Brazil's Principal Democratic Institutions

Full Transcript:

Introduction: 

Hello and welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast, where it is my job to discuss and analyze democratic institutions. 

Brazil’s democratic journey has been one of great hopes and progress, yet also one of disappointments and distrust in democratic institutions. Brazil is a vast country of 214 million people, organized as a federation in 26 states and the Federal District of Brasilia. In a bi-cameral system,  the Chamber of Deputies represents the people, while the Senate represents the states. It is a presidential system with the president is elected in a two-round system. 

With José Antonio Cheibub I discuss some of the principal democratic institutions of Brazil. He shares with us his insights based on 30 years of research. We talk about how the presidency is checked by the two chambers, and that he thinks that the institutions during the Bolsonaro presidency actually worked as they are supposed to work. Many feared Bolsonoaro would disassemble the democratic institutions, yet he has been mostly held in check, and he will possibly lose power in the next general election in October. 

José Antonio Cheibub also mentions that the party fragmentation has become a problem since voters cannot distinguish among the many party labels. Yet, a peculiar coalition rule, that was the main cause of the fragmentation has recently been removed, which already led to reshuffles in the party landscape. 

José Antonio Cheibub is a Mary Thomas Marshall Professor of Liberal Arts at the Texas A&M University. He has made seminal contributions to political science research and published four books, including Presidentialism, Parliamentarism, and Democracy.

I really enjoyed this conversation since I learnt a lot about Brazilian institutions and politics, but also it made me quite hopeful for the upcoming elections in October this year. I link to his website in the show notes.

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the twenty-fifth episode of The Rules of the Game podcast. I am a political economist with a PhD in Economics from the University of Bern in Switzerland. And I previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Center for Global Development.

You find a full transcript of this episode on my website rulesofthegame.blog. I am always curious to hear your opinion, so just send me an email to [email protected], and please leave a review and share this episode with friends and colleagues.

Now please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with José Antonio Cheibub.

Interview:

Stephan Kyburz: José Antonio Cheibub, welcome to the Rules of the Game podcast. I’m very happy to have you on the show.

José Antonio Cheibub: Thank you. Thank you very much. I’m happy to be here.

Stephan Kyburz: My first question, as always, is what is your first memory of democracy?

José Antonio Cheibub: Yeah. That’s an interesting question and I grew up during the military dictatorship and for the circumstance there, my family was entirely against the military and so one thing that I grew up with was hating the government. And one of my first memories was after things became more democratic, was feeling like: Oh! Now there is a government I don’t need to hate that I can actually agree with, and that felt very, very strange but very nice also. And so that’s my first memory of noticing that I was no longer living under a dictatorship.

Stephan Kyburz: That’s a very nice memory. Thanks for sharing that. And I also think that’s kind of a key part of democracy, right? That there is not a real hate to government. Obviously, we disagree and especially if the party is in power that we don’t like so much, we disagree, but still that there is this common sense, right? 

José Antonio Cheibub: Yeah, and it’s different from feeling like the people who are in power are evil or should be removed. 

Stephan Kyburz: So, today I would like to discuss the democratic institutions of Brazil and I’m aware that this is obviously a big topic, there is so many aspects to democratic institutions. But I just want to discuss the main parts and let’s see where we are heading with the discussion. But first of all I’d like to ask you, from your perspective, what were historically the really key moments in the development of the Brazilian democracy. And obviously, there were interruptions with the military dictatorship as you mentioned, already. But when you look back, what were the key moments and key institutional developments?

