Women Facing Brazilian Institutions

Full Transcript:

Introduction: 

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

Women in Brazil have consistently been underrepresented in politics. What are the reasons for this lack of women’s political power in this vast democracy? How do formal and informal institutions hinder fair representation of women? How could the political system be changed to reflect the true interest and character of Brazilian society?

With Larissa Peixoto Gomes I discuss Brazilian democratic institutions from a feminist perspective. Based on her research and personal experiences, she shares with us the difficulties that women in politics face and how institutions and conditions make it hard for them to win political office. We review the Brazilian open-list proportional representation electoral system and the federal structure. Larissa has a pointed opinion about how institutions should be changed to make the political system work for all citizens and all government levels. And she explains why money has such a significant influence on political power.

Larissa Peixoto Gomes is a researcher at the Wales Governance Centre of Cardiff University. She received her PhD in Political Science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. In her PhD thesis she compared the substantive representation of women in Brazil, the United Kingdom, and Sweden. Her research is focused on political institutions, political representation, elections, gender, and ethnic minorities. She regularly contributes to the public discussion of democratic institutions and women in politics. So for anyone interested in the latest developments in Brazilian politics, she is definitely a great resource, and I link to her website and Twitter in the show notes.

I am your host, Stephan Kyburz, and this is the thirty-third 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 please send me an email to [email protected]. A great way to support my podcast is to leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. So if you want to do me a favor please rate the podcast and your favored platform. If you find my discussions interesting and you’d like to support my work, consider buying me a coffee at buymeacoffee.com and you find the link to it on my website rulesofthegame.blog. 

Please enjoy this wide ranging conversation with Larissa Peixoto Gomes. 

Discussion:

Stephan Kyburz: Larissa Peixoto Gomes, welcome to the rules of the game podcast. I’m very happy to have you on the show. 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Thank you for having me. It’s great being here.

Stephan Kyburz: So what is your first memory of democracy?

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: I was thinking about this and I guess my first memory would be going to vote with my parents. And Brazil has electronic voting but when I was little it was still paper ballots. So I think I remember my dad letting me check off the box for him, which was really exciting. But I know that my mom went to protests when she was pregnant with me, so…  My parents are very engaged.

Stephan Kyburz: You had these political vibes, the political life from very early on. 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Yeah, my dad is involved in unions and has been his entire career and my mother worked in a major newspaper until I was 15 years old. They are both journalists. So politics was common around the house.

Stephan Kyburz: So that determined also your research career in some sense? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: A little bit. I was forbidden to go into journalism. So I guess I chose the next best thing since I wasn’t allowed something else. I was like, okay, what can I do that is still in something that I’m interested in? And that kind of decided, I went into social sciences and from there a love of research was born. 

Stephan Kyburz: So was it a worry that it would be too dangerous to go into journalism or what was the reasoning behind that? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: No, they were mostly concerned with a career that is… There are too many people graduating in journalism in Brazil. So the market had too many professionals and not enough vacancies. So they were worried about my financial stability, mostly. So they were actually not that happy that I went into social sciences and not law or medicine. 

Stephan Kyburz: The more secure path I would say.

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Exactly.

Stephan Kyburz: The election of president Lula must have been a great relief for your family then?

