Warming Back Up to Democracy? Democratic Thermostatics and Brazil’s 2022 Presidential Election
Latin American presidents get re-elected at extremely high rates. Yet incumbent Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro finds himself in a dogfight against his rival, former president Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, in October’s presidential electoral contest. Why? The pandemic, the economy, and environmental policy may be partially to blame. But could it also be that Brazilians are in the mood for democracy? Bolsonaro’s victory in the 2018 elections represented a clear rejection of the democratic status quo and, particularly, a revolt against a discredited establishment. Brazilians got all that and more. Yet we think that the data point to a growing
Threats to the Freedom of Information Act on its Tenth Birthday
[Today’s post is a translation of an op-ed that appeared in the Folha de S. Paulo] Organizational secrecy constitutes the first refuge of corruption, incompetence, and inefficiency. In this sense, perhaps the single most important advantage that democracies have over other forms of government is their ability to limit secrecy and promote the free flow of information. Transparency is the oxygen of democracy, and exactly ten years ago on May 16th 2012, Brazil put into effect a keystone institution to breathe fresh air into the Brazilian state– an access to information law (LAI). The LAI promised transformation (“Muda Brasil!”) and
Bolsonaro’s Increasing Electoral Mischief
In their influential 2018 book “How Democracies Die” Levitsky and Ziblatt argued that rather than staging an open coup, modern leaders may subvert the democratic process by repeatedly undermining institutions. In the runup to the October election, Bolsonaro appears to be following their script closely, and his electoral mischief continues apace, along at least three distinct axes. First, as scholars Fiona Macaulay and Cláudio Couto highlighted in an important article on The Conversation, throughout his presidency, Bolsonaro “has repeatedly questioned both the electronic voting and vote-counting process and the impartiality of the electoral courts that organize and regulate elections in Brazil…” Repeatedly casting
The Brazilian Environment on Trial
Since the beginning of the Bolsonaro administration, Brazil has experienced numerous environmental disasters, including the rupture of a tailings dam in Minas Gerais, wide-reaching oil spills on the northeastern coast, and a sharp increase in wildfires throughout the Amazon rainforest and the Pantanal wetlands. International perceptions of Brazil’s environmental performance have also been dramatically downgraded. The country lost its traditional place as one of the most ambitious environmental players among developing countries and is now considered unpredictable, at best. Although the country carried ambitious promises to last November’s UN climate summit, including cutting emissions by 50%, ending illegal deforestation by 2030, and achieving
Bolsonaro’s Troubling Outreach to the Military
President Jair Bolsonaro has been an avid supporter of the Brazilian military throughout his career. This is not surprising, given that he is a former army captain and an apologist for the military regime that governed the country until 1985. But recent events suggest that the President’s extensive outreach to the military has become more purposeful and potentially dangerous. The increasing militarization of Latin American democracies is not unique to Brazil, but it has been deep under Bolsonaro. In his chapter in the new volume, Militares y Gobernabilidad: como estan cambiando las relaciones civico-militares en America Latina, University of Brasília professor Antonio
China’s Campaign for Brazilian Hearts
China’s cultural influence in Latin America remains understudied. While there are many good analyses of its rising economic heft in the Western Hemisphere, our understanding of China’s public diplomacy efforts and its cultural outreach is incipient. With the aim of beginning to address this gap, American University’s Center for Latin American and Latino Studies (CLALS) launched a research project to better illuminate China’s efforts to shape perceptions in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region. The project “Communicating Influence: China’s Messaging in Latin America and the Caribbean” benefits from a network of CLALS-affiliated researchers based in the region. Currently in its final stages, researchers
Brazil’s Kremlin Convolutions
Bolsonaro’s engagement with Putin in the run-up to the invasion of Ukraine was bizarre, to say the least.
Splintering Parties and the Governance Challenge
The hyperfragmentation of the Brazilian party system is unparalleled. The party system has splintered repeatedly over the years, with 24 parties currently represented in the lower house of Congress and 33 parties registered at the electoral court at last count. The effective number of parliamentary parties – a standard measure of parties to seats – has increased correspondingly, from roughly 4 in 1988 to more than 16 in 2018. If you imagined that this might be driven by the incentives facing politicians, you’d be correct. However, in a recent article in Comparative Politics, Timothy Power and Cesar Zucco do a bang-up job of demonstrating just how strong these
Hunger, Pandemic, and Politics
Hunger is not a new challenge for many Brazilians. But the problem has been heightened during the COVID pandemic. In Heliópolis, São Paulo’s largest favela, pre-pandemic food lines might have attracted three hundred people; now, that number has more than tripled. Brazil has re-entered the World Food Programme’s Hunger Map this year after a seven year reprieve. About nineteen million Brazilians currently face food insecurity, according to the WFP’s Center of Excellence Against Hunger in Brazil. Inflation is also squeezing the poor. A recent article in Revista de Nutrição concluded “Thirteen of the seventeen Brazilian capitals [saw…] a rise in the prices of natural and minimally processed