José Antonio Cheibub: In Brazil we tend to identify two periods of democracy. One going from 1946 to 1964, which was a democratic period, then there was alternation in power at the top, you know, in the presidency and certainly at the state level.But it was also very problematic. It lasted for 18 years only and there are some important institutional issues. I think democracy became more established in 1985 with the current. And I think the two key events. There are first the election of Tancredo Neves, who in 1985 was elected, under the same rules that the military had established for electing presidents,  thinking that they would not lose an election. And they actually lost and that was very important. And then of course the 1988 constitution which is the constitution that still frames politics in Brazil. And so to me those are the two key events in the process. And there are lots of bumps in the road, but those I think are accidents and things that happen in a democracy

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly. So looking a bit further back, one aspect of the democratic institutions that I really like to talk about is parliament, the two chambers of parliament. So Brazil has a chamber of deputies, which is the lower chamber and the senate. And the rules to elect the chamber of deputies were already established in 1946, so that’s a very long time ago. There are 27 multi-member electoral districts, corresponding to the 26 states and Brasilia, the capital, and there is also a minimum and a maximum of seats for each state. So this rule seems to be quite stable and constant. So what is your opinion and what do you think are kind of the specific problems of that system? But also advantages?

José Antonio Cheibub: I mean the overall system, in terms of a bi-cameral legislature and different modes of election between the lower chamber, the chamber of deputies and the senate. I think this is pretty standard in the countries where you have a bi-cameral structure, in particular where – Like in Brazil, you have federalism, with the 26 states plus Brazilia and so on. What is not necessarily standard is, as you mentioned, the degree of malapportionment. In the lower chamber and in the senate. So by malapportionment I mean that the price of the vote is different in each of the units. So you have multi-member districts, in the 27 units, in the 27 districts but the number of seats, the number of seats that each district returns should be a proportional, is more or less a proportion of the population so that you keep each unit represented proportionally in the chamber and not necessarily in the senate. Let’s talk first about the chamber. These rules that you mentioned, about having a minimal number of seats and a maximum number of seats, generate an inequality across the district. That was very profound in the 1946-64 period. It remained profound during the military, which should be said held the legislative elections periodically during the dictatorship. And today is much less unequal because of the population shifts. But the consequence is that a state, a very small state like Acre, which is in the north, in the middle of the Amazona’s forest or Roraima, they need very few votes to buy a seat, where states like in Rio and Minas Gerais they need many more votes to buy one seat. So fortunately, because there was a shift in population, the disparities caused by the lower number of seats, the minimum number of seats have been corrected today. The one state that is really penalized is the state of São Paulo which is the one big loser in this process because in addition to the minimum seats, there is a ceiling that no state can have more than 70 seats and the one state that could have – actually São Paulo loses 50% of the seats – it could have, it should have about 105 seats but it only has 70. And so that’s a bad thing.

Stephan Kyburz: And is there a discussion to increase that maximum number of seats?

José Antonio Cheibub: Not really. This is pretty amazing. In my recollection there was an attempt by the DSE, which is the electoral court that organizes the elections in Brazil, to reapportion some states, but not São Paulo, but to reapportion some states and there was an outcry against it and they had to back off from that reform. And there is a big fear that São Paulo will dominate the federation. And I think that this is something that comes from the 1930’s, after the first period of Republican Government between 1888 and 1930 and so there was this strong fear of São Paulo’s dominance. So I think it’s very difficult that this will be changed.

Stephan Kyburz: And I think what we haven’t mentioned yet is that Brazil uses an open list  proportional representation system. And is quite well known, I would say, for like a fragmented party landscape, so there is a lot of small parties and recently there was a constitutional amendment in 2017, the Constitutional Amendment 97 which prohibited the formation of political collisions so that the party landscape will be less fragmented. What is your opinion on this constitutional change and how do you see party fragmentation in the chamber?

