Mixing Up the Crisis of Democracy with the Crisis of a Certain Theory of Democracy

Despite taking into account the devastating effects of the world economic crisis that erupted in 2008, albeit using a nuanced argument and even recognizing the erosion of the party systems that would have remained according to him without substantive changes since the end of World War II, Adam Przeworski formulates a diagnosis according to which we would be faced with an alternative which is not one. As he writes:

In other words, if it is “just a routine party realignment”, the base theoretical model will work again, albeit with the problem of having to deal with the “rise of xenophobic parties”. If what is underway is not such a realignment, it will be democracy as such that will have collapsed. Such reasoning depends entirely on an underlying premise relating to “the inherent limits imposed on individuals by the requirements of living together in peace”. It is a premise established a priori by the theory itself, in that what the author identifies as the “sources of dissatisfaction with representative democracy are just due to the inherent limits imposed on individuals by the requirements of living together in peace. Democracy may still be, and I believe it is, the least bad way of organizing our lives as a collectivity, but any political arrangements face limits as to what they can achieve” (Reference PrzeworskiPrzeworski 2019: 198–199).

This shows just how and to what extent the current crisis made explicit the tacit normativity of theories of democracy with otherwise purely descriptive intents. This is also what may be exemplarily seen in another reference book on the crisis of democracy, the one by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018), in that, for instance, they implicitly condemn the institution of binding primaries for the choice of candidacies in the United States, starting in 1972. After showing how the binding mechanism for choosing candidacies weakened the party leaders, the authors also showed that the power of these leaders was somehow reestablished through new types of informal control, such as the previous decision on the candidacy that would become consecrated in the primary (the ‘invisible primary’), the control of the direction of the parties over the primary processes themselves and, finally, over the electoral process itself concerning the candidacies of their parties. Astonishingly though, the authors conclude from this reconstruction that, “although many factors contributed to Donald Trump's stunning political success, his rise to the presidency is, in good measure, a story of ineffective gatekeeping. Party gatekeepers failed at three key junctures: the ‘invisible primary,’ the primaries themselves, and the general election” (ibid. 2018: 43). Such an analysis implies that the only available program of action that remains would be that of not only going back in time but, more precisely, going back to a pre-1972 moment.

Before the aforementioned turn of the bibliography in the second half of the 2010s, and even before such interpretations as Levitsky and Ziblatt's and Przeworski's became dominant in the debate, Reference MairPeter Mair (2013) had already consistently pointed out over the years that parties were failing to fulfill their role and that their present downfall involved two related processes. On the one hand, parties can no longer achieve citizen engagement: the turnout in elections decreases, and those who vote identify themselves and commit themselves less and less to party positions. It is what Mair characterizes as a withdrawal from conventional politics. On the other hand, parties no longer stand for an exclusive basis to their exponents and leaders; they no longer represent the expression par excellence of the activities and positions of their most prominent cadres. These cadres began to resort to other public institutions, using the parties, at most, as platforms, as springboards to reach other positions, which no longer depend on the parties themselves.

In his influential book, Reference MüllerJan-Werner Müller (2016) followed clues given by Peter Mair to try to understand the populist phenomenon, arguing that populism violates tacit rules of democratic political culture, dividing the electorate between, on the one hand, the ‘authentic’ and ‘true’ people, and, on the other hand, ‘inauthentic’ and ‘false’ people. He also claims that populism is a kind of ‘shadow’ of representative democracy in the sense of projecting itself as its negation. And yet, despite his recourse to Mair's analysis, also Müller does not see any possible way out than to return to how democracy used to work before the current crisis, as may be seen in the premise from which he starts: “the success of populism can be connected to what can be called unfulfilled promises of democracy and, in a sense, simply cannot be fulfilled in our societies” (Reference MüllerMüller 2016: 76).

Not seeing the need to rethink the very concrete model of democracy that underlies their theoretical model as an unquestionable premise, the only concrete move that dominant interpretations of the current crisis of democracy in political science did make was to rethink what would be ‘endogenous’ and ‘exogenous’ to institutions in analyzing political systems. This is a point that became especially apparent after Levitsky and Ziblatt's (2018) phrasing of a set of ‘informal rules’ for the functioning of institutions.^{Footnote 2} Apart from the fact that this thesis has acquired many characteristics of an ad hoc explanation, it also raised many problems of consistency of the theoretical model itself.