Larissa Peixoto Gomes:  Yes, we’re all very active and we’re all extremely relieved when he won. We were all messaging each other. I went to Brazil to vote so I planned my annual leave, my holidays so that I could go home to vote for the first round of elections. So that I could also vote for legislative elections. Because when you were a Brazilian abroad you can only vote for president. So I wanted to vote also for every other office. So I voted and left Brazil on the same day. So I was in the airplane texting my sister because that’s what the airline would allow for free. Just asking for numbers. Please give me more numbers. Tell me what’s happening because I can’t access the superior electoral courts app. I need to know. So right now we’re all very relieved at the result. 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, I think it’s a relief in terms of democratic institutions and democracy in Brazil, right? Because there were these worries, threats and today I’d like to discuss with you some of these democratic institutions from a feminist perspective or looking at political power of women in Brazil. And you have done a lot of research on that. So, my first question, which is a very pointed question, is if you could change one institution, one democratic institution in Brazil, what would that be? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: That’s so difficult. But I think I would change the open list system. I think there are several tweaks that we could do in the electoral system. One of them would be the open list and another would be the number of vacancies that we have. So that’s not usually mentioned. When Brazil instituted candidate quotas for women, so gender candidate quotas, it also increased the number of vacancies. It increased the number of candidates allowed per seat by 50%, which watered down the number of quotas. So essentially you had before, what would have been 70% to 30% but then you increased that number by 50%. So you no longer have that 70/30 ratio. You’re going to have a 30% ratio to 70 + 50. So you have a situation where women are underfunded in a context of a sea, what I described of a sea of candidacies. So they’re just drowning. In male candidacies where they are just not seen and they don’t have the money to be seen. So right now there are no more corporate donations to Brazilian campaigns, which is a step in the right direction. But we still have private donations that are a percentage of an individual’s income, a percentage of their annual income. So if a banker wants to donate 10% of their annual income and I want to donate 10% of my annual income, those are very different types of influences. So most countries would create a nominal amount. So a person can donate up to let’s say R$1000 or $1,000. But we still have that sort of inequality. And we do have inequality in how that pot of money is distributed. And we have inequality on how parties decide to distribute that money. But when you have a decided amount of money that goes to everyone, that’s already a step in the right direction. But when you have clear rules on how that money is distributed, that is already a step in the right direction. When you have a more clear direction in we are trying to make this more egalitarian, then that’s a step in the right direction. So when quotas were created and the number of candidacies were increased, that was a distinct statement in – we are actually doing this – so that we can say we have quotas, but they don’t actually have to mean anything. And that happens a lot in Brazilian legislation. 

Stephan Kyburz: You touched already on so many different aspects. So I have many questions following up.

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: You asked for one institution, I chose the electoral system. 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, Yeah, Yeah. So when you say you would change the open list system, so does that mean you would prefer a closed list system? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Yes, but with obviously gender parity. And I would also think Brazil should consider reserve seats for indigenous peoples. 

Stephan Kyburz: Maybe we can touch on that later again. Just so that the audience really understands what a Brazilian ballot looks like. So people vote for one person from one party, right? They choose, like, one candidate?

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Yeah. People can vote for a party, you can just vote for one party and give your vote to that party. But that means your vote is getting counted just for how many seats that party is going to get. It doesn’t get counted for an individual to get that seat. When you vote for an individual, your vote is counted essentially twice. It’s counted in how many seats the party is going to get in the proportional apportionment and it’s counted in who is getting that seat. And Brazil has… it has a threshold. So a candidate needs to meet a minimum threshold of votes to get that seat. So if you’re giving your vote just to the party, that means the person you’re more interested in to have that seat will not necessarily get it. So one thing that usually happens in election years is that I get messages from family members and friends asking who are you voting for. So I can, you know, choose my candidates based on… Off of your choice. And I give people suggestions. I never tell them exactly who to vote for. I give them like I’m voting for this person, but there’s also this and this and this. But I always tell them, vote for an individual person because otherwise you are giving away a vote because your vote gets to be counted twice if you vote for a person.

Stephan Kyburz: Just to compare that with… Actually in Switzerland, I always compare it to Switzerland. In Switzerland, we also have an open list system, but it’s a bit a different version. So the parties, they present a list, you know, of candidates and they present as many names as there are seats in one constituency. You know, if a canton has 20 seats – a Canton is like a state – the party will present 20 names and then the people can actually tweak the list. So they can, if they don’t like a person, they can kind of cross it out. If there is like a thing called “panaché” so you can also include names from other lists and you can also duplicate candidates. So there is a list system but you can change it. And I think even though they’re both called open list, there are different types of open lists. And so we see really how those things actually matter, right? For how much power or how much influence has the party on how many women are elected versus in Brazil, it’s really more an individualistic candidate centered open list system, right?