José Antonio Cheibub: So the proportional representation systems, I mean there are two types, broad types. One is, I mean, in list proportional representation systems, one is what we call a closed list and the other one is an open list. In the closed list, parties present a list of candidates ordered by the party and the voters can vote for one of the lists. And then when the system allocates seats to the parties, the individual candidates who go to the parliament or to the congress, are the ones who are – if the party got 10 seats are the first 10 names as ordered by the party. In an open list system there is no ordering of the candidates. So the voters choose an individual candidate, sometimes they can choose the party, also, but they vote for individual candidates. And in the case of Brazil, the candidates, if the party got 10 seats, the candidates who go to congress or to the chamber are the 10 candidates who are most voted from that list. So that’s the system and it’s very similar to the way it works in Poland and in Finland. In Brazil it is very much discussed and very much disliked and a lot of people attribute the cause of the very extreme fragmentation in Brazil to this particular system. Now, you mentioned that in 2017 there was this constitutional amendment that prohibited or changed the way that coalitions could be formed, for the legislative elections for the chamber. So the coalition rule that existed before was, in my opinion, absolutely bizarre. It was that rule and not necessarily the open list system that allowed for the survival of many political, I mean, many very small, even micro political parties. And because that rule allowed, through a complicated process, but allowed some small parties to come together with one large party and these parties would present very small lists but when the distribution of seats that were given to the coalition would be made by ranking all the candidates from the different parties in order of votes that they received as a person, and then the candidates from these small parties would do relatively well individually but if they were not in a coalition, they would not be able to get even one seat. So it is the coalition that allowed them to meet the minimum threshold. So the discussion is that it is the system, as the open list PR system, that causes the fragmentation. I disagree with that very much because in Poland or in Finland you have a similar system and the fragmentation is not as extreme as it is in Brazil. What is the culprit is the coalition rule. So I think getting rid of that rule is a very welcome change, and I think you know we’re gonna see the effect in this year’s election, and we are already seeing because many parties are merging and because they understand that if they don’t become slightly larger, they’re not going to be able to make the threshold that exists at the level of each district. Now I recently wrote a paper in which I argued that the thing that really needs to be explained in Brazil, which is really bizarre, it’s not so much why there are so many parties, but why is it that the number of parties kept increasing from 1990 all the way to 2018. And this is very contrary to what happens in many other democracies. Usually democracies start with a large number of parties and then they kind of coalesce. So anyway the story to me, it’s not only the coalition rule but it is a system of financing of political parties, the incentives that it creates, the fact that parties in Brazil, although they are very hard to create, contrary to what we may think given the proliferation of parties. Just to give you an idea, Bolsonaro tried to create a party two years ago, so that he could run for the re-election and he had to abandon that idea because he failed to meet all the requirements to create a new party. But this part has never died, once they get the minimum requirement for existence, they are available in the districts for people to come in and run so in this paper we try to argue that what really causes it is the incentive that individual legislators, individual candidates have to run under a small label that is already available to them and that leads them to then generate this increasing fragmentation. So I think that the end of the coalition rule is going to reduce the number of parties but some of the incentives to continue running under relatively small parties will still remain and so we’re not going to see an effect as profound as we should have seen.

Stephan Kyburz: But do you think like, let’s say compared to the US where you only have two parties now, Brazil is really a very different case where you have so many small parties. Do you see kind of an optimum? You know there’s the argument in a presidential system that with a lot of small parties it’s much harder for a government to find consensus. So do you see that fragmentation is a big problem and it should be reduced? But maybe there is also the view that you don’t want to end up in a two-party system.

José Antonio Cheibub: I personally favor multipartism. And I don’t see fragmentation as being intrinsically problematic, especially in Brazil where research has shown that the executive is able to create very strong coalitions and then these coalitions are able to govern and they support the executive and they pass legislation. So Brazil, in spite of the fragmentation, it has not been a system plagued by inaction or deadlock. I mean a lot of things changed in Brazil since the 1988 constitution and they changed because there was this coalition that was able to support, some coalition that was able to support these changes. So I don’t like the first- past-the-post system. I think in the case of Brazil, I don’t think it would lead to a bipartisan system but it would restrict the entry of interest into the political process. And I think one of the good things of PR and multipartism is to allow the entry of interests and then they are going to be discussed and negotiated and come together in the congress in the form of a governing coalition. What I think is true is that Brazil just became too fragmented and there is no way the number of parties that exist in Brazil now represent anything that is meaningful. I mean there is no interest associated with these parties. They are just labels.

