The centralization of policy decision-making

in the Brazilian political imagination

Rogerio Schlegel
ABSTRACT
The Brazilian federation has undergone a remarkable centralization of regulatory authority
since the previous decade, a process that can also be described as growing coordination of
public policies by the federal government. The fact that this takes place during a period of
democratic rule contradicts the conventional wisdom about federative dynamics in the country
democratic regimes are expected to decentralize authority. The purpose of this study is to assess
in what extent the support for decision-making centralization has prevailed in the Brazilian
political imagination and if this paradigm is linked to a possible mistrust of local authorities. The
main aim is to discuss the policy benchmark that might have influenced the design of the
federation and of intergovernmental relations, assuming that ideas are relevant to institutional
change. Taking into account recent developments in the field, pointing to the complementary
roles played by elites and the broader public in building institutions, the research will be
conducted in two fronts: analysis of 20th centurys books that influenced the national political
thought, looking for policy paradigms expressed by a relevant section of the intellectual elite;
secondary analysis of surveys with the Brazilian population, conducted as remotely in time as
possible, to investigate the normative orientation of the public in terms of federal arrangements.
1 THEORETICAL FRAME AND JUSTIFICATION
The support for centralized policy decision-making and the mistrust of local politicians
appeared in previous studies as potential hypotheses to explain some of their findings (Almeida
and Carneiro, 2003; Almeida, 2005; Arretche, 2009). However, no research has taken them as its
main theme so far.
To what extent the character of the Brazilian federation, with the center having a
prominent role in coordinating policies, is in line with the Brazilian public preferences? Has this
centralized arrangement been desired and conceived after the propositions of the authoritarian
thinkers of the 1920s? The axes authoritarianism-democracy and centralization-decentralization
are perceived as independent in the Brazilian political imagination? Distinguishing right to decide

Ipsa Summer School 2010 Course: Qualitative Methods and Research Design - Proposed research design

and right to act will help to better understand shifts in Brazilian federation design? This project
aims at fostering knowledge that helps advancing answers to these questions.
Although still underexplored in Brazil, research on the role of ideas in institutional
development is getting higher in the agenda of Political Science studies (Faria, 2003; Capella,
2005). Under the umbrella represented by expression "ideas", analysts have gathered quite
different concepts such as language, speeches, knowledge, symbols and images that express
identities, solutions to public problems, frameworks and worldviews, and values, subjective norms
and ideologies. They have in common their character as cognitive structures with influence on
institutional development as a weapon for persuasion, a mobilizing factor or a justification for
advocacy, just to mention a few examples of the roles investigated. The list of Social Science
works associating ideas and institutional change is wide and in the rise (for a recent account, see
Bland and Cox, 2010).
In this study, the featured ideas are the principles that worked as policy benchmarks. It is
widely accepted that ideas provide the framework for dealing with public issues. The way a
problem is perceived might take it into the government agenda or make it seems invisible to
authorities. In the market of solutions, one is understood as suitable, the other is not even if
both are viable. But beyond that, there are ideas or cluster of ideas that serve as benchmark in
several points of institutional development. They are values, beliefs, preferences, perceptions
that inform what is acceptable and desirable in terms of public policy and institutional design
they even help building the identity of relevant agents. The policy benchmark is a normative
framework used by political actors, defined through dynamics that take place at the discursive
environment of society (Hall, 1989; Jobert and Muller, 1987; Muller, 2003).
This project will analyze members of the intellectual elites works and opinions of the
wider public because both are relevant to define policy paradigms. To Jobert and Muller (1987),
members of the elite are mediators actors capable of transforming an impenetrable socioeconomic reality into a consistent programme for political action. Mediators do not define the
paradigm themselves; there is rather a collective process in which power struggles and other
forms of confrontation take place within the wider social environment. In the model of multiple
streams of Kingdon (2003), academics and analysts are among the policy experts responsible for
formulating potentially viable alternatives. In other stages of the policy process, these ideas must
be disseminated to the general public in order to build their support. Public opinion is decisive in
shaping what the author calls the national mood", which can determine whether a given
alternative is forgotten or goes to the top of government agenda.

