Beliefs or ideology: the imperative of social inclusion in Brazilian politics

ABSTRACT

This paper underscores how a dominant belief in social inclusion not only has shaped Brazil’s post-1988 institutions, but has also dominated policy preferences of Brazilian politicians regardless of their ideological orientation. Based on a unique survey with Brazilian legislators, we have been able to understand how elite preferences are connected to this belief of social inclusion. We also address how the belief of social inclusion itself changed over time, from what can be called as irresponsible inclusion to a more fiscally sound social inclusion. By combining the elite’s survey with roll call voting records, we compare the degree of consistency between what lawmakers say and how they behave. The results demonstrate that although social inclusion is the spoken imperative, the division between government and opposition distinguishes itself as the main cleavage in Brazilian politics. The Brazilian case is noteworthy, since its economically unequal and politically hyper-fragmented context can serve as an example of a strong executive, generally aligned to society beliefs, seizing the opportunity to coordinate Congress towards delivering redistributive policies.

KEYWORDS:

• Beliefs
• ideology
• social inclusion
• Brazil

Acknowledgements

Preliminary versions of this paper were presented at the 2015 meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), San Francisco, 3–5 September; and at the workshop ‘Brazilian political elite: Ideology, value and policy preference’, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, 31 January 2014. We are grateful for the comments and suggestions provided by the participants of these events, especially Timothy Power, Cesar Zucco, Louise Tillin, Jane Duckett, James Manor, and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Although beliefs were not her central argument, Fenwick (2009) also identifies that the general public supported social inclusion regardless of socioeconomic standing and/or partisanship. For her, the key explanatory factor in Brazil’s success was its unique nonmajoritarian political dynamics and its ability to achieve macroeconomic stability, which provides incentives for politicians to support the agenda of social inclusion regardless of partisanship and potential obstacles from state governors. We are grateful for an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

2 We use here ideology measures as provided in Power and Zucco (2012), as the normalisation of a numeric value ranging from 1 to 10.

3 Arretche, Schlegel, and Ferrari (2016) conducted a national survey with voters, about preferences over the vertical distribution of power in redistributive policies. Their results partially support this idea. Voters preferences do change however when the question of ‘who pays?’ is included. Our elite survey indicates that this issue has no salience among legislators whatsoever. The authors directly comment on policies of social inclusion being a possible explanatory factor for a preference for centralisation in Brazil, especially among vulnerable citizens, because it entailed that the brunt of the cost for popular policies was not borne by the regions that had the most to gain.

4 Since the 1988 Constitution Brazil has a universal health care system called ‘Sistema Único de Saúde’ (SUS), in which all Brazilians have the right to have access to a unified public health system.

5 ‘CPMF’ was a tax that charged all financial/bank transactions made by individuals and firms. It worked from 1996 to 2007 and it was created to collect revenue to be allocated in public health policies during the Cardoso administration via a Constitutional Amendment in 16 August 1996.

6 The Bolsa Familia cash-transfer program was created, via a Provisional Decree n.132, on 20 October 2003.

7 It is worth noting the parallel with India (see Maiorano & Manor, 2017), where the tax burden has also increased. However, in the Indian case much of the increase came from corporate taxation other than income tax – only 14% of government revenue in 2015–2016.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) [grant number ES/J012629/1] and by the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisa (CNPq), number 306565/2014-5.