Someone like Reference RuncimanDavid Runciman (2018) is not afraid to state that radical changes in society and the planet have placed us in an entirely different situation and that it is necessary to integrate such ‘exogenous’ elements into political analysis. For him, the environmental crisis poses a type of challenge that democracy has never faced, for instance. Nevertheless, despite all its heterodoxies regarding mainstream political science, Runciman's analysis is based on the same premises that characterize the mainstream stand, claiming that “Representative democracy longs for what it can't have”, or that “Representative democracy cannot close the circle” (2018: 107).

It is this premise that allows him to suggest, for example, that democracy may not be up to the challenge of the environmental crisis—and that perhaps the Chinese model may take advantage of this deficiency. This is also what allows him to suggest that the democratic state may not be up to the task of competing with the new digital Leviathans, as is the case of Facebook, meaning that perhaps algorithms can better respond to political demands than existing democratic institutions.

The ‘circle’ cannot be closed because the fundamental theoretical premise already establishes that it cannot be closed. This fundamental assumption of much of the literature on the current crisis of democracy is largely responsible for the consequence of putting the terms of the discussion as the alternative of returning to the previous mode of operation of institutional politics (even with some corrections) or watching the death of democracy.

Brazil's Crisis of Democracy, 1994–2022

The destruction of democratic institutions through electoral means became possible in Brazil from the electoral victory of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018 on because they were identified with the ‘system’. In the ‘system’ that prevailed from 1994—the launching date of the Plano Real of economic and political stabilization—until at least the popular uprisings of June 2013, the vast majority of the parties formed a relatively indistinct mass of political machines that are enclosed in the state in which they reproduce themselves, functioning as companies selling parliamentary support. With rare exceptions, all parties were always in the government, whatever the government, whatever the candidacy they had supported in the presidential election.

Except for the initial period (2003–2005) of Lula's administration (2003–2010) and during the brutally abbreviated second term (2015–2016) of Dilma Rousseff's presidency (2011–2016), what was seen as a political management model based on the formation of mega blocks to support the government and the limitation of nominal opposition to a parliamentary fringe. One of the many consequences of this arrangement is that the situation and opposition had their roles inflated and shrunk, respectively. On the one hand, there is a flagrant disproportion between the vote received by the presidential candidates and the total number of congressional and opposition parties in Congress. On the other hand, a ‘swollen’ government support base stimulated dissensions and fractures within the field of the situation.

In the 20 years of the Real arrangement, from 1994 to 2014, ministries, agencies, and state agencies were at risk of fragmenting government action, as it was always necessary to distribute public positions and funds to parties and parliamentary groups according to their congressional strength. The administration of super coalitions occurred under conditions of increasing party fragmentation. Fragmentation tended not only to be inefficient but also threatened to block the creation of a ‘brand’ of government to be used in the electoral period. It was up to the condominium manager to be able to confer the possible homogeneity to this archipelago of interests, establishing cross-cutting agendas of government.

This function as manager of the government condominium was performed in that period by the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) and by the Workers Party (PT), which functioned as opposing clusters of agglutination and coordination. As most of their resources were placed in the cross-sectional organization of the governments they led, these two leading parties had to ‘outsource’ the search for votes to other parties. PT and PSDB were not able to make congressional benches significantly larger each time and, at the same time, produce a functional government. Just because there were no cadres available to perform the two tasks at the same time, it was necessary to balance the two objectives. While this ensured that whoever ran the government could not impose itself on all the other parties in the electoral dispute, using all the weight of the federal government for the benefit of their party, the growing partisan fragmentation made the task of government coordination increasingly difficult and problematic.

The rupture with this logic of governability came with the uprisings of June 2013 (Reference NobreNobre 2013), which gave clear signs that this particular model of Brazilian politics since re-democratization had been exhausted. The political system did not understand or did not want to understand that the political-economic stabilization inaugurated in 1994 was no longer sustainable and that a new arrangement was needed. Dispersed and without possible institutional channeling, the social energy of the June uprisings was manipulated opportunistically by different conglomerates of interest. The best known of these was the so-called Operation Car Wash, an anti-corruption judicial operation that presented itself as a representative of popular indignation within the political system. Thus, little by little, the ‘system’ went from the already uncomfortable position of being seen as inherently corrupt and benefiting itself to the position of being seen as the fundamental cause of the suffering of the majority of the population.

