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Brazils
Accountability Paradox
Frances Hagopian
Frances Hagopian is Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer in government at Harvard University, and author of Reorganizing Representation in Latin America (forthcoming).
120
Journal of Democracy
Frances Hagopian
121
122
Journal of Democracy
Frances Hagopian
123
124
Journal of Democracy
20.6%
61.7%
19.8%
PMDB (6.8%)
15.7%
PFL (2.8%)
15.7%
None (63%)
6.8%
Total (100%)
6.8%
59.3%
5.9%
11.8%
14.1%
Patronage Voter
55.5%
15.7%
56.9%
58.5%
58.3%
Program Voter
Valence Voter
the Party of the Liberal Front (PFL, now known as the Democrats) still
sought patronage rewards. But more surprisingly, PT partisans were as
inclined to reward policy performance as the nonaligned (see Figure).10
In this new political world, political parties earned credibility through
governance.
These reforms of the last few decades have transformed Brazil. Democracy is more inclusive and participatory than ever before. Across
the vast country, thousands of local councils deliberate on matters of
local infrastructure spending, debate and inform healthcare policy, and
can veto proposed land use. Brazilians sign petitions, participate in
their communities, work on political campaigns, and attend neighborhood-association and party meetings at rates that are comparable to
those found in Germany.11
Citizen initiatives have also improved the integrity of the electoral
process. In 1999, the Movement to Combat Electoral Corruption mobi-
Frances Hagopian
125
lized more than fifty groups to pass a law that strips vote-buyers of their
mandates. Eleven years after that came the Clean Record Law, which
bans a politician convicted of corruption from again standing for office for eight years. Through social mobilization and state action, social
rights and economic opportunities were extended to women, Brazilians
of African descent, and the disabled. Quota laws have opened places in
some government ministries and in federal universities for graduates of
public high schools and Afro-Brazilians in proportion to their numbers
in a state, and an antidiscrimination statue has tackled the subtler forms
of social exclusion in Brazil.
Political inclusion also deepened support for and enhanced the legitimacy of political institutions. In the 2006 Latinobarmetro survey, 65
percent of respondents expressed some or a lot of confidence in the electoral courtthe third-highest such figure in Latin America. In the 2001
survey, 71 percent agreed that parties are necessary (the second-highest in Latin America).12 In the 2012 Americas Barometer survey, 87 and
85 percent of respondents, respectively, disagreed that it is justifiable
for the president to shut down and govern without the Supreme Court or
Congressthe primary institutions of horizontal accountabilitywhen
the country is facing hard times.13
In sum, as of 2012 Brazilian democracy had never looked stronger.
Economic stability and social inclusion had laid the foundations for a
more participatory and democratic political culture, stronger citizen attachment to the key institutions of liberal constitutionalism, and greater
stability in the party system. Stronger parties ran on clear platforms with
less reliance on clientelism, while a more sophisticated electorate made
its choices based on parties ideas and performance. What went wrong?
126
Journal of Democracy
level Mensal~ao defendants had enjoyed impunity drove the defeat of PEC
37a proposed constitutional amendment that would have curbed state
prosecutors ability to investigate corruption.
Despite the rise in program voting,
Even in hard times, and
most citizens still worried more about
with popular anger
economic stability, public-service deat the political class
livery, and social inclusion than ideolthreatening to boil
ogy. As former president Cardoso has
over, Brazilians find
observed, they were turning out in the
their democracy worth
streets not on behalf of parties, but on
taking part in, and
their own.15 The electorates overall
respect the institutions partisan-identification rate, after hoverthat safeguard it.
ing for fifteen years around 50 percent,
fell to half that number in 2015. The most
serious losses were suffered by the PT.
Between 2013 and 2015, its self-identified partisans went from 31 percent of the electorate to just 12 percent.16
The crisis of representation that hit Brazil took scholars and political
professionals by surprise, and has left them struggling to explain why
and how party-to-voter linkages could have crumbled so fast and to such
a great extent. The sharp drop-off in partisan identification came before
the Car Wash scandal broke, so outrage at corruption cannot by itself
be the cause. The blurring of programmatic differentiation among major
parties does not seem to be the reason, eitherthat process had been
ongoing since 2006.17
The timing of the early signs of crisis suggests that faulty government performance lies at the root of the turmoil. Valence voting gave
huge opportunities to parties that did not dole out patronageespecially
the PT and the PSDBbut it also raised the bar for their performance
in office. With partisan identification so shallow, parties lacked insulation from their policy failures. Once citizens lost faith in their respective parties to represent them, they became likely to judge governmental performance as a whole more harshly.18 And so the model of
representationin which the governing party is held accountable not
for implementing the policies that they propose, but for the big picture
of growth, inflation, and service delivery, even when those things are
beyond the partys controlfell into crisis.