Stephan Kyburz: But also the labels are not very clear to the voters.

José Antonio Cheibub: No, not at all.

Stephan Kyburz: I very much agree actually with your view that the multipartyism and the dynamics with a proportional system is very important so that new parties can enter and appeal to voters and that in the end coalitions can be formed during the legislative work and I prefer that way more to a system that is stuck with a number of parties.

José Antonio Cheibub: That prevents the interests from entering the political system which is I think is what happens in the US, right? 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly.

José Antonio Cheibub: In an extreme form.

Stephan Kyburz: You briefly mentioned the finance, party financing so that it is also a result of the open list system that the candidates they want to appeal to the voters so they try to invest a lot of money to actually have that visibility? Is that an element of Brazilian politics?

José Antonio Cheibub: It is an element of Brazilian politics but I think people also tend to take what appears to be an easy explanation and they just accept it too easily. So the line that is the goal now is that one of the sources of corruption is the legislative elections because they require candidates to reach out to source of financing that are illegitimate because they need to differentiate themselves from their own copartisisms, so that the vote that a voter gives to their party goes to him or herself and not to my copartism because I need to end up at the top of the list. I find that this is a very misguided argument and actually wrong. I mean to begin with, I think as became plenty clear in the past years, the big corruption in Brazil happens at the executive level and not at the legislative level. I’m not saying that there is no corruption. We just saw, recently, the minister of education in Brazil and the legislators, how that happened. But that involves the executive. In any way that’s the big source of corruption, political corruption. I think parties in Brazil, they have an incredible amount of public resources available to them. The recent legislature made it sure that these resources increased, by a factor of two at least, with a ridiculous amount of money, like billions of Reais being allocated to the parties to be spent in elections. So Brazil is a good example of how thinking that the solution for money in politics is to adopt public funding of elections. That’s not necessarily true because I mean it shows that the politicians can actually come together and just take a lot of this money for whatever they want to do. And that’s what the majority in Congress did more recently. So there is a problem of oversight by the electoral court on the accounts of parties and candidates. They have a good system in practice but it’s a system that doesn’t work, I mean in theory, but it’s a system that doesn’t work in practice. So I do not believe that the problem is structural as some people believe. It doesn’t have to do with the electoral system. Research shows that corruption, for example, there is no agreement among political scientists which system is more corrupt, whether it is open list PR or closed list PR. One thing that is true is that the systems that have open list PR believe that the solution is going to be to adopt closed list PR. and the systems that have closed list PR, like in Argentina, they believe that the solution is to adopt open list PR. Is just two different forms of corruption. But corruption will be there but not because this is in Brazil or Argentina but because it is everywhere where you have elections. I mean in the US,  in Italy, in France, in Germany and you know…

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, personally I prefer still the open list system because it gives a bit more flexibility and I think less power to the parties. 

José Antonio Cheibub: This is one thing that I joke with my friends, when people say we should give more power to the parties in Brazil and I shake my head and I said: Do you want these people to have more powers? I particularly don’t. I don’t think they are… I don’t trust them for that.

Stephan Kyburz: I totally agree with that. So looking to the senate. So the senate represents the 26 states and Brasilia and the senators are elected under a first-past-the-post system in a block voting system for 8 year terms, and there is 3 senators representing each of the states.

José Antonio Cheibub: Yes.

Stephan Kyburz: So I Recently talked about Chile also on my podcast. And there was a huge discussion now when they write a new constitution: what happens to the senate? Should it be abolished? And now they came up with this chamber of regions. So what is the acceptance of the senate in Brazil? And where do you see like problems? What’s your opinion on the Brazilian senate and how it is elected?