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: And how the party affects that list is through finance, is through giving a candidate money for their campaign. So the idea is that each individual will campaign on their own in their own area. The problem with creating a list in Brazil that a voter can switch up, that they can, you know, manipulate is that my state alone of Minas Gerais, which is one of the biggest electoral districts in Brazil. We have 54 Federal Deputies and 77 State Deputies And Brazil has about 35 parties. So imagine the effort even just the computer effort in counting that if you have something that is manipulated by voters. So we used to have just, you know, parties present as many candidates as there are seats. Obviously. Now they get to present 150%. When we used to have coalitions, we don’t have those anymore, it was 200%. So they could present double the number of seats. Now, legislative coalitions are gone. And it’s a good thing because people would vote for someone and that vote was counting for as many parties as they were in that coalition. And that was problematic because you didn’t really know who your vote was going for. 

Stephan Kyburz: So that rule was abolished in 2017, right? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Yeah.

Stephan Kyburz: Which even led to more fragmentation and to more power to candidates that are joining a coalition or a party coalition, right? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Yeah. The problem with the end of the coalition is that now, parties have a bigger interest in having candidates for executive office. So instead of joining a federation, they are doing it for themselves and then they will consider in a runoff creating an alliance with another party. And that’s really what’s problematic. But once a rule is extinguished or created, you can’t really know its effect within several elections. You can’t go – oh, but in 2018 something happened – And that means that that rule didn’t work or ending that rule didn’t work. You’ve got to wait to see what happens. I think, ultimately, given that people weren’t aware of how their vote was really counting. It’s a good thing that legislative coalitions are no longer happening. But I think there needs to be more incentive for these federations, for these party federations to be created. So less incentive for parties to have executive candidates.

Stephan Kyburz: In Brazil, women got the right to vote already in 1932. So it’s already quite a while. Obviously you had periods of dictatorship in between. But then a gender quota was established in 1995. And then by 1997, as I know, you can correct me if I’m wrong, there was a 20% rule, so that parties have to present 20% of the candidates must be women. And then in 2009 it was increased to 30%. Now, even though those rules, there is still the percentage of MPs, of women in parliament was still around 10%. Now it’s at 17.7%, I think? So you really blame that specific open list system on that low percentage. But I mean, there’s probably many reasons, but that is one reason? Because parties cannot push or they don’t have an incentive to push women candidacies higher up in the priorities, right? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Yeah. So of course, there are other reasons. So it’s that additional 50%. It’s the open list system and it’s the financing. So women don’t have the networks within parties and outside of parties to get their candidacies financed. And it’s still very much an “old boys club”. So when we talk about when women got the vote in 1932, It sounds like all women started voting in 1932, and it’s not true. That actually came gradually. So it was some women got the vote in 1932, then a few more in 1934, and then it increased a little bit more in 1946. And then the mandatory vote became something that it’s also measurable how important women’s vote was seen in Brazilian society because civil servants, male civil servants had to vote, but women civil servants were not obligated to vote. So then women civil servants were also obligated to vote, but then all men were obligated to vote and not women. So you see women always doing this catching up when it comes to Brazilian politics. So this catching up is still happening. But when you have this incredibly wide field of voters and candidacies and parties and not enough money to go around to everyone, to have that visibility that sufficient visibility it becomes harder to claw your way to the top. So when you look at the money that women need to win an election, they usually need more money to get less votes than men in Brazil. 

Stephan Kyburz: So that’s what you showed in your research, right? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Yeah. 

Stephan Kyburz: The money is so important because candidates need that visibility? Because there is as you say a sea of candidates. So there’s so many that people can’t even grasp who is who essentially and the money really plays a role? In what sense? Money makes people have more ads in the public, it helps them to have TV time? I’m not sure but I think that’s also regulated, right? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Yeah so the TV time you have… The regulated public TV time, so you have two hours a day that politicians don’t have to pay for. So candidates don’t have to pay tv stations for that time. And that time is also divided by parties. So each party will have a designated proportional amount of time for that hour, and it is decided internally and we don’t really know each party has their own rules, how that division takes place. So it’s really interesting to see how ads are made, it’s really interesting to see how they… Who speaks, who has more time. For instance, there was a federal deputy candidate. She won. So I’m sure you’ve heard of judge Sergio Mouro who was the very biased judge against president Lula. And he ran for Senate and he won. His wife ran for federal deputy. The ad was simply him saying this is my wife Rosangela Mouro, vote for her. She didn’t say a word. So watching Brazilian campaign ads is really interesting. But if you have extra money you can do additional ads. You can have more flyers. Because if you are in a party and you don’t necessarily agree with their alliances… I interviewed a state deputy once and she said – well, I didn’t agree with the alliance that the party made and so they didn’t give me any flyers and I don’t have money to make my own. So if you have additional funds, you can make your own flyers. You have more time to go around to talk to people. You have cars. So when you look at the breakdown, because all Brazilian candidates have to declare their expenses and they have to declare according to categories. So you have categories relating to social media, crowdfunding. So every single expense. So even the crowdfunding and their fees to crowdfunding websites have to be declared. So if you can’t afford a crowdfunding website fee, you can’t even crowd fund.

