Brazil

IMPLEMENTATION PROCESS IN BRAZIL

Overview

Since 1985, year that the new Constitution was approved in the Congress, Brazil is a federal republic and a presidential democracy country. In the presidential democracy, the winners of election take all systems in which losers are excluded from power for long periods (Power, 2000). It is an inflexible framework where the replacement process of bad governments is more difficult than the parliamentary system. Despite many debates made by politics, academics, and journalists in the last decades about the weakness of presidential democracy, the system remains ongoing in Brazil.

Otherwise, the Brazilian electoral system have undergone substantial change since 1985. Suffrage is now universal and the voting age was lowered to sixteen in 1988. Furthermore, direct elections for mayor and councilors of all cities, senators, deputies, and governors are being held every four years. Presidents are now elected in a two-round majoritarian system, with the top two finishers advancing to the second round. The same procedure is followed in electing governors and majors of the largest cities, but senators are still electing in first-past-the-post contests.

The political party system in Brazil is highly fragmented and most of them lack a clear ideological identity. As there is no national electoral threshold, and multiparty alliances are permitted, it is easy for parties without any political thought to attain representation in Congress. A reform in the Brazilian political party system is claimed often by a group of legislators. Hence, most citizens in the country continue to believe that most political parties are not true representations of Brazilian society (Power, 2000).

Main national actors As previously stated, Brazil is a republic because the president is elective and temporary; federate, in sense of the states having political autonomy; and presidential, it means that the president is a state chief and govern chief at the same time.

The figure on the right side is a scheme of the Brazilian government framework. The executive enforces laws and the government or state agenda. The president, elected every four years, follows this agenda with the support of ministers and ministers secretaries chosen by him/her. The legislature (make laws) is represented by unless three senators in each state, and the distribution of deputies is proportionally related to the number of people in each state. The judiciary is in charge to judge laws elaborated by legislature, and the Court of Justice is the supreme authority (its formal denonimantion is "Supreme Court of Justice"). Eleven ministers drafted by president and approved by senators take part in this institution.

The relationship between actors

In Brazil pos-1985, the relationship between Judiciary, Legislature and Executive is remark by several interest conflicts. These events test the capacity of institutions to assure that the national democratic regime works in such stressful conditions. Additionally, the country has hard challengers to overcome such as the widespread poverty combined with the world´s worst distribution of incomes and the consequences of economic crises during the military government (1964-1985), system in which still have persistent support of some civil groups. As a result, Brazil is in post-authoritarian regime (Power, 2000). It means that Brazilians are learning to make decisions that could solve their problems in a democratic context.

The true is that Brazil had a brutal colonized process, resulting in a bad heritage which reflects in episodes of corruptions and scandals involving Judiciary, Legislature and Executive nowadays (Avritzer; Filgueiras, 2011). The mechanisms that will control effectively the political process towards the national socioeconomic development are in the first steps.

References

Avritzer L, Filgueiras F (2011) Corrupção e controles democráticos no Brasil. Textos para Discussão CEPAL-IPEA, 32. Brasília-DF: IPEA.

Power TJ (2000) Political institutions in democratic Brazil: politics a a permanent constitutional convention. In: Kingstone P R and Power T J (eds). Democratic Brazil: Actors, institutions, and process. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, pp 17 - 35.