Conservative Parties, Democracy and Economic Reform
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CONSERVATIVE PARTIES, DEMOCRACY, AND ECONOMIC REFORM IN CONTEMPORARY BRAZIL Scott Mainwaring, Rachel Meneguello, and Timothy Power Working Paper #264 – March 1999 Scott Mainwaring, Eugene Conley Professor and former chair of the Department of Government and International Studies at the University of Notre Dame, is Director of the Kellogg Institute. His most recent book, Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave: The Case of Brazil, will be published by Stanford University Press in early 1999. Rachel Meneguello is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Coordinator of Graduate Studies in Political Science, and Director of the Center for Studies on Public Opinion (CESOP) at the University of Campinas-UNICAMP, Brazil. Timothy J. Power is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Louisiana State University. He is the author of Elites, Institutions, and Democratization: The Political Right in Postauthoritarian Brazil (Penn State University Press, forthcoming) as well as the coeditor (with Peter R. Kingstone) of Democratic Brazil: Actors, Institutions, and Processes (University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming). He received his PhD from Notre Dame in 1993. The authors are grateful to Caroline Domingo, Ed Gibson, Frances Hagopian, and Kevin Middlebrook for helpful comments; to Daniel Brinks and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán for research assistance; and to Felicia LeClere for methodological advice. A version of this paper will appear as a chapter in Conservative Parties and Democracy in Latin America, ed. Kevin Middlebrook (Johns Hopkins, forthcoming). ABSTRACT In this paper we analyze conservative parties in Brazil, focusing on the post-1985 democracy but with some attention to earlier periods as well. We develop four main themes. First, conservative parties in Brazil have been successful at maintaining political power. Our second major theme is that compared to the center and left, Brazil’s conservative parties have several distinctive features. Third, there are significant differences among the conservative parties. Our final major theme is that the conservative pole in the party system is changing. RESUMEN En este artículo analizamos a los partidos conservadores en Brasil, concentrándonos en el período democrático posterior a 1985, pero prestando también alguna atención a períodos anteriores. Desarrollamos cuatro tesis principales. En primer lugar, que los partidos coservadores en Brasil han tenido éxito en mantener poder político. Nuestra segunda tesis es que los partidos conservadores de Brasil tienen varias características que los distinguen tanto del centro como de la izquierda. Tercero, que hay significativas diferencias entre los partidos conservadores. Nuestra cuarta tesis principal es que el polo conservador en este sistema de partidos está cambiando. In this paper we analyze conservative parties in Brazil, focusing on the post-1985 democracy but with some attention to earlier periods as well. We develop four main themes. First, conservative parties in Brazil have been successful at maintaining political power. Conservative parties were pillars of the oligarchic order from their creation in the 1830s until 1930. With the introduction of basically fair competitive elections and mass suffrage in 1945, they established themselves as the hegemonic electoral force in congressional elections until 1962. They helped engineer the 1964 military coup, then became a powerful junior partner in the military regime of 1964–85. Since 1985, in Brazil’s second ‘experiment with democracy,’1 conservative parties have consistently been part of the governing coalition at the national level, and they have fared well electorally. Remarkably in view of the discredit of the military regime by 1985, in the mid to late 1990s conservatives have succeeded in revitalizing their programmatic image. Once viewed as retrograde by large sectors of the society, today, under the aegis of a somewhat successful centrist president (Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 1995–present) who has embraced much of the conservative economic agenda, conservatives are again able to publicly articulate what they stand for without fear of ridicule. While emphasizing conservative dominance throughout Brazilian history, we do not intend to imply that there have been no serious challenges to conservative hegemony. Getúlio Vargas, president from 1930 to 1945, dismayed some conservatives by beginning to incorporate the urban popular classes into the political system. The second time Vargas was president (1951–4) he implemented measures that conservatives disdained; so did President Juscelino Kubitschek (1956–60). The populist reformist government of President João Goulart (1961–4) represented a particularly stiff challenge—one that conservatives could not tolerate, so they fostered and supported a military coup and the ensuing dictatorship. Throughout the 1946–61 period, conservative politicians shared power at the national level and had to make concessions, some of which they regarded as significant. Similarly, they have shared power in the post-1985 democracy, during which time they have again experienced some defeats. But in broad historical and comparative perspective, conservative politicians in Brazil have done well electorally and politically. With the exception of 1963–4, they have been part of the governing coalition at the national level since Brazil’s independence in 1822. Our second major theme is that compared to the center and left, Brazil’s conservative parties have several distinctive features. Rightist parties are more likely to favor neoliberal 1 The allusion here is to Thomas E. Skidmore’s classic Politics in Brazil, 1930–1964: An Experiment in Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967). economic policies and are more conservative on issues such as law and order, abortion, and family morality. Most conservative parties fare best electorally among relatively poor, less educated, and older voters. They also do best in small counties (municípios) and in the poor regions, especially the Northeast. Organizationally, conservative parties are marked by significant cross-state differences, low discipline and loyalty, reliance on clientelism, and personalistic campaign styles. Third, there are significant differences among the conservative parties. Some have an articulate and coherent conservative discourse and do best among well-educated and better-off voters and in the more developed regions of the country. Others are less ideological and more clientelistic or personalistic; they generally fare best among less educated voters in smaller counties. Our final major theme is that the conservative pole in the party system is changing. We highlight three changes. First, since the late 1980s the conservative parties appear to have ended and perhaps even reversed the long-term downward electoral trend they experienced between 1945 and 1964 and again, after an upward spike promoted by the military regime, between 1970 and 1982. Second, in the post-1985 period the conservative parties have accepted democracy more than ever before. Third, conservative parties are less dependent electorally on the poor regions than was the case in the past. The poor regions are still conservative strongholds, but the gap between conservatives’ electoral fate in the wealthy and poor regions appears to be narrowing. Rethinking the Notion of Conservative Parties In his excellent book2 Edward Gibson proposes this definition: “[C]onservative parties are parties that draw their core constituencies from the upper strata of society… A party’s core constituencies are those sectors of society that are most important to its political agenda and resources. Notwithstanding the many valuable contributions of Gibson’s book, this definition is problematic, and the Brazilian case illustrates the flaws. Gibson provides four criteria for assessing whether conservative parties’ core constituency is the upper strata. First, a conservative party draws disproportionately on the upper classes for its electoral support. This criterion has insuperable empirical problems. In Brazil, as we show later, the main conservative parties have disproportionately drawn their support from less educated and lower income respondents. By ‘disproportionately’ we indicate that supporters of conservative parties are slightly poorer and less educated than the mean for the Brazilian electorate. Several important conservative populists have overwhelmingly drawn their electoral support from the lower classes. One example was Fernando Collor de Mello, who won the 1989 presidential election. His electoral base was the poor and uneducated; he fared poorly among the wealthy and educated. Conversely, respondents from the highest income category sampled in surveys (with a family income of 50 or more minimum salaries) are more likely to identify with a leftist than a rightist party. Gibson’s second criterion is that conservative parties can be identified by distinctive patterns of financial support. Whether it is actually the case that programmatically conservative parties can be identified in this manner, however, is an untested and uncertain proposition. In Brazil, for example, it is not ex-ante obvious that conservative parties have different bases of financial support from the centrist parties. Third, Gibson suggests examining programmatic positions—a move we fully endorse. But the relationship between programmatic positions and the other criteria Gibson uses is opaque. Finally, Gibson advocates looking at “the social interests most consistently