Brazil is experiencing a crisis whose root causes are political. A normal economic downturnbrought on by Chinas economic slowdown
and the Rousseff administrations failure to respond quickly to rising
inflation while distracted by reelection worrieshas flared into something much greater. The proximate cause, noted by Marcus Andr Melo,
may have been a tug of war between Rousseff and an opposition congressional faction that proved capable of disrupting the administrations
Frances Hagopian
127
128
Journal of Democracy
6. By 2008, 68 percent of the total population (a figure that included 60 percent of those
in the lowest income quintile) reported having seen a doctor in the last year (the same percentage as in the United States). From 1998 to 2008, the population served by community
health workers doubled from 30 to 61 percent. Jairnilson Paim et al., The Brazilian Health
System: History, Advances, and Challenges, Lancet, 21 May 2011, 178082.
7. Rafael Rofman, Leonardo Lucchetti, and Guzmn Ourens, Pension Systems in
Latin America: Concepts and Measurements of Coverage, World Bank SP Discussion
Paper No. 0616, October 2008, 17.
8. By 2005, Brazil was spending 16 percent of its GDP on social insurance, social assistance, health, and education. This was just shy of the 16.2 percent regional benchmark
set by Uruguay. James W. McGuire, Social Policies in Latin America: Causes, Characteristics, and Consequences, in Peter Kingstone and Deborah J. Yashar, eds., Routledge
Handbook of Latin American Politics (New York: Routledge, 2012), 201. By 2008, public
spending on health and education was exceeding the OECD average.
9. Natasha Borges Sugiyama and Wendy Hunter, Whither Clientelism? Good Governance and Brazils Bolsa Famlia Program, Comparative Politics 46 (October 2013): 4362.
10. Another study based on 2002 surveys in the cities of Caxias do Sul and Juiz de Fora
found that voters backed candidates for president and governor based on issues such as
privatization and land reform, but in congressional races chose politicians who had delivered hospitals, schools, bridges, and roads to their districts, or who seemed likely to do so.
Barry Ames, Andy Baker, and Lucio R. Renn, The Quality of Elections in Brazil: Policy, Performance, Pageantry, or Pork? in Peter R. Kingstone and Timothy J. Power, eds.,
Democratic Brazil Revisited (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 10733.
11. Russell J. Dalton, Politics in Germany, and Frances Hagopian and Timothy J.
Power, Politics in Brazil, in G. Bingham Powell, Jr., Russell J. Dalton, and Kaare Strom,
eds., Comparative Politics Today: A World View, 11th ed., (Boston: Pearson, 2015), 267,
504.
12. Cesar Zucco, Jr., Estabilidad sin Races: La Institucionalizacin de sistema de
partidos en Brasil, in Mariano Torcal, ed., Sistemas de partidos en Amrica Latina: Causas y consecuencias de su equilibrio inestable (Barcelona: Anthropos, 2015), 78107.
13. Mitchell A. Seligson, Amy Erica Smith, Elizabeth J. Zechmeister, eds., The Political Culture of Democracy in the Americas, 2012: Towards Equality of Opportunity,
Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), www.vanderbilt.edu/lapop/ab2012.
php#Brazil.
14. Scott Mainwaring, Timothy J. Power, and Fernando Bizzarro, The Uneven Institutionalization of a Party System: Brazil, in Scott Mainwaring, ed., Latin American Party
Systems: Institutionalization, Erosion, and Collapse (under review). Zucco, Estabilidad
sin Races.
15. Ricardo Balthazar, PT vai diminuir, mas um partido necessrio, diz FHC,
Folha de S~ao Paulo, 25 September 2015.
16. As revealed in Datafolha polls reported in Mainwaring, Power, and Bizzarro, Uneven Institutionalization. A similar precipitous decline between 2010 and 2014 was evident in surveys conducted by the Center of Public Opinion Studies at the University of
Campinas, Pesquisa FAPESP, 235 (2015), 88.
17. Andrei Roman, Protest Escalation, (PhD diss., Harvard University, in progress).
18. Zucco, Estabilidad sin Races, 910.
19. Melo, Crisis and Integrity in Brazil, 53, 57.