The dysfunctional functioning of institutions came together with their inability to develop intense successive shock waves. In 2013 came the June uprisings. In 2014, Dilma Rousseff narrowly won a fierce presidential election and, subsequently, announced the adoption of an economic program that she had fought throughout the campaign. Immediately thereafter, the defeated candidate in the presidential election altered the historical position of his party, the PSDB, in all the elections since 2002, by refusing to accept the result, accusing the process of being fraudulent, and calling for street demonstrations to challenge the legitimacy of the winner. Beginning in 2015, a recession of rare destructive power, which began in late 2014, was established and continued for two long years until 2016. From 2015 until the beginning of 2019, Operation Car Wash revealed and eroded the illicit foundations of the political system of the last decades, establishing a state of permanent panic in official politics, which entered into a maximum self-defense mode. In 2016, a process of cold pressing of democracy led to the ousting of Dilma Rousseff from the presidency and the presentation by the interim government of an economic program that represents a radical liberal shift, without any discussion or approval in general elections. In April 2018, Lula was arrested. In October 2018, Bolsonaro was elected president.

Starting in June 2019, the so-called Vaza Jato revealed exchanges of messages between members of the Car Wash task force with the judge responsible for the Operation, Sergio Moro, who was then Minister of Justice of Bolsonaro. The existence of judicial collusion, propaganda calculation, and political motivations as modus operandi of the actors involved became evident. In March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic arrived in the country, with its destructive capacity amplified by an openly negationist government. There were also environmental disasters resulting from negligence as catastrophic as those of the collapse of the Mariana (2015) and the Brumadinho (2019) ore dams, and the cultural calamity of the fire that destroyed the Museu Nacional (2018).

This stunning sequence is another sign that the Brazilian case here seems to keep its peculiarity in some aspects. Not that all the elements of the crises of democracies pointed out before are absent, quite the contrary. However, in Brazil, the effective forms of political opposition that emerged did not find institutional channels of expression, resulting in a blockage that led to the election of a far-right candidate to the presidency in 2018. Turning once again to Mair:

In Brazil, the force coming from “outside conventional party politics” that emerged in June 2013 was not only ignored by the political system but failed to “structurally constitute” itself, to use Mair's words. The political system—and the parties in particular—did everything to contain and dissipate the social energy of June; at the same time, the political system in its current configuration not only did not have enough strength or organization to resume the role it had played, since with the ousting of Dilma Rousseff in 2016, the political system itself also went into autophagy.

The Crisis of the Paradigm of Coalition Presidentialism and a Possible Alternative Explanation

Since the 1990s, the hegemonic characterization of the Brazilian political system is that of ‘coalition presidentialism’^{Footnote 3}. In his inaugural characterization of the Brazilian presidential regime as ‘coalition presidentialism,’ in early years of Brazilian re-democratization, Sérgio Abranches presented the idea in the following terms:

What was initially a name given “for lack of a better” one became established itself as a real explanatory paradigm of Brazilian politics from the 1990s on. What was once a tentative description, full of doubts and even a ‘dilemma’ when put in comparison with the Brazilian democratic period from 1945 to 1964, was later seen as the fundamental features of the new paradigm. Eighteen years after Abraches’ inaugural text, leading political scientist Fernando Limongi stated without any reservations: “From a descriptive point of view, the Brazilian political system, there is no doubt, can be named ‘coalition presidentialism’” (Reference LimongiLimongi 2006: 30).

In its development to become a paradigm, coalition presidentialism's most influential version has been largely inspired by the version of neo-institutionalism developed by Adam Przeworski, with whom many leading Brazilian political scientists have closely collaborated for decades now (as in Reference Przeworski and LIMONGIPrzeworski And Limongi, 1997; see also the preface to Reference PrzeworskiPrzeworski 2010). It is no surprise, then, that Przeworski's characterization of democracy and its implicit normative assumptions, as developed thus far, are also largely presupposed by this explanatory paradigm of the functioning of the Brazilian political system.

The paradigm of coalition presidentialism went beyond the implicit normative assumptions that it shares with dominant interpretations of the current crisis of democracy. In its rigid opposition between ‘description’ and ‘normativity’, the paradigm of coalition presidentialism also did not allow for the conscious elaboration of its implicit normativity that continued, however, to operate, as in the resistance of its theoreticians to accept any modification of electoral and party legislation, for instance. Furthermore, having become a hegemonic, explanatory paradigm, coalition presidentialism's implicit normativity also marginalized certain research themes, such as the super coalitions of government or the governism of the political system.

