Political Science Quarterly
Volume 115 No. 1 (Spring 2000)

 

Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: The Case of Brazil
By Scott P. Mainwaring. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999.
Reviewed by Jorge I. Dominguez

 

This splendid book describes and explains the characteristics of Brazil's political party system in comparative context. It also provokes a reexamination of the comparative study of parties more generally. Mainwaring notes that scholars of party systems often assume a fairly high level of institutionalization. This theoretically conscious analysis of Brazil's party system through the second half of the twentieth century argues, in contrast, that Brazil and many other countries that democratized in the last quarter of the twentieth century have weakly institutionalized party systems. Patterns of party competition are unstable; the parties have weak roots in society and do not respond to, or reflect, its social cleavages; parties are held in low regard and typically possess weak internal organization.

Mainwaring demonstrates impressively that Brazil's political party system is weakly institutionalized by comparative standards, and less institutionalized since 1985 than between 1945 and the 1964 military coup. Brazil's parties appear and disappear with surprising speed. The two largest parties operating before that coup no longer existed when a civilian returned to the presidency in 1985. In the second half of the 1980s, about 40 percent of the members of Congress switched party membership during one congressional term; in the first half of the 1990s, the proportion of party switchers rose to half the members of Congress.

Mainwaring comprehensively explains the low institutionalization of Brazil's party system in two ways. One is a long-term macrohistorical explanation. Brazil (as many recently democratizing countries) is a late industrializer, relying on capital-intensive development; the size of its industrial working class, never large, was at its peak just about half the size of the working class in Western European countries in the 1960s. Brazil never developed large mass-based, disciplined working class parties that might have induced fear and comparable discipline on nonsocialist parties. The Brazilian state, moreover, proactively imposed patterns of corporatist representation (weakening recently) that long short-circuited much of the political work that parties perform in other countries.

Mainwaring's second persuasive explanation is the insidious effect of Brazil's electoral laws on its party system. Brazil's open-list, high-district magnitude proportional representation electoral law maximizes the likelihood that party candidates will court a personal following in often-fierce competition with other candidates from the same party. Incumbents have an automatic right to reappear on the ballot even if they switched parties during the preceding term or never voted with their party's majority. Brazil's highly decentralized political system also decentralized its parties, giving strong incentives for region-based pork-barrel politics that shape nonideological, catch-all parties.

One doubt emerges from this rich and detailed analysis. Why is Brazilian party discipline in Congress so high? Mainwaring asserts the opposite: "it is clear that Brazil's catch-all parties lack discipline" (p. 140). And yet, in 221 roll-call votes in the Chamber of Deputies in which at least 10 percent of those who voted opposed the winning side, voting discipline was above 85 percent for every party. True, this is lower than in other democracies, but the reader by this point in the book expects less discipline. Mainwaring does not account well for a level of discipline that seems high given the party system he has described. Moreover, Mainwaring spends considerable time assessing the impact of federalist decentralization on the party system, but there is never a comparative study of the party systems of Brazilian states. A better book would have demonstrated that the argument holds not just at the all-Brazilian level but also, in stylized fashion perhaps, for state-level party systems.

This book will become the key reference in future studies of Brazil's party system. It should also influence a rethinking of the comparative and theoretical work on party systems outside the North Atlantic countries to better understand the challenges that face countries of recent democratization.

Jorge I. Dominguez
Harvard University