José Antonio Cheibub: First of all I should say I don’t really know what the public acceptance of the senate as an institution. My guess is that it is as low as it is of any institution in Brazil, political parties, the congress. This is true in Brazil and it’s true everywhere. I mean the public does not really trust the democratic institutions that are in place. Having said that we can say something about the senate in its structure. So the thing is this, the senate in Brazil is what we refer to as being symmetric and incongruent. It is symmetric because it has the same powers as the chamber of deputies, a little bit like in the US. The only difference is that the chamber of deputies is the only chamber that can receive the projects that were initiated by the executive. And so these projects have to be first evaluated in the chamber, and that includes the decree policies or the decrees issued by the government that gives a slight advantage to the chamber over the senate because in the system of resolution of conflict between the senate and the chamber, the system tends to advantage a little bit the chamber where that initiates the appreciation of a project. So since the chamber can, for example, kill a project that was initiated by the president and the president has no alternative to send it to the senate, so the chamber has a slight advantage. Otherwise the two have the same power, so they are symmetric. But they are incongruent because, as you said, they are acted in very different ways. So the supporters of the representatives and the senators are different. It is block voting every eight years because the way that they renovate is every 4 years, one third of the senate is renovated or two thirds of the senate. So one third is renovated, it’s just first-past-the-post. When it’s two thirds is first-past-the-post but for two seats. So I have to say that of all the institutions that we talk about in democracy, I believe that there are no grounds to decide about institutions in terms of which one is more democratic than the other. I think that they all have justifications you know and pros and cons. But the only institution that I still cannot find a reason or something in favor is the senate. I mean the only thing I know about the senate is that it is a very anti-majoritarian Institution. Even if it is symmetric to the extent that they are incongruent, what the senate does is that it requires that a super majority approves every bill. And I don’t see a reason for that. And so I am not a huge fan of the senate, although during the Bolsonaro government, the senate wasn’t too bad because it kind of served as a break on some of the worst proposals that came from the government. But then again I don’t think the period of Bolsonaro conforms with anything that ever happened in Brazil. It’s not normal politics because you know the institutions are there, and they operated but when you have a president you know with the powers that he has who has such extreme policy preferences and so much disregard for the institutions, things cannot be working as normal politics. So everything changed with the impeachment of Dilma and the ascension of Bolsonaro. Hopefully after this year things are going to go back to normal.

Stephan Kyburz: So you would say that the senate in this period, in this term, was really kind of a break on the presidential powers, which you say the chamber of deputies was not as strong…

José Antonio Cheibub: As a matter of fact, the chamber of deputies was under the first speaker, Cesar Maia, in the first two years of Bolsonaro. I mean one thing that happened after two years of constantly losing in the congress, both in the chamber and in the senate, is that Bolsonaro realized or was made to realize that nobody can govern without the support of the congress unless you are dictator. Perhaps he thought he was and so he didn’t care about it. But then so when he realized that, or was made to realize what he did is that he invested heavily on the election of the speaker of the house and of the senate and so he made a coalition with what in Brazil is called a Centrão which is this group of parties that they’re not really center because they are mostly right wing but they’re called Centrão in the sense to denote the fact that they are about cannibalizing the state. They want to have access to the perks and to the budgets so that they can distribute it to their supporters. And so he made an alliance with that, he was able to make this the speaker of the house and the speaker of the senate and that completely changed the game and he became much more successful in legislative terms than he had been in the first two years. But it wasn’t just the senate, but I think the congress in general was a positive force, not as positive as could have been but it was a positive force in preventing Bolsonaro from doing as much damage as he wanted to do.

Stephan Kyburz: Was there an attempt to take away also powers from the president as an institution or was it more in policy questions that they were breaking him down?