Stephan Kyburz: So it’s really like hurdles of entry even to do campaigning, right? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Exactly. 

Stephan Kyburz: When you say you would prefer a closed list proportional representation system, your hope would be that if parties have more say over the list, the kind of ranking or how they position women on those lists, you would think that there is a push or more pressure on parties to put women higher on the ballots? Is that how you think it would work? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: No, I don’t see it as giving parties more power because right now parties do have all the power because they hold the purse strings. If you have a closed list system, and this is what research into closed lists with gender quota shows in Sweden, in Argentina, in any other country that has a zipper system or 30% quota shows… Sorry,  a zipper system is one man/ one woman. What it shows is that you create a clear rule that affiliates can go and say this is the rule, you now have to follow it. So right now there are no rules within parties that define how money gets spent and how money gets divided. So parties have all the power. Once you create a rule of how parties have to present their candidates, you are creating clear transparent rules that require democratic processes that are internalized. So that is what most women within parties are demanding. At least in left wing parties in Brazil, not necessarily in right wing parties. So what would happen is you have clear transparent rules of how candidates have to be presented. You’d still have a problem with who gets presented at the top, obviously. But then all of that campaign funding goes to the list. It is not to an individual person. So I understand that there’s an issue about freedom to choose an individual person and there are… I would say electoral systems are like fingerprints, each country has their own and I’m sure we would find a way around it, around giving people a voice around the closed list. But the closed list system is in itself a way to give back control to lower ranking party members and not the party at the top.

Stephan Kyburz:  It would just by definition, by construction, right, it would lead to more women being elected. So you say you compared in your research also, you know, the Brazilian situation to Sweden for example. And in Sweden, how did they get to such high numbers of women in parliament? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: In Sweden it was a contagion effect. So there aren’t mandatory quotas in Sweden. In the social democrats, the women instituted, they demanded a zipper system. They said they would all leave the party if a zipper system wasn’t instituted. And they meant it. So that was defined within the social democrats, which was until I finished my PhD the largest party in Sweden. Right now, Sweden has taken a turn to the right. But that kind of created a contagion effect to other parties. So other left wing parties followed suit, moderate parties created smaller quotas and right wing parties say they have their own means, they have their own things. But Sweden already had more gender equal culture which they’ve created since medieval times, even. You go to the Medieval museum in Stockholm and you have like no gender roles among their action, their activities. So it was a different kind of society. So part of my research, my PhD research, was looking at that cultural aspect between Brazil, the U.K. and Sweden and what allows and enables women’s substantive representation in each of these countries. Because that aspect is a reality. You can’t compare countries and say if I create this rule here, it has to work there the same way. It doesn’t work that way. You have to account for the country’s idiosyncrasies.

Stephan Kyburz: Context always matters of course. But also sometimes I think some rules even work in different contexts really, really well and really similar. But in this case I think culture, history, everything plays a huge role. Patriarchic society, how strong this is, how soon it has been changing. And I think looking at, you know, medieval roles in society would be another interesting conversation. 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Exactly. And Brazil is a country of imported rules. So it is a colonial country. So everything is imported. So the idea that you can just bring a rule there and expect it to work the same way and even compare open list of Brazil to other country’s open list, no other country that uses open lists has 211 million people. So it’s just not comparable. 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, exactly. And one other thing you actually mentioned is you would lower the district magnitude. So the size of the constituencies, is that right?

