{"id":1126,"date":"2016-03-31T15:09:07","date_gmt":"2016-03-31T15:09:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.observingbrazil.com\/?p=1126"},"modified":"2019-09-09T01:18:51","modified_gmt":"2019-09-09T01:18:51","slug":"mensalao-car-wash-party-system-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregmichener.com\/blog\/mensalao-car-wash-party-system-stupid\/","title":{"rendered":"Mensal\u00e3o + Car Wash = It’s the Party System, Stupid."},"content":{"rendered":"

It is safe to say that the problem with Brazil\u2019s government is not its\u00a0choice of coalition partners, but rather the lack of choice. Faced with a governing coalition in disintegration, Rousseff has given larger pieces of the state pie to several of Brazil\u2019s many rent-seeking parties. One of them, the Partido Progresista<\/em> (PP), has been accused of receiving R$358 million (US$100 million) in illegal party finance, bribes, and kickbacks in association with Petrobras and the Car Wash Scandal. Grim \u00a0details about the scandalous exploits of Brazil\u2019s parties aside, the issue is how Brazilians should be looking beyond the current crisis to reform the\u00a0atrocious electoral and party systems.<\/p>\n

Brazil\u2019s party system is an international pariah.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A clattering abomination. As the saying goes, \u2018you don\u2019t do politics in Brazil\u2019s Congress, you do business\u2019. The giant Mensal\u00e3o<\/em> Scandal proved this in 2005, and the Car Wash\u00a0is proving it again, only a decade later. This time, virtually all parties are implicated – not just the coalition.<\/p>\n

How ridiculous is Brazil\u2019s Congressional party landscape?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Take Michael Gallagher\u2019s country-by-country summary<\/a> of party system size (effective number of parties) around the world over the last decades. Without getting into the mathematics of calculating effective number of parties, Brazil tops the globe with 14 effective parties at the electoral level (Eff Nv 2014).* In a distant second place is Indonesia, with nearly 9 effective parties \u2013 more than one-third fewer than Brazil. No country in Europe exceeds 8, and most are closer to 3-4.<\/p>\n

In short, Brazil is not an outlier, it\u2019s a freak.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But no one in Brazil is telling it like it is. In effect, many Brazilian political scientists have spread the myth of Brazilian exceptionalism \u2013 \u201cParliamentary Presidentialism\u201d. Well, just like American myths of political exceptionalism, these myths are in need of a reality check and concomitant political reform.<\/p>\n

A party system with over thirty parties represented in Congress poses serious problems for promoting credible public policy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps most egregiously, it is easy for large private interests to capture representatives through political finance or coercive tactics (e.g. construction companies \u2013 Lava Jato). It is also easy for large economic interests \u2013 such as Globo \u2013 to divide an already divided party landscape and conquer. In procedural and policy terms, an extremely fragmented congress means that critical public interest reforms are difficult to pass. This explains why Brazil\u2019s broadcasting law has remained relatively untouched since 1968. It also explains the failure of real pension reform and giant regulatory failures. As these two articles from the Associated Press<\/a> and Reuter<\/a>\u2019s demonstrate, both the Brazilian media and Congress have failed to protect Brazilians from dangerous cars and exposure to pesticides that were banned twenty years ago in developed countries.<\/p>\n

Political Recruitment Dilemma<\/h4>\n

With the current political system breaking down, now is the time to think about reform. Unfortunately, this job will be left mainly to citizens; legislators have few incentives to change the status quo. In effect, before real change can take place, Brazil needs to get over its political recruitment problem (\u201cpolitics is for the corrupt, therefore only the corrupt go into politics\u201d) and get better people to Congress.<\/p>\n

*Algeria’s 2012 election did see a higher number of effective parties than Brazil, but I totally ignore this case, as the country has had the same President since 1999.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is safe to say that the problem with Brazil\u2019s government is not its\u00a0choice of coalition partners, but rather the lack of choice. Faced with a governing coalition in disintegration, Rousseff has given larger pieces of the state pie to several of Brazil\u2019s many rent-seeking parties. One of them, the Partido Progresista (PP), has been Read more about Mensal\u00e3o + Car Wash = It’s the Party System, Stupid.<\/span>[…]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1130,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregmichener.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregmichener.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregmichener.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregmichener.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregmichener.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1126"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregmichener.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1614,"href":"https:\/\/gregmichener.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1126\/revisions\/1614"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregmichener.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1130"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregmichener.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregmichener.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregmichener.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}