José Antonio Cheibub: I think it was more in policy questions and unless I’m forgetting some episode that happened, which is very possible, my sense is that people do not believe when it comes – I mean we have to distinguish the rhetoric from what really happens right? We all know that. So the rhetoric is that the president is a dictator, he or she is too powerful but I think everybody is more or less satisfied and they understand that in a country as large and complex as Brazil, I mean this is true, I believe, in general but it is particularly true in a country like Brazil that’s diverse, it’s large, complicated. To have an executive that can operate as the leader of the legislative coalition, that will support a policy program. This has been observed under Cardoso, under Lula, under Dilma in her first term and everybody agrees, so everybody who expects to be the government understands that these institutions are not bad and they need to have them to be able to govern. So I don’t think anybody is trying to change that.

Stephan Kyburz: That’s very interesting because my view was always, if you have a balanced congress in terms of political parties and political power, if that is really balanced between the left and the right and the center, you could even have a president with more extreme views like Bolsonaro as long as the president cannot him or herself just rule by decree right? So as long as the president is checked by congress, the system should still essentially work right? And I think this period kind of showed that also.

José Antonio Cheibub: Exactly! This first two years of Bolsonaro showed exactly that, that when possible, I mean like the fact that the president has decree powers, doesn’t mean that the president can do whatever he or she wants to do. Because every single decree has to be approved or rejected by the congress, first by the chamber and then if it’s approved by the chamber has to be approved by the senate and then it’s still subject to amendment in that process and to veto by the president in the very end. So this idea that the president is too strong, I think is more the product of rhetoric than the product of reality. What is important to see is that it is a process, people understand how it happens and so Bolsonaro at some point understood, as Cardoso understood, as Lula understood and Dilma, unfortunately, did not really understand but one small aspect is that you gotta be able to control the levers of the chamber and the senate if you wanted to build a coalition, just like in a prime ministerial system, like in a parliamentary system. So losing the speaker of the house for Dilma, for example, was incredibly consequential. When she was not able to elect somebody who would support her. And Bolsonaro saw that not having an ally in that position was hindering whatever he wanted to do and then he fixed it by investing everything he had, in a terrible way but not in an illegal way or an unconstitutional way, but terrible just because we are against him. But maybe if it were a president I liked I wouldn’t be unhappy about it.

Stephan Kyburz: Right. And he had to find compromise right? So he had to work with the system to get closer to a compromise or a coalition with the speaker.

José Antonio Cheibub: Yeah, and we know that the only reason he (that’s the one event that I’m kind of forgetting) that the only reason he did that is not because he cared about policies but he needed to protect himself against impeachment. And because the impeachment, the initiation of the impeachment is entirely in the hands of the speaker of the house, because there are 60 requests for impeachment sitting in his desk that he does nothing about. So the reason Bolsonaro did it is because he wanted to protect him and his sons. Now the fact that there is somebody in congress… You know the congress is composed of people like those people, who compromise. I mean but the fact is it was a compromise, he couldn’t just force it and tell these people what to do he had to give them something.

Stephan Kyburz: And that’s very important right?

José Antonio Cheibub: Yeah I think that that’s very important. And unfortunately, and this is the thing I think a lot of us political scientists and  people in general, I mean lay people and so on, we have this idea that deep inside would like to have a dictator and we have a hard time accepting that in a democracy things are gonna move slowly. They’re not gonna happen, like between today and tomorrow, and sometimes we’re gonna lose and we have to live with it.

Stephan Kyburz: So the question also of presidentialism versus parliamentarism came up in Brazil’s history as well several times. So there were two referenda actually, first in 1963 when there were two questions about moving back to a monarchy versus a republic and introducing parliamentarism versus presidentialism and then in 1993 again, there was a referendum on introducing parliamentarism which was rejected by quite a large majority.  And then in 1997 actually the reelection possibility for the president was introduced. Does that show you like in terms of  institutions – So the presidency seems to be really an institution that people also support, even though these were… obviously the referendums are long time gone. But is that your view of the presidency as well?

