao Paulo. Like the transition from colony to empire, the transition from empire to republic was marked more by fundamental social and economic continuity than by change.
The Revolution of 1930, which brought an end to the First Republic and the hegemony of the Sao Paulo coffee oligarchy, was in no real sense a revolution at all. Getulio Vargas, governor of Rio Grande do Sul and the defeated candidate in the elections in March, came to power in November of 1930 as a result of an armed rebellion led by dissident members of the political elite, especially in Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais but also in Sao Paulo, as well as by disaffected military officers; this triggered intervention by the federal army to remove President Washington Luis from office. It represented yet another shift in the balance of power between landed regional elites more than the emergence of new social forces and brought the military to the center of power, where it remained for the next sixty years.19
Elections in 1933 for a Constituent Assembly and the Constitution drawn up the following year were meant to inaugurate a cycle of "democratization," but the emergence in 1935 of the radical Alianca Nacional Libertadora (ANL) and a failed communist attempt to seize power in November of 1935 led to the imposition of a state of siege. When elections under new "democratic" rules to be held in January of 1938 threatened to produce a result unacceptable to Vargas and the military-either a restoration of the former "liberal democracy" dominated by state oligarchies and especially the coffee interests of Sao Paulo or a populist president offering to improve the lot of the poor (a politica dos pobres)-they were aborted by a military coup in November of 1937. Getulio Vargas remained in power for another eight years.20 The Vargas era was notable for stateand nation-building, economic development, and modernization, but also, and not least, a shift in the relations between state and society, especially the urban working class. Labor unions represented the first autonomous organizations of civil society in Brazil. Their protests and strikes during the first decades of the twentieth century had been met by severe police repression. As Brazilian industry expanded in the aftermath of the depression and especially during World War II, large sections of the working class, previously in independent, often anarchist or socialist-led sindicatos, were gradually drawn into a close relationship with the state, reinforced by an ideology of class collaboration, class harmony, and social peace. Much of the corporatist labor legislation of the Estado Novo remains in force today.
In 1945, at the end of World War II, the Vargas dictatorship came under considerable pressure to liberalize Brazil's political system. But the pressure was less domestic than international: Brazil was one of the United States' closest allies in the struggle for democracy against fascism. Vargas finally promised "free" elections confident that he had the means (through control of the state apparatus) and support (especially from the ranks of the organized working class) to win them. Significantly, both the pro-Vargas and anti-Vargas parties chose military figures as their candidates for the presidency. Neither had much popular appeal, certainly less than either Vargas himself or Luis Carlos Prestes, the leader of the Brazilian Communist party (PCB), who had spent the entire period of the Estado Novo in prison.
The process of "democratization" was initiated and controlled pelo alto, from above. But between May and October of 1945 Brazil's major cities experienced unprecedented mass political mobilization, orchestrated in part by the PCB and, more particularly, by the so-called queremistas (from the slogan "Queremos Getulio": We want Getulio). There were growing fears among those conservative sectors in Brazil newly committed to "democracy" that popular forces were being dangerously radicalized. It took a soft intervention by the United States and another military coup (this time to remove Vargas from power) to guarantee the elections scheduled for December, which were won by General Dutra, Vargas's minister of war, representing the forces that had sustained the Estado Novo. Brazil's newly instituted "democracy" was restricted in scope and fundamentally antipopular in nature. The price of democracy was continued state control of organized labor, continued restrictions on political participation (no extension of the vote to the illiterate half of the population), and repression of the Communist Left (after the PCB had polled half a million votes-10 percent of the vote-in both the presidential and Congressional elections of December of 1945 and in the gubernatorial, state assembly, and municipal elections of January of 1947). The distribution of seats in Congress under the "democratic" Constitution of 1946 ensured that the more conservative states of the North and Northeast were overwhelmingly overrepresented at the expense of the states of the South and Southeast, especially Sao Paulo. Finally, and most important of all, the military retained its independent political power. It remained largely beyond civilian control, and without its support it was impossible for any elected president to remain in power.21
Underpinned by the rapid economic growth of the postwar period, this limited form of democracy survived several political crises, notably those surrounding the suicide in August of 1954 of Getulio Vargas (who had been elected to the presidency in the second postwar elections in 1950) under pressure from the military to resign, and the resignation in August of 1961 of President Janio Quadros, whose many problems included his relations with the military, after only eight months in office. In the early 1960s, however, with by now a much higher level of popular participation in politics, a number of factors, principally a sharp economic downturn but also the impact of the Cuban revolution, combined to radicalize the popular forces in Brazil. Labour and the Left demanded radical social and economic change. The Right (including by now large sections of the urban middle class) was prepared to support (indeed encourage) a military coup if this was the only way of preventing the kind of radical change sought by the Left. Overestimating the strength of the forces for change and underestimating the strength of the existing power structure, civilian and military, and its unity and decisiveness when its interests came under threat, President Joao Goulart (1961-1964) attempted to create an opening to the Left. The result was his overthrow by the military on March 31, 1964, bringing to an end Brazil's postwar "experiment with democracy." There was little popular resistance.22