Even so, from the end of the 2000s on, disturbing elements came to the surface that required attention, making it very hard for the coalition presidentialism model to maintain its plausibility and its explanatory force. I take Reference ZuccoZucco (2009) to be the first within the paradigm to recognize such deficiencies and difficulties and to face them when he raised questions like: “if, in fact, parties do behave in a structured way within the legislature, does it necessarily follow that this structure is ideological? In other words, what role does ideology play in executive-legislative relations, and consequently, in the functioning of the legislative branch?” (Reference ZuccoZucco 2009: 1077).

The answer he arrives at also has major consequences for the basic assumptions of the paradigm:

Yan de Souza Carreirão had already emphasized the ambiguities of the consolidation of the Brazilian party system, showing the difficulties in the expectation that tendencies toward institutionalization, the structure of competition, the role of ideology in structuring the system and partisan fragmentation could move toward stabilization:

Those processes just got much worse after 2014, losing the ambiguity that Carreirão still identified at that time. To avoid those consequences and the results of the shortcomings of the coalition presidentialism paradigm, I proposed characterizing the way of operating that dominated the political system during Brazilian re-democratization as pemedebismo (Reference NobreNobre 2013, Reference Nobre2022). Pemedebismo proposes a critical appropriation of the results of empirical research guided by the paradigm of coalition presidentialism in which some of the elements avoided by such a model are not only marginalized but also come to the center, allowing us to ask questions that are usually absent, such as: Why would super parliamentary majorities be necessary for the functioning of democracy in Brazil? Why do the vast majority of the parties adhere to the government, whatever it is, and any candidacy they have supported in the presidential election?

This is too broad a question to be developed in full here. It suffices to say that the notion of pemedebismo aims at addressing them as key features of the Brazilian political system. Pemedebismo is a name derived from the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) because this party was an exemplary case of a governist party, independent of the government, independent of the presidential candidacy supported during the elections, in a model that is characterized by the formation of parliamentary supermajorities in support of the current government, whatever government it might be. Although driven by the broader social objective of understanding Brazilian conservatism, pemedebismo as a notion is limited to how the political system operates.

Such a mode of operation, democratic since 1985, may well be explained as a means to democratically fight social forces of transformation that intend to combat inequalities at a much more intense pace. At the same time, it is a mode of operation of the political system that works in favor of an extremely slow pace of democratization. In this context, however, it is decisive to emphasize that Bolsonaro's presidency (2019–2022) cannot and should not be understood as comparable to all those who preceded him. In contrast, it is the first government since re-democratization that directly and concretely threatened democracy as such. Nevertheless, the role played by the pemedebistic logic of the political system in producing the conditions that led to the election of Jair Bolsonaro should not be underestimated.

The Bolsonaro government represented an occupation of pemedebismo by the extreme right. Likewise, it represents the rise to power of social groups that until then considered themselves excluded from political representation and effective participation in decision-making circles during the period of re-democratization, as it would be possible to say, for example, of the evangelical electorate, of the Armed Forces, of security forces more generally, or of some sector of the agribusiness.

These characteristics may lead to the risk of understanding Bolsonaro's government as a mere new social and electoral coalition that came to power for the first time in re-democratization. As if it were a simple ‘alternation of power’, as if it were a new social coalition that, having come to federal power, would have to deal, like its predecessors, with the pemedebismo of the system. It turns out that the occupation of pemedebismo by the extreme right is qualitatively different from the previous ones, from the right and the left. Not least because it has a hard and organized core of authoritarian support. For the first time since re-democratization, the electorate of authoritarian inclination, which had been dispersed since the end of the military dictatorship, concentrated its vote on a single candidacy and reached the presidency.

The pemedebismo of the Bolsonaro government is pemedebismo in its limit form: it points to nothing less than the end of the very democratic conservatism that the concept sought to circumscribe. Normalizing this limit form of pemedebismo is a conceptual and political error that can cost nothing less than democracy itself. Without the maintenance of democratic institutionality, it is the very notion of pemedebismo that loses its ballast and its conceptual meaning.

This does not mean ignoring the fact that the phenomenon goes beyond the Brazilian context; it belongs to authoritarian movements of global scope. The electoral success of the typical conservative uprisings of the decade of 2010, of which the victory of Bolsonaro in 2018 is part, coincided with an economic crisis that is only paralleled by the one that began in 1929. These were movements that mobilized real deficits in the way existing democracies worked.

