This paper starts from the claim of a shift on the reception of the idea of representation by contemporary left, to support a diagnosis on the Workers Party (PT) experience in recent political history in Brazil. Although it had started by challenging "representative democracy", PT ended up as the main sponsor of the widest experiment in novel forms and instances of representation in contemporary Brazil, often under the rubric of a "participatory" ideal. The paper tends to emphasize the unavoidable character of this "drift" toward representation as well as to identify the root of these experiments on a partisan political commitment with certain hitherto peripheral sectors of the population - far more than a presumed ideological clarity on a theoretical-oriented diagnosis about Brazil or about democracy.
Brazil; democracy; political representation; institutions; Workers Party