The paper describes the evolution of legal ideas underlying authoritative discourse used as grounds for changes in economic policy in Brazil. It examines the role of legal ideas in the shaping of policy since the rise of enlarged administrative power in the nineteenth century to the emergence of the developmentalist state in the 1930s, to pro-market reforms of the mid-1990s and early twenty-first century. A description of the contrasts between three major clusters of legal ideas is offered, covering: imported French-style legal doctrinalism in the “classical liberal” era (1850–1930), changes introduced by the administrative law of the “old developmentalism” (1930–1980), and imported Anglo-Saxon legal and economic concepts of the pro-market reforms phase (1990–2000).
This article discusses political transitions in Brazil in the context of globalization. It focuses on the political legacies that offered resistance to external processes and on the emergence of “new checks and balances” that constituted the relevant conditions for processes of political decision-making from the 1980s to 2002. It also shows that the management of economic policies, combined with the broader political process, was an important dimension of these political transitions. The article concludes by emphasizing the challenges that exist in the treatment of social issues and the connections between the domestic and the international agendas.
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