Brazilian Politics On Trial

"Explores the causes of Brazil's numerous corruption scandals, the successes and failures of its anticorruption reforms, and the implications of the Brazilian experience for reform efforts in countries around the world"--

In October 2018 Brazilians elected Jair Bolsonaro as their new president. A former army officer who served under the military dictatorship, Bolsonaro has spent his political career campaigning against democracy and human rights. His notoriety comes from his repeated racist, sexist and homophobic statements and his defense of torture, extra-judicial executions and impunity for Brazil´s security forces. Bolsonaro is sometimes described as a “Tropical Trump.” But this wording greatly underestimates the threat that he poses to Brazil´s still young and fragile democratic institutions. In Spite of You brings together voices of the new Brazilian resistance. It includes chapters by Dilma Rousseff, former president of Brazil, political prisoner and torture survivor; Fernando Haddad, former minister for education and mayor of São Paulo, who was defeated by Bolsonaro in the 2018 election; and Eugenio Aragão, former minister for justice in President Dilma´s last government. It also gives a voice to feminists, environmentalists, land rights activists and human rights defenders, explaining the background to Bolsonaro´s election and setting out a manifesto for reviving democracy in Brazil. Contributors: Eugenio Aragão, Rubens Casara, Sérgio Costa, Vanessa Maria de Castro, Fabio de Sá e Silva, Michelle Morais de Sá e Silva, Paulo Esteves, Conor Foley, Gláucia Foley, Fernando Haddad, Monica Herz, Fiona Macaulay, Renata Motta, Dilma Rousseff and Márcia Tiburi. Conor Foley is a Visiting Professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and has worked on legal reform, human rights and protection issues in over thirty conflict zones. His previous books include, Protecting Brazilians Against Torture, Another System Is Possible and The Thin Blue Line.

Do societal inequalities limit the effectiveness of democratic regimes? And if so, why? And how? Addressing this question, Bernd Reiter focuses on the role of societal dynamics in undermining democracy in Brazil. Reiter explores the ways in which race, class, and gender in Brazil structure a society that is deeply divided between the included and the excluded¿and where much of the population falls into the latter category. Tracing the mechanisms of the profound cultural resistance to genuine democratization that he finds dominant among the elite, his theoretically and empirically rich analysis offers an alternative way of understanding both the nature of Brazilian democracy and the democratization process throughout Latin America.

This book offers the first conceptually rigorous analysis of the political and institutional underpinnings of Brazil's recent rise. Using Brazil as a case study in multiparty presidentialism, the authors argue that Brazil's success stems from the combination of a constitutionally strong president and a robust system of checks and balances.

Courts, like other government institutions, shape public policy. But how are courts drawn into the policy process, and how are patterns of policy debate shaped by the institutional structure of the courts? Drawing on the experience of the Brazilian federal courts since the transition to democracy, Judging Policy examines the judiciary's role in public policy debates. During a period of energetic policy reform, the high salience of many policies, combined with the conducive institutional structure of the judiciary, ensured that Brazilian courts would become an important institution at the heart of the policy process. The Brazilian case thus challenges the notion that Latin America's courts have been uniformly pliant or ineffectual, with little impact on politics and policy outcomes. Judging Policy also inserts the judiciary into the scholarly debate regarding the extent of presidential control of the policy process in Latin America's largest nation. By analyzing the full Brazilian federal court system—including not only the high court, but also trial and appellate courts—the book develops a framework with cross-national implications for understanding how courts may influence policy actors' political strategies and the distribution of power within political systems.

When Bloomberg News invited the young American journalist Alex Cuadros to report on Brazil's emerging class of billionaires at the height of the historic Brazilian boom, he was poised to cover two of the biggest business stories of our time: how the giants of the developing world were taking their place at the center of global capitalism, and how wealth inequality was changing societies everywhere. The billionaires of Brazil and their massive fortunes resided at the very top of their country's economic pyramid, and whether they quietly accumulated exceptional power or extravagantly displayed their decadence, they formed a potent microcosm of the world's richest .001 percent. They held sway over the economy, government, media, and stewardship of the environment; they determined the spiritual fates and populated the imaginations of their countrymen. In 2012, Eike Batista ranked as the eighth-richest person in the world, was famous for his marriage to a beauty queen, and was a fixture in the Brazilian press. But by 2015, Batista was bankrupt, his son Thor had been indicted for manslaughter, and Brazil--its president facing impeachment, its provinces combating an epidemic, and its business and political class torn apart by scandal--had become a cautionary tale of a country run aground by its elites. Over four years, Cuadros reported on media moguls and televangelists, energy barons and shadowy figures from the years of military dictatorship, soy barons who lived on the outskirts of the Amazon, and new-economy billionaires spinning money from speculation. His zealous reporting takes us from penthouses to courtrooms, from favelas to art fairs, from scenes of unimaginable wealth to desperate, massive street protests. Within a business narrative that deftly dramatizes the volatility of the global economy, Cuadros offers us literary journalism with a grand sweep.--Adapted from dust jacket.

This open access book focuses on theoretical and empirical intersections between governance, knowledge and space from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributions elucidate how knowledge is a prerequisite as well as a driver of governance efficacy, and conversely, how governance affects the creation and use of knowledge and innovation in geographical context. Scholars from the fields of anthropology, economics, geography, public administration, political science, sociology, and organization studies provide original theoretical discussions along these interdependencies. Moreover, a variety of empirical chapters on governance issues, ranging from regional and national to global scales and covering case studies in Australia, Europe, Latina America, North America and South Africa demonstrate that geography and space are not only important contexts for governance that affect the contingent outcomes of governance blueprints. Governance also creates spaces. It affects the geographical confines as well as the quality of opportunities and constraints that actors enjoy to establish legitimate and sustainable ways of social and environmental co-existence.