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: I would lower the number of vacancies, not necessarily the number of seats. Right now culturally, it would be really hard to argue for a state legislature to be any less than the state itself, which is what it is. Technically a candidate can campaign throughout the state, in the entire state. Now they don’t because they can’t afford to and they’re usually tied to a local context. So in my state for instance, you’re going to have a state deputy that is more tied to the north of the state. And they say, you know, you’re going to have a state from this area, from this town, from this region. But to argue for multi member districts that would divide the state, I think that would bring about some gerrymandering and that would be more dangerous. So I think at this point in time it would be best to just maintain the states as the district and just lower the number of vacancies back to 100%. 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah, I think it makes sense. And also I think changing the district size and everything would be very, very complicated and potentially problematic. Just quickly in Switzerland, I think the social pressure on parties to have more women candidates increased a lot in the recent time and now, even though we don’t have a quota, parties are pressured to pledge a certain percentage of candidates, women candidates to put on their lists. Some parties really pledge like 50%. Others, you know, are a bit more vague and so on. But the social pressure actually increased a lot. I think it has worked like civil society has been very active. 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: I think that’s really important. And I think that’s why we had a 3% increase right now. Despite all the hurdles, we were able to have a 3% increase in women in the chamber of deputies because of this. Because more women are campaigning and are doing grassroots campaigns and a lot of people are demanding more women in office. But in a country the size of Brazil that gets watered down, that is dispersed. So you’re campaigning in states that have 23 million people, 20 million, 15 million. So it’s just a lot of people that have to do that pressure and each person is going to have a different priority. So that pressure gets dispersed. So a 3% increase without any rule change was actually pretty good. And I’m pretty happy with it. 

Stephan Kyburz: The 3% are, again?

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: In federal deputies.

Stephan Kyburz: Okay. So looking more at the federal structure. So Brazil has 26 states and the capital Brasilia. And then there is local government level. How do you see how federalism effects the political power of women? And do you see the same problems emerging at the local level, as we see at the national level?

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: I think in practice, Brazil has four levels. I divided in federal level, state level, large cities and small cities. When you’re looking at electoral dynamics in Brazil, the large cities behave a little bit more like states than they do like small towns. And large cities are the ones that have run off elections. So that’s how I categorize it in my research. So, those are with 200,000 voters or more. And right now there are 96 cities. It’s been increasing. So there’s been small increases every election with a number of cities that are part of this category. And you can see that the number of mayors in these cities and in small towns and the gender imbalance there is very clear. Women don’t get elected to large towns, but they get elected to small towns because large towns, large cities are a stepping stone. Their stepping stone to being a federal deputy or a state deputy or governor or senator depending on the size of your town. If you’re a capital, then it’s definitely a stepping stone. Small towns, no. You are attending to local problems. You are attending to really grassroots issues, day to day problems. You are a caretaker and caretaking is a women’s issue. Still. 

Stephan Kyburz: Just one question about the majoritarian election. So that is for city councils or for the city executive? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Yeah. So Brazil has executive and legislative, right? So it has majoritarian elections for all of its executive, which is 50% + 1. And it has proportional elections for all its legislative. And senate is a pluralist election. So for mayor, it’s an executive election and then for city councilor, it’s a legislative, it’s a proportional election. And all of these numbers, the proportionality is defined in the constitution and it’s actually really hard to find how the proportionality was defined. And it’s somehow, somewhere, someone decided that it should be 300,000 people to one representative. So that is the initial proportionality rule of Brazil that I could not find a piece of legislation for. That is just the basic rule. And that’s how every other proportionality is defined. That’s how you get 50 for 23 million people in Minas Gerais and then 77 for the same 23 million people. And then you get 41 city councilors for the capital of Belo Horizonte. Because it’s 300,000 to 1. I don’t know where that comes from. I have no idea. 

Stephan Kyburz: Okay. And also population numbers changed a lot, I guess.

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Population numbers change over time and it still remains the same. I don’t know why. But what happens in small towns is you have women just staying put, they become city councilors, they become mayors and then they don’t leave in part not only because that role is not a stepping stone, but because if they use it as a stepping stone, if they move on, they have to move. They have to spend the majority of their time in the capital of that state or in Brasilia, which for women is still really hard to do. So when you look at civil status for women politicians, they are either single or they’re divorced. And when you look at the civil status for male politicians, they’re married.

