This 1996 book is about politics in Brazil during the military regime of 1964–85 and the transition to democracy. Unlike most books about contemporary Brazilian politics that focus on promising signs of change, this book seeks to explain remarkable political continuity in the Brazilian political system. It attributes the persistence of traditional politics and the dominance of regionally based, traditional political elites in particular to the manner in which the economic and political strategies of the military, together with the transition to democracy, reinforced the clientelistic, personalistic, and regional basis of state-society relations. The book focuses on the political competition and representation in the state of Minas Gerais.
This article identifies and proposes a framework to explain the responses of Latin America's Roman Catholic churches to a new strategic dilemma posed by religious and political pluralism. Because the church's goals of defending institutional interests, evangelizing, promoting public morality, and grounding public policy in Catholic social teaching cut across existing political cleavages, Church leaders must make strategic choices about which to emphasize in their messages to the faithful, investment of pastoral resources, and alliances. I develop a typology of Episcopal responses based on the cases of Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and Mexico, and explain strategic choices by the church's capacity to mobilize civil society, its degree of religious hegemony, and the ideological orientations of Catholics. The analysis draws from 620 Episcopal documents issued since 2000. RESUMEN Este artículo identifica y propone un marco para explicar las respuestas de las Iglesias Católicas latinoamericanas a un nuevo dilema estratégico que plantea el pluralismo religioso y político. Puesto que las metas eclesiásticas de defender los intereses institucionales, evangelizar, promover la moralidad pública y basar la política pública en las enseñanzas sociales católicas atraviesan los clivajes políticos existentes, los líderes de la Iglesia deben hacer elecciones estratégicas acerca de cuáles metas enfatizar en sus mensajes a los fieles, en sus inversiones de recursos pastorales y en sus alianzas. Desarrollo una tipología de respuestas episcopales basadas en los casos de Argentina, Chile, Brasil y México y explico las elecciones estratégicas de acuerdo con la capacidad de la Iglesia para movilizar a la sociedad civil, su grado de homogeneidad religiosa y las orientaciones ideológicas de los católicos. El análisis se basa en 620 documentos episcopales, emitidos desde 2000.
This article focuses on the legacies of the authoritarian regimes of South America for the contemporary consolidation of democracy. In particular, it considers their lasting effects on the region's informal networks and formal institutions of political representation. It questions several assumptions made by the literature on regime transition and democratic consolidation in South America about political culture, institutional reform, and electoral realignment: taken together, these assumptions are misleading about how much and what kind of political change has occurred in Latin America as a result of authoritarian rule. To understand how the challenges of democratic consolidation have been shaped, the article proposes instead to examine how the economic policies and political strategies pursued by military regimes preserved, altered, or destroyed the clientelistic and corporatist networks of mediation between state and society prevailing at the onset of authoritarianism, as well as those constructed upon the representative base of programmatic political parties.
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