Political Careers in Brazil: Long-term Trends and Cross-sectional Variation

Abstract

Brazil's political system is a combination of presidentialism and federalism, liberal rules for the creation of political parties and elections based on open-list proportional representation at federal, state and municipal levels. This gives rise to a complex opportunity structure, characterized by many parties, a great number of available professional positions and medium to strong links across and between levels of government. As a consequence, political careers are fairly easy to enter, since party leaders have little control over the choice of aspirants, but politicians face a high turnover in legislative positions and a high risk of being left out of the game altogether. Three main points are defended here. First, it is inadequate to analyze Brazilian political careers under the same criteria used in the USA. Second, they approach the integrated model defined by Jens Borchert, with intense movement not only between the three levels, but also between the legislative and the executive branches of government. Third, notwithstanding all this, a mandate in the federal Chamber of Deputies is still the lynchpin of a successful political career.

Keywords:

• Integrated model of political careers
• Brazilian political opportunity structure
• Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

Notes

The literature on the causes of the 1964 coup is rather extensive. See, for instance, Santos (1986), Figueiredo (1993) and Almeida (1998).

For a different point of view upon how open-list PR affects legislative behaviour in Brazil, see Amorim Neto and Santos (2003).

About longitudinal changes incurred by the Brazilian party system since 1979, see Lima Jr. (1993) and Nicolau (1996).

This point is shown well by Pereira and Rennó (2003).