A structural element of the authoritarian uprisings of the 2010s their anti-system, which goes hand in hand with their political parasitism, in which they attack the ‘system’ while benefiting from the fact that the state bureaucracy continues to provide public services. With dysfunctionalities, certainly, but without interruption because of the permanent attacks that are directed at them. This tactic is of great relevance to the authoritarian project of Bolsonaro for at least two reasons: it deliberately shuffles the division between situation and opposition, reconfiguring it into a division between ‘system’ and ‘anti-system’; and prepares a constant destruction of democratic institutions from the inside, seeking to identify the ‘existing democracy’ with the ‘system’ and proposing the identification of the ‘true democracy’ with the period of the military dictatorship (1964–1985).

Bolsonaro successfully identified ‘system’ with ‘pemedebismo’. Even if he resorted, after the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic to the country, to an agreement with Congress based on the same logic of political negotiation, albeit under a new direction. At this moment, he also successfully convinced a large portion of the electorate that this defense maneuver was necessary for him not to be ousted from power, that is to say, to continue to fight the same ‘system’ he negotiated a deal with. Be that as it may, what truly matters here is that the identification between ‘system’ and ‘pemedebismo’ is performed with a view to the destruction of the same democracy that produced pemedebismo. As if they were synonyms. As if a democratic political system could not operate otherwise in Brazil. It is as if the only alternative to the democratic conservatism of pemedebismo were the restoration of an authoritarian regime.

This is what, in theory and practice, the authoritarian threat looks like in Brazil, it is its specificity. The practical and theoretical challenge posed by the election of Bolsonaro in 2018 will accompany Brazilian democracy for many years still, even though he was not reelected in 2022, even though he barred from running for office until 2030. It will not be possible to address the authoritarian menace in Brazil without addressing at the same time the many figures of the pemedebismo of its political system.

Separating the Crisis of Democracy from the Crisis of Some Theories of Democracy

As Runciman rightly states, for those who still want to live in democracies, there is an alternative to the deadlock which is to imagine new democratic institutions. For Runciman, “democracy is not working well—if it were, there would be no populist backlash. But attempts to make it work better focus on what we feel we have lost rather than on what we have never even tried. Political arguments revolve around ideas of recovery and rescue—of the welfare state, the constitution, the economy, our security, and our freedom. Each side wants to recapture something that has been taken away” (2018: 56).

This makes us look the wrong way, for sure, Runciman is right. The whole issue today should be to focus “on what we have never even tried” and not on a return to models of democracy that have lost their social ballast, whatever may be understood as being such ballast (with similar intent, see Reference Gagnon and VasilevGagnon and Vasilev 2016). Nevertheless, one of the decisive reasons why our imagination is blocked is exactly the mixing up of ‘democracy’ and ‘certain theories of democracy’, an amalgam to which Runciman also succumbs. This theoretical amalgam ultimately mimics the more general amalgam of the current party systems and the configuration that democracy had until recently.

Throughout the world, whenever something new appears, the novelty always includes at least some arrangement between traditional parties and new grassroots movements and digital organizations of some sort. In most cases, the traditional parties want to swallow the new movements and the movements want to run over the parties. When none of these things happens, the most varied forms of conflicting coexistence are possible. The most common arrangement is a competition between the two. With the transformation of parties into parastatal entities, into the hands of the state to control society, the divorce between mobilization and organization was gradually established as a lasting characteristic of political systems. It is no coincidence that so many attempts to reform political institutions go through the reconstruction of parties as movements.

Questioning the founding assumptions of the dominant literature on the crisis of democracy should be accompanied by a change of the terms in which democracy itself is understood so that its social and institutional potentialities can emerge. It means, for example, granting centrality to its character as a way of life and not only as a political regime or a form of government.^{Footnote 5} It means criticizing the theories of popular sovereignty that underlie these theories of democracy, which are also in crisis.

In that sense, it is of great importance to emphasize the emergence of ideas such as the breaking of informal rules, whose most salient reference may be found in Reference Levitsky and ZiblattLevitsky and Ziblatt (2018). Among other things, it shows that the functioning of institutions depends crucially on something that is, so to speak, outside of them, which concerns something that we could call a democratic political culture. A theory that shows that the very consideration of what would be ‘endogenous’ and ‘exogenous’ to explanations should return to the discussion and should no longer be taken as simply referring to self-evident institutional rules.

The different theories and views of democracy presented here certainly cannot by themselves change the situation. However, they can help to solve part of the problem, at least. Especially if they agree to debate openly about new horizons of transformation that are now absent from the conversation. To achieve that, however, it is imperative to put aside the amalgam of ‘democracy’ and ‘theories of democracy’, which, today, blocks the understanding of the situation and the search for innovative solutions.