José Antonio Cheibub: I mean I feel like you know in this debate about Presidentialism and Parliamentarism I kind of have a quirky view and I’m very conservative in the sense that what I really believe is that either system can work, but that the status quo is just too strong for it to be changed under democratic conditions. And every time that a system moved, almost every time and first of all, there are very few cases of changes between parliamentarism and presidentialism or vice versa. The few cases that exist happen either because there was an authoritarian interregnum between the two cases like in Kenya or Ghana or Sri Lanka or because there was a fear of a democratic breakdown, that was the case of France that went from parliamentarism to some presidentialism and it was the case of Brazil. In 1961 and this plebiscite in 63 was the compromise that they found to the fact that nobody wanted that system. But that system was the compromise that they found with the military to prevent the military from intervening in politics. So I don’t take that change as you know it wasn’t certainly a programmatic change, to a decision to adopt it. In 1993 it was because the parliamentary group in 1988 in the writing of the constitution of 1988 lost and they found a way to kind of create that one lifeline to see if they were able to change. But the power of inertia is too big for people to want to change. So I personally think that in principle there is nothing wrong with presidentialism as there is nothing wrong with parliamentarism. And there are terrible presidential systems and there are terrible parliamentary systems. I mean just look at Italy in the post-war period, of France in the Fourth Republic or Thailand with multiple coups and so on. Then you have bad presidential systems but you have good. I mean Chile being an example. I was amazed with Chile because if there was one presidential system that was sort of working was Chile and all of a sudden they are talking about moving, changing it and I kind of couldn’t understand it. But they didn’t because nobody does under democratic conditions because the people who have to vote for it are the people who did well under the system that they want to change. I think the 97 constitutional amendment that allowed for one re-election of the president brought the country into the pattern that exists today in the presidential systems. I mean it started with the two term election. So the vast majority of presidential systems today are two round elections in which, by popular elections, in which if the president… No candidate makes more than 50% of the vote, then you have a second round with a top two, in which case one of them necessarily will get more than 50%, unless there is a tie which is super unlikely. Now this became the norm and now with the you know with one re-election. It is not a copy of the US because the US remains the only presidential democracy in the world, the only presidential system in the world that has an indirect election for president and actually it’s probably the worst system for electing presidents. So I don’t see it as a big problem and I would prefer to have no term limit if we could be assured that there would be an oversight body that would be able to prevent excesses for the incumbent, but I don’t think that that is something that can be created in the short run. So I mean I think you know I see it as a good development actually. I don’t see it as a bad development.

Stephan Kyburz: Also to bring stability into the executive right? With the possibility of reelection.

José Antonio Cheibub: What this system became, if you come to think about it, given the onw thing we know is that in common presidents who run they tend to win but they don’t always win. As we just saw in the US right, with Trump. So what the system means in essence is let’s give the president an 8 year mandate, subject to removal in the middle of that mandate, subject to removal by the population

Stephan Kyburz: Okay so like a recall. Like a forced recall after 8 years.

José Antonio Cheibub: Yeah, if you’re not doing a good job in the first four years we’re gonna replace you. But if you’re doing okay, we’re gonna keep you. So I don’t think that this is a bad system. 

Stephan Kyburz: Cool, that’s very interesting. And looking forward to the next election in October, 2nd of October, what are your expectations? It’s always hard to predict but do you see like a movement in the presidency back to more moderate forces?

