Promoting Pluralism in Brazilian Congress: Stoking a Feminist-Evangelical Fight?

• In Event: Religion and Pluralism

Abstract

What happens Congress becomes a site of contention for two previously excluded groups whose interests are fundamentally at odds? Does a democratic framework become more inclusive, or plural, when the key claims and policy priorities of one minority political actor involve decreasing, or fighting against the expansion of another minority political actor’s rights? This paper focuses on the case of Brazil’s Congress to show that, since the critical juncture of the creation of its 1988 Constitution, this country has progressively witnessed the formation of what can be defined as a highly “adversarial policy community” (Dudley and Richardson, 1996) in the federal legislature. The two contending political actors are the Feminine Caucus and its feminist allies on the one hand, and the Evangelical Caucus and its conservative religious allies, on the other. Through the content analysis of bill proposals as well as of the proceedings from committee hearings, we argue that the end result is a situation of “competing rights” (Foster and Jacobs, 2010), which has distanced Brazil’s gender-centric public policies from some of its Latin American counterparts.

Authors

• Simone R. Bohn, York University

• Pedro G. dos Santos, College of Saint Benedict