Like that of 1945, the political liberalization-and, finally, democratization-of the 1970s and 1980s was initiated and controlled from above. It was not primarily a response by the military to opposition MDB/PMDB victories in elections (in 1974 and 1982), or the unexpectedly strong emergence of civil society especially in the form of new unionism in 1978-1979 and the formation of the Workers' Party (PT), or even the extraordinary mass mobilization in favor of diretas ja (immediate direct presidential elections) in 1984-although these all played their part. Rather, the regime sought to consolidate and advance its own institutionalization and reduce the costs of repression. It is not clear that democracy was ever the intended outcome. Only when it lost control of the presidential succession process, being no longer able to count on a majority in the electoral college, did the military throw its weight behind a deal struck between PDS dissidents (who formed the Partido da Frente Liberal, PFL) and the opposition PMDB under which the seventy-five-year-old liberal-conservative opposition politician Tancredo Neves became the "official" presidential candidate. Tancredo was duly "elected," but as is well known never took office. He was taken ill on the eve of his inauguration and died a few weeks later. The presidency went to the vice-presidentelect, Jose Sarney, who was, though a civilian (and therefore the first civilian president of Brazil in more than two decades), the former president of the ruling party under the military regime.
In 1985 a transition from military to civilian rule (but not yet to democracy) was peacefully effected. It was a transicao pactuada, a transition sem ruptura. The Nova Republica, like the limited form of democracy established in 1945-1946, was thus compromised by its origins. It was built on the institutional foundations of the authoritarian regime it replaced.23 Those who were anticipating simply a continuation of military rule by other means were, however, confounded. Sarney, despite some delaying tactics, presided over a genuine transition to democracy, culminating in the presidential election of 1989 based on universal suffrage.
The 1989 presidential election was not, however, as we have seen, won by the PMDB, the main opposition movement for over twenty years and by far the biggest and broadest party in Brazil, as might have been expected; nor by the PDT, the party of Leonel Brizola, the heir to Getulio Vargas and Joao Goulart; nor by the PT, the new grassroots opposition party, whose leader, Lula, reached the second round; but by Fernando Collor de Mello-young, energetic, psychologically unstable, and corrupt (as we now know), a hitherto virtually unknown politician from the poor northeast state of Alagoas with no significant party behind him. He proved attractive to the dominant class, which, after the twenty-one-year military dictatorship, had no credible candidate of its own; to the poor who were susceptible to his populist appeal; to some sections of the middle class; and, to their lasting shame, to some intellectuals.24 The 1994 election was again won by neither the PMDB, nor the PDT, nor the PT, but by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the small Center-Left/ Center PSDB, which had split from the PMDB, backed by the parties of the Center-Right/Right, especially the PFL. In 1994, even more than in 1989, the principal aim of the conservative forces in Brazil, which again, after the Collor debacle, had no candidate of their own, was to defeat Lula, who six months before the election had a considerable lead in the opinion polls and was apparently heading for victory. It was the Plano Real, of course, with its promise of a final end to runaway inflation, that guaranteed victory for Cardoso and in particular secured the support of the poorest sections of Brazilian society.25 Above all, the 1989 and 1994 (and 1998) elections in Brazil, like most mass democratic presidential elections in the late twentieth century, were won not so much by the candidates and certainly not by their parties, but by serious money, modern campaign organization and methods, and the influence of the media, especially television.
In each of these elections the defeated candidate Lula had to battle against deep-rooted prejudice: the majority of Brazilians (of all classes) found it hard to imagine as president a Sao Paulo metalurgico from a poor rural northeastern background with only a modest formal education. But the PT also contributed to its own defeat: it was internally divided; many of its policies were unconvincing; its social base in the industrial working class was too narrow; it could never decide whether to bid for the support of the very poor and underprivileged or to look for alliances in the center ground (which were in any case probably unavailable). In light of Brazil's political history, political culture, and political system as described in this essay (and the defeat of the socialist Left almost everywhere in the world in this period), the growth of the PT in Brazil since its foundation in the years 1979-1982 is a remarkable story. Lula increased his vote from 17 percent in 1989 (first round) to 27 percent in 1994 and 32 percent in 1998. In every election since 1990 the PT has increased its seats in both the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies as well as the number of states (including the Federal District in 1995-1998 and now Rio Grande do Sul) and municipios (including the cities of Sao Paulo in 1988-1992 and Porto Alegre since 1988) it controls. The PT has undoubtedly changed the political agenda in Brazil, but it is still a long way from winning power at the national level.
