Why Don’t Autocrats Always Succeed in Weakening Democracy? Brazil in Comparative Perspective

Name: Why Don’t Autocrats Always Succeed in Weakening Democracy? Brazil in Comparative Perspective
Start: 2025-03-11T12:00:00-05:00
Location: Benson Latin American Collection

Schedule

Tue, 11 Mar, 2025 at 12:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Benson Latin American Collection | Austin, TX

The LLILAS Brazil Center presents the Brazil Center Keynote Address
March 11 | 12:00pm | Benson Collection 2nd floor
See map: https://bit.ly/3fbUHh5
"Why Don’t Autocrats Always Succeed in Weakening Democracy? Brazil in Comparative Perspective"
Carlos Pereira, Fundaçåo Getúlio Vargas

For many scholars and pundits, Brazil was seen as a prime example of the risk of democratic breakdown following the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right populist with an autocratic profile, in 2018. Contrary to pessimistic expectations, however, Brazilian democracy has not only survived, but politics has largely returned to business as usual. What explains this supposedly unanticipated outcome?
The literature on democratic backsliding offers divergent views on the extent of the phenomenon and the degree of democracies' vulnerability. In this LLILAS Brazil Center keynote, Carlos Pereira proposes that, to assess the state of democracy and its capacity to resist backsliding, it is crucial to distinguish conceptually and empirically between autocratic rhetoric and autocratic attempts, on the one hand, and democratic erosion and breakdown, on the other. Based on these distinctions, Pereira argues that democratic resistance to backsliding depends on specific institutional configurations, political conditions, and events, including legacies of judicial independence and the rule of law, plural inter-party competition, divisions within the incumbent party or coalition, and social protest.
Carlos Pereira is full professor in the School of Economics of São Paulo at the Fundação Getúlio Vargas (Getúlio Vargas Foundation, EESP/FGV). He was the Edward Larocque Tinker Visiting Professor at Stanford University in 2016 (Estágio Sênior CAPES); a Visiting Scholar at the Hertie School of Governance, Berlin; and a Research Fellow at Oxford University. He was also a Visiting Fellow in the Foreign Policy, Global Economy, and Development programs within the Latin American Initiative at the Brookings Institution, Washington, DC; and a Resident Fellow at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation, Italy. Additionally, he has held positions as assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University, and visiting professor in the Department of Economics at the University of São Paulo (USP) and at Colby College in Maine. He served as an associate researcher in the Department of Social Sciences at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation.
Free and open to the public.