Harvesting Influence: Explaining Agricultural Producers’ Political Participation in Argentina and Brazil

• In Event: The Politics of the Agricultural Commodity Boom in Latin America

Abstract

This paper compares agricultural producers’ political strategies in Argentina and Brazil in order to understand how the features of the political system condition business’ ability to transform their economic power into influence over the policy-making process. Rural elites in both countries share many socioeconomic characteristics and have faced important threats to their property rights, however their political strategies to confront these harmful policies have been very different. In Brazil we see that agrarian elites have found a successful institutional way of coordinating their efforts to block policies against their interests: a multi-party caucus in Congress that controls the agrarian committee, and as a consequence, the agenda on agrarian policy. In contrast, in Argentina we see the manifestation of the failure of institutional channels: producers protesting on the streets and mobilizing public opinion in order to block redistributive policies. I argue that this difference in the channels chosen by agricultural producers in each country is related to three institutional features (electoral rules, party structures and coalitional dynamics) that make Brazil’s political system more permeable to business influence. In addition, this paper shows how changes in the regulatory role of the state and an increase in public concern around the environmental and social consequences of agricultural production have led producers’ associations in both countries to increase their actions in the legislative arena.

Author

• María B Fernández Milmanda, Harvard University