IV
Since all three democratically elected Brazilian administrations in the 1990s have depended for support in Congress on the parties of the Right, Center-Right, and Center, which, except in a rhetorical sense, do not put social issues high on their agendas, since these administrations have in any case been constrained in their capacity to focus on the "social question" by the demands of macroeconomic stability, especially the need to reduce the fiscal deficit, by low economic growth, and by the realities of Brazil's position in the international economy, and since Brazil's social problems are intractable and not susceptible to short-term solutions, it is not surprising that progress in this area has been slow. However, it does matter that democratic governments are seen to make a difference. And democracy does offer more possibilities for fundamental social changeand peaceful change-than other political systems. All Brazilians, even the indigent, the poor, and the illiterate and semiliterate (tens of millions of them), now have the vote. Despite all the obstacles put in their way, not least by the unreformed political system itself, they can use it effectively in their own interests-or not.
Education is perhaps the key. "We must educate our masters," famously declared Robert Lowe in the House of Commons on the passage of the Reform Act of 1867. (What he actually said was, "I believe it will be necessary that you should prevail on our future masters to learn their letters.") Almost a century later, Anisio Teixeira, one of Brazil's greatest educators, wrote, "There will only be democracy in Brazil the day the machine (maquina) that prepares people for democracy-the public school-is assembled in Brazil." Basic, primary education is an area in which considerable improvements have been made in recent years, although reform has too often seemed to have been driven more by the needs of the economy in the twenty-first century than by the requirements of education in citizenship, and it remains woefully inadequate. It also has to be said that few Brazilian politicians, especially those in power, think of the Brazilian people as their "masters."
Organization is also important. Civil society is now highly mobilized in Brazil, offering new forms of participation and "empowerment," but it is perhaps less politically combative than in the recent past. Its connections to political parties are weak. And it is still working out how to make the democratic state "useable." The political parties of the Left (old and new) that are most opposed to the status quo have for the most part failed to gain the electoral support of the poorest sections of Brazilian society, as we have seen, and have not been sufficiently prepared and ready to take power, at least at the national level. The elected Center/Center-Right Brazilian governments of the 1990s could have been more effectively pressured into engaging in more meaningful dialogue with the representatives of civil society and with leaders of opposition political parties and, without resorting to "populist economics," could have been made more responsive to the economic and social needs (rights?) of the majority of the population, more willing to give priority to compensatory, redistributive social policies.
If Brazil's still relatively new democracy fails to deliver not only economic benefits to the population as a whole but at least the beginnings of a more equitable distribution of wealth and power, it will always be fragile and will always struggle to command popular support. And there are dangers to democracy-not so much from social revolution (there is nothing in Brazilian history or political culture to suggest this as a real possibility, as we have seen, and any resort to more violent ways of demanding economic and social change outside democratic institutions would, as always, meet powerful resistance) or, at least in the immediate future, from military coup as from self-destruction. Like electorates in many other Latin American countries, the Brazilian electorate-overwhelmingly young (30 percent under thirty), poorly educated (70 percent with no more than seven years in primary school), and extremely poor (60 percent of the economically active earning under U.S. $150 per month)-could in certain circumstances be persuaded to support populist authoritarian solutions to their problems. Brazil has still to demonstrate that it can successfully combine "formal" liberal representative democracy with a significant extension of citizens' rights and a reasonable measure of social justice.