José Antonio Cheibub: I mean it’s not only hard to predict but it is hard, for me at least, to separate what I want to see happening from what I I think will happen. I mean this is what I think it’s reasonable to say. First of all I think with the impeachment of Dilma, beginning with the Lava Jato and the impeachment of Dilma and what happened during the Temer presidency in which you know, I hate to use this word, but I think there was a grand perception by some sectors of the elite that they had to do something to stop Dilma and to stop the Lava Jato, so they stopped both. So beginning with that and the absolutely unfortunate election of Bolsonaro which was completely out of line in terms of normal politics. I mean I think Bolsonaro was elected by circumstances. One of the prices that the elite had to pay for being able to save its own skin was to vilify the PT. So they polarized. But PT had governed for 12 years and everybody… Nobody is afraid of PT, you know. Lula, I mean they are not going to change the country. They’re not going to create socialism in Brazil, they’re not even trying to do that anymore. So that completely destabilized things and Bolsonaro was just the product of circumstances. So hopefully, what I think is true is that the circumstances are no longer there. So there is a possibility that things are going to come back to normal. It is clear that the contest is going to be between Lula and Bolsonaro but honestly I find it puzzling to see that Bolsonaro does not fall in popularity as in my view he should be falling, which is as much troubling to see that Trump doesn’t fall in popularity. And so I don’t know the stain power of Bolsonaro. So my hope is that you know Lula, to be honest I mean I don’t think Lula has a lot to offer intrinsically anymore. I think he was great when he was first selected but I think his time has passed but the circumstances make him sort of the savior and a lot of people, I believe, will vote for him because they do not see Bolsonaro in any positive way. So I think it’s going to be difficult because it’s not gonna be a certainty. That’s what I see. I think there is a high probability that Lula is going to win but it’s not going to be a sure win and something that you can relax and say: Oh, you know, Bolsonaro is out of here. And if he wins a second term, I think it’s going to be a total disaster for the country in terms of policy. 

Stephan Kyburz: But still the congress would be like checking on him. That’s what happens.

José Antonio Cheibub: Hopefully! But the ways that the parties are changing, I mean there will be a lot of realignment in congress. The one good thing it seems to me is that Bolsonaro and his group, they’re not very good at politics. And so they’re not being very successful at creating a strong party, even up from among the existing parties. So that makes me a little hopeful that this force of the PSL that grew in 2018 because of Bolsonaro, that this is not going to happen. But again I don’t know how much of that is my wishful thinking.

Stephan Kyburz: Thanks a lot for sharing all these thoughts, opinions and analysis. That was really super interesting. 

José Antonio Cheibub: You are very welcome.

Stephan Kyburz: As a last question I’d like to ask you, what would you recommend? Articles… it could be newspaper or could be academic but also books, maybe, that you want to share with the audience.

José Antonio Cheibub: I’m going to make a plug for a book by a friend of mine who is going to be coming out in the end of this year, in Portuguese, by Fernando Limongi and he analyzes the process in very detail, the process that led to Dilma’s impeachment and to Bolsonaro’s election and to Lava Jato and I think he has very interesting things to say and so I recommend that. For a good initiation to Brazilian history since 1930 to about the end of the military regime, there are two books by Thomas Skidmore that I very much like. And I recommend it to all my students who are interested in learning something about Brazil. They’re not perfect, like no book is perfect, but they are very insightful when they are well researcharched. There is a recent handbook of Brazilian politics that was published by Routledge, organized by Barry Ames. This is… the reader will find a sort of summary article on basically every topic related to Brazilian politics. The drawback is that these people have heterogeneous points of view and methodological commitments and theoretical views and so on. So it can be very heterogeneous but I think it is a good starting point because there’ll be citations, then you can start from there and go on. So those are pretty much the true thing I would recommend.

Stephan Kyburz: That’s a very good list. I’m happy to include those in the show notes. 

José Antonio Cheibub: Okay, alright. 

Stephan Kyburz: José Antonio thanks a lot for taking the time for this conversation. It has been very insightful. I’ve learned a lot about Brazil. We haven’t talked about federalism more in detail, that would be a maybe another conversation. But I think for now we leave it at that.

José Antonio Cheibub: Yeah, there is a lot to be talked about. Well thank you very much for inviting me. I enjoyed it a lot.

Stephan Kyburz: Me too. Thanks a lot for taking the time. 

José Antonio Cheibub: Thank you.