Stephan Kyburz: As you say, the big towns, they are a stepping stone for politicians to actually become politicians at federal level, to become MPs. So that political career still favors men a lot, right? Because they probably take less care of the family, whatever, they have higher incomes, etc, etc. Right? So all these things make it much more likely for a political career to be feasible even for men, right? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: They are more likely to have the connections. They are more likely to be the inheritor of the family connections. So a lot of people in Brazil will criticize women politicians who have family connections and not criticize men who have family connections into politics. Even though family connections into politics is important for everyone, not just in Brazil, but the world over. And one really telling example is former presidential candidate Aecio Neves who has a sister who actually runs the entire family, runs Aecio Neves entire image and political life and is known that, I actually have heard firsthand, to call newspapers in the state of Minas Gerais to say you need to fire that reporter because that article was negative about us and a reporter gets fired. But she was never the inheritor of the family’s political tradition. Their grandfather was elected president as the first president after the military dictatorship. Tancredo Neves, he died before taking office. So Aecio Neves was built up as, of course he is going to be president someday and it was never her. That was never a question. It was never going to be her. And that happens a lot in Brazilian politics. 

Stephan Kyburz: The women who actually do this political careers, right? So more on the right side of the political spectrum, they don’t necessarily represent the average woman, they are also more representing the wealthy part of the population?

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Right wing women are increasing in politics. And I was actually doing my research at the chamber of deputies when the new intake was received. So there were a lot of Bolsonaro supporters there and a lot of them actually met this very stereotypical appearance. They all had similar haircuts, similar outfits and they all had a similar speech, a similar rhetoric of I have this many kids and I am married to a wonderful man who is very supportive of this. So their representation of what they want to represent, they tend to be it and not be it. So they are married, they have kids, but also the traditional role of housewife and not working they’re not doing that because they’re there and they’re doing politics and they’re doing something that they normally would say a man would do. 

Stephan Kyburz: But it’s only possible because they are very affluent, right? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Yes. Or because the party invested in them heavily so they would win women’s votes. 

Stephan Kyburz: Okay. Again, going to the local level and the town level, those things are quite hard to change, right? This will take time until women have the same opportunities in the labor market, are more on par with men, right? In society. 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes:  Well, this is why I defend some radical rule changes. This is why I believe some radical rule changes are necessary. It’s a historical debt. So if we haven’t been able to fix this through cultural changes, then we have to fix it in another way. What do we have to do to enable women to have equality of opportunity that would create an equality of result. So right now the equality of opportunity isn’t there? Because we don’t have random results. We know exactly what will happen at every election. We know how many women will get elected. We know how many black people will get elected. We know that indigenous people will not get elected. So what do we have to do to make sure that this changes? And it’s changing rules. It’s making different rules that enable these changes because we want to see a different Brazil and we want to see a different world. So I’m very for making these radical changes that would enable this. But of course when you talk about electoral system change, it’s also very scary because there are people who will suggest changes that go radically towards the other end of the spectrum. You start to… No, never mind, just leave it the way it is, it’s fine, it’s fine. So it’s a very scary thing to bring up and to talk about. 

Stephan Kyburz: I think many of the rules you have in mind were more or less implemented in the new constitution in Chile, right? But it was rejected in the end. So these rules are quite hard to convince a large part of society, as well, to be implemented, right? 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Yeah. And this is because a lot of people believe that they will lose their place and they will lose their power. So this is pure backlash. If somebody else is getting it that means I am not or I am less likely to. So if you create a seat reserve for indigenous people, the estimation is that in the area there is now Brazil is that there were about 8-10 million indigenous people before the arrival of the Portuguese. There are 800,000 now. To argue that they don’t deserve their own representation is insane. But to say that – oh they have the same opportunity as anyone to have representation right now – they don’t. Because they’re way less likely to have the funds. So the thing is you’d say in any other country to be selected to be a candidate. In Brazil, no. Parties are like, come in, be a candidate for us because any vote for the party counts for the party. But they will not select them for money. So come in, be a candidate. We will not support your candidacy because we don’t actually think you would win. And we’ve already tapped this more senior person who’s been in politics for 30, 35 years, a white guy to win. So he is the one, he is our guy. I interviewed this woman for my master’s dissertation and she said, well I’m changing parties now. Why are you changing parties? Oh because I almost won without any support from my party and I could have won if I had some. Why didn’t your party support you? Because they decided it was that woman’s turn to win. She was the one that was going to win, not me. But they could have had two women. They could have been the only party in the state legislature with two women. So once a party decides this is the winner, then that other person is hanging out to dry. Indigenous people in Brazil are in various areas. You have them in the south, in the southeast, in the north. If you create a seat reserve then they are given a chance to be united. How do you argue that too? The other people who will lose 10-15% of their seats. 