[Footnote] ENDNOTES 1On colonial government, see Leslie Bethell, ed., Colonial Brazil (Cambridge, En gland: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 46, 129-135, 142, 257. 2On Brazilian independence, see Leslie Bethell, "The Independence of Brazil," in Leslie Bethell, ed., Brazil: Empire and Republic, 1822-1930 (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Also two essays by Emilia Viotti da Costa: "The Political Emancipation of Brazil," in From Colony to Nation: Essays on the Independence of Brazil, ed. A. J. R. Russell-Wood (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975) and "Independence: The Building of a Nation," in Emilia Viotti da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chicago, Ill..: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
[Footnote] 3Richard Graham, Patronage and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 109, Table 2, and 332, note 41. On the political system of the empire, see also Jose Murilo de Carvalho, A construcao da ordem: a elite politica imperial (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Campus, 1980), and Teatro de sombras: a politica imperial (Rio de Janeiro: IUPERJ, 1988). 4Graham, Patronage and Politics, 185-186, 200, 202. 5Bolivar Lamounier and Judith Muszynski, "Brasil," in Enciclopedia electoral latinoamericana y del Caribe, ed. Dieter Nohlen (San Jose, Costa Rica: Instituto Interamericano de Derechos Humanos, 1993), 99, 128. The compilation by Lamounier and Muszynski in ibid., 93-134, especially Table 2.1, "Evolucion del electorado 1933-1990 [in fact 1894-1990]" (ibid., 99) and Table 2.9, "Elecciones presidenciales 1894-1989" (ibid., 125-130), contains valuable statistical information on all elections in Brazil until 1990. For elections from 1982 to 1996, Jairo Marconi Nicolau, ed., Dados eleitorais do Brash (1982-1996) (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Revan, 1998), is indispensable. 6Jose Murilo de Carvalho, Os bestializados: o Rio de Janeiro a a republica que nao foi (Sao Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 1987), chap. 3. 7Lamounier and Muszynski, "Brasil," in Nohlen, ed., Enciclopedia electoral, 99, 128. 8June Hahner, Emancipating the Female Sex: The Struggle for Women's Rights in Brazil, 1850-1940 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991), 171173. 9Nohlen, ed., Enciclopedia electoral, 108, 113, 128. 10For an interesting analysis of the "black vote" in the elections of 1985 and 1986, see Elza Berquo and Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, "A emergencia do voto negro," Estudos CEBRAP 33 (July 1992). 11Nohlen, ed., Enciclopedia electoral, 99,130, and Nicolau, ed., Dados eleitorais, 23-26, 29-36. 12President Fernando Collor de Mello was impeached first in the Chamber of Deputies on September 29 (441 votes to 38) and then, definitively, in the Senate on December 30,1992 (76 votes to 3), the day after he had in fact resigned, 13On the Brazilian party system, see in particular the work of Scott P. Mainwaring: "Brazilian Party Underdevelopment," Political Science Quarterly 107 (4) (1992); "Brazil: Weak Parties, Feckless Democracy," in Building Democratic Institutions: Parties and Party Systems in Latin America, ed. Scott P. Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993); and Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 14See Alfred Stepan, "Brazil's Decentralized Federalism: Bringing Government Closer to the Citizens?" in this issue of Daedalus. 15See Paulo Sergio Pinheiro, "Democratic Governance, Violence, and the (Un)Rule of Law," in this issue of Daedalus. ' 16On the independence of Brazil, see endnote 2.
[Footnote] 17For an introduction to the question of the abolition of slavery in Brazil, see Leslie Bethell, "The Decline and Fall of Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Brazil," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 1 ( 6th series) ( 1991 ). 18Quoted in Carvalho, Os bestializados, 10. 19The best book on the Revolution of 1930 remains Boris Fausto, A revolucao de 1930: Hist6ria e bistoriografia, 16th rev. ed. (Sao Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997). 20On the background to the 1937 coup, see Aspasia Camargo et al., 0 golpe silencioso: As origens da republica corporativa (Rio de Janeiro: Rio Fundo, 1989). 21On the "democratization" of Brazil at the end of World War II, see Leslie Bethell, "Brazil," in Latin America between the Second World War and the Cold War, 1944-1948, ed. Leslie Bethell and Tan Roxborough (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 22 On the collapse of postwar democracy in 1964, see Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos, Sessenta e quatro: Anatomia da crise (Sdo Paulo: Vertice, 1986), and Argelina Maria Cheibub Figueiredo, Democracia ou reformas? Alternativas democrdticas a crise politica, 1961-1964 (Sdo Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1993). 23 On the process of liberalization/democratization in the 1970s and 1980s, there is a vast literature. See, in particular, Luciano Martins, "The 'Liberalization' of Authoritarian Rule in Brazil," in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Latin America, ed. Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Also Alfred Stepan, ed., Democratizing Brazil: Problems of Transition and Consolidation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 241n the first round, Collor secured 30.5 percent of the votos validos (i.e., excluding the blank and spoiled ballots), Lula 17.2 percent, and Brizola 16,5 percent. In the second round, Collor had 53 percent, Lula 47 percent. 25 Cardoso won in the first round with 54 percent of the votos validos. In 1998, he won re-election in the first round with 53 percent. [Author note] Leslie Bethell is director of the Centre for Brazilian Studies at the University of Oxford.