Informal Institutions, Continuities and Ruptures in Brazil’s Regional Politics

• In Event: Latin American Clientelism: Who Benefits and How does it Affect Policy?

Abstract

How do established political practices survive powerful actors? What conditions make them sufficiently entrenched to resist and in turn change those actors? This study seeks to analyze how informal institutions—unwritten but enforced extra-official rules and procedures—are central both to the functioning of democratic life but also its authoritarian remnants. The study revolves around important shifts in voter behavior in Brazil’s poorest and least-developed region—the Northeast—under the left-leaning Workers’ Party (PT) (2003-2016), which have survived despite the impeachment of the PT President in 2016 and a massive shift in the national electorate to the Right in the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro. By focusing on the informal practices that shape the choices of formal institutions such as political parties, the study has important implications for understanding regional cleavages that strain democracies across the Americas today.

Author

• Jorge Antonio Alves, Queens College, CUNY