Stephan Kyburz: Yeah. Exactly. And especially because the people in power are the ones who can change the rules of elections and that’s very hard to bring about. 

Stephan Kyburz: So if you could recommend some books or articles to the audience, either related to what we were talking about or more generally, that would be great.

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: One thing that is missing a lot in the discussion of democracy right now and in the discussion of electoral systems and how rules are changed is a discussion about power. And we’re talking about proportionality and we’re talking about representation without discussing power and privilege. And that kind of makes the discussion pointless because we are changing these rules to make representation more diverse and to create more representation for people and to make that house truly a house of the people. So I became a political scientist not just for the science aspect of it but for the political aspect of it. I truly believe the things I’m saying. And if the research told me that it had to be something else, I would be going for something else. But the research tells me you need to understand who are these people and you need to understand different perspectives and you need to understand that sometimes people will have to lose power for other people to have power. So I made a list that includes Brazilian and other literature that talks about coloniality, that talks about imperiality, that talks about power and how do we combine these discussions into understanding democracy. That democracy is more than just saying in 1932 women got the vote. Did they? How did they get the vote? There’s a lot of people who still say that between 1889 and 1930 there was a democracy in Brazil, the Old Republic. That wasn’t a democracy. At best oligarchy. That was a bunch of old white men deciding who was going to be the next ruler of Brazil and pretending in a full election, where only rich people voted and the poor people, the rich people allowed to vote. There barely was secrecy of voting. So I think we need to be more critical of these periods that we call democratic and see if they really were. 1946 to 1964  how democratic was that? So I have a lot of these kinds of discussions. I think “Space invaders, race, gender and bodies out of place” by Nirmal Puwar is definitely something to be read. Aníbal Quijano about coloniality and decoloniality, incredibly important reading. Anything by Heleieth Saffioti which is an incredibly important Brazilian sociologist. A lot of discussions from Eline Severs and Karen Celis and Silvia Erzeel, they’ve been doing a lot of research together. That’s really important. Also Sarah Child, Spivak, Butler, Foucault, these are obvious but they should be said anyway. Catherine Walsh and Walter Mignolo. All of these are really important readings and I myself for all of this that I’ve mentioned, I have a book chapter with a colleague, it’s in Portuguese, about the enfranchisement. It’s the electoral systems of Brazil through a lens of enfranchisement and I think it gives a different perspective of the Brazilian electoral system that other political scientists might not have done. But it is in Portuguese so it’s a little harder to access. 

Stephan Kyburz: I’ll put it on the list anyway and thanks a lot for all these recommendations. I’ll put them in the show notes for everyone to follow up with reading and it sounds fascinating. And actually I totally agree that we should talk more about power. Obviously my podcast is on democratic institutions, but I see this in a more political economy way. And obviously there are historic aspects to it. There are sociological aspects to it. And power actually, I think political scientists also and political economists as well should talk about power even though obviously it’s hard to grasp. But I think that discussion is really important.

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Power being hard to grasp is why we need to study these philosophers and sociologists like Foucault, Burgess, Spivak, Butler because we can bring this into the discussion with a different understanding. I see political science as a study of power and practice. We are studying power in its element.

Stephan Kyburz: Of course, democratic institutions that not only involves the formal institutions, even though I mostly talk about formal institutions, but of course also informal institutions and institutions in society like religion and education, etc. These are all very important aspects. Thanks a lot Larissa for joining the discussion on the Rules of the Game podcast. I really enjoyed it. It gave me a great different viewpoint on Brazilian politics and I think I learned a lot also reading some of your work. 

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: Thank you. 

Stephan Kyburz: Hopefully we can have a follow up discussion at some later point.

Larissa Peixoto Gomes: That would be great. That would be my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. 

Stephan Kyburz: Thank you.