Compared to What?

Abstract

A rich and plausible academic literature has delineated reasons to believe Brazil’s democratic political institutions—including electoral rules, the political party system, federalism, and the rules of legislative procedure—are suboptimal from the viewpoints of democratic representativeness and policy-making effectiveness. The authors concur that specific peculiarities of Brazilian political institutions likely complicate the process of solving societal collective action dilemmas. Nonetheless, Brazil’s economic and social track record since redemocratization in the mid-1980s has been reasonably good in comparative regional perspective. Perhaps Brazil’s informal political negotiating mechanisms, or even other less obvious institutional structures, provide sufficient countervailing influences to allow “governance” to proceed relatively smoothly despite the appearance of chaos and political dysfunction.