Brazilian democracy and its enemies

Abstract:

The main objective of this article is to demonstrate that inertial democracy in Brazil has sought to resolve its impasses by using hardball in politics, a kind of radical application of the law, in spite of democratic institutions, in a context of judicialization of politics and the rise populism. Authoritarianism has taken on other forms of action at the beginning of this century. The work points in a preliminary way to two recent examples of hardball: the use of requests for impeachments in Brazilian politics to defend political opponents (by the Legislative), successfully in contexts of economic crisis, and the role of “Lava Jato” (by the Judiciary), in the fight against corruption in a growing context of dissatisfaction with democracy and its institutions. For this purpose, we use, as an empirical basis of this work, the databases of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, Datafolha and World Values ​​Survey (WVS).

Keywords:  Inertial Democracy; Hardball; Authoritarianism; Populism