Ipsa Summer School 2010 Course: Qualitative Methods and Research Design - Proposed research design

Approaches called "interactive", investigating top-down and bottom-up moves, have

become increasingly usual in studies on the development of institutions (Sanders, 2006: 44).
They are seen as a way to overcome visions that assign agency exclusively to high-profile actors
such as presidents, judges, senior bureaucrats and members of intellectual and business elites
taking into consideration mass publics, social movements and advocacy groups too.
1.1 What centralization means?
The relevance of discussing normative orientations behind the policy decision-making
centralization also lies on the fundamental role this theme plays in contemporary debates. In
Brazil, the opposition centralization-decentralization and considerations on the power of
governors have been hot spots in policy analysis. Many Brazilian studies aim at gauging in what
extent the federation is centralized or decentralized (e.g. Campbell, 1992; Almeida, 2001; Souza,
1997; Abrucio, 1998; Stepan, 1999; Arretche, 2005; Almeida, 2005).
The federal structure is considered one of the most important features of the Brazilian
political process, with impact on partisan and electoral dynamics, state reform and social policy
design, for instance. According to the prevailing view, there is an evident association between
federation arrangements and levels of democracy in the country. Centralization would
characterize authoritarian regimes such as Estado Novo dictatorship and the military coup that
seized power in 1964 and decentralization would be a trace of democratic regimes such as
Repblica Velha and the democratic era initiated in 1946.
This framework applies to the 1988s Constitution, a milestone in the most recent
democratization process, but not necessarily to what came after it. Important institutional changes
of the 1990s and 2000s represent moves toward centralization, in spite of democratic
consolidation. As a whole, they have in common the concentration of policy decision-making and
of regulatory power at the national level.
As Arretche (2009) highlights, a recent development in comparative analysis offers a
conceptual tool to better understand the Brazilian federation trajectory: the differentiation between
right to decide and right to act two dimensions related but distinct, especially useful to assess
1

the degree of dispersion of authority between different levels of government . The first describes

Contemporary research increasingly applies this distinction, albeit with diverse terminology. Other authors
use the terms "policy decision-making" to refer to the right to decide and "policy-making" for policy
implementation or for the whole process involving public policies (Obinger, Liebfried and Castles, 2005;
Sellers and Lidstrom, 2007; Arretche, 2009). Rodden (2005) defines three dimensions of authority in which
decentralization could be observed: fiscal authority, political authority and policy management authority.
The first concerns the distribution of tax collection and expenditures among levels of government, the
Ipsa Summer School 2010 Course: Qualitative Methods and Research Design - Proposed research design

authorities capable of regulating policies, the second refers to who are supposed to implement
the policies and effectively deliver the services (Braun, 2000; Keman, 2000). It's a way to refine
the knowledge on federal dynamics that goes beyond collapsing them into the centralizationdecentralization dichotomy.
Discriminating the right to decide from the right to act allows the analyst to launch a new
look at recent Brazilian history. Not every shift that was interpreted as power decentralization
necessarily involved the transfer of authority to regulate policies. Brazil would be among the
countries where state-building process was accompanied by a preference for uniform national
policies, like Germany and Austria. In this process, the dominant values in society made
uniformity prevail over claims for autonomy among subnational units (Arretche, 2009). The
contemporary Brazilian federation can be plausibly depicted as a complex arrangement in which
much of the right to decide is concentrated at the center, but the right to act is largely distributed
to constituent units.
2 DATA COLLECTION AND METHODOLOGY
The proposed research has two fronts:
a) revising, interpreting and contextualizing historically influential works of 20th centurys
Brazilian political thought;
b) obtaining and analyzing survey databases that trace back Brazilian population
2

orientations on public policies and federal design .

The main objective is to detect and discuss current policy paradigms and its roots. The
study has commonalities with previous research programmes, such as that of Brando (2007:
30), which had as main ambition describing "intellectual structures and theoretical categories
under which reality is perceived, practical experience is articulated and political action is
organized. The project also focuses on texts considered the most significant among Brazil's
political diagnoses, hoping they are the most capable of revealing distinct eras political
conceptions. It also rejects idealistic approaches that take ideas as detached from their political,
social and language environment something quite different from accepting that ideas are
relevant to institutional development. But while Brando looked for "intellectual families" within
second refers to the possibility that local governments are elected directly and has their own mandate
(untouchable by higher levels of government), and the third has to do with the distribution of responsibility
for defining policies, in one hand, and for implementing them, in the other a variation of the concept
presented
here.
2
How much would be possible to go back in time is still an open question. Previous secondary analyses
were able to explore surveys on public policies conducted in Brazil in the 1940s (Lavareda, 1991) and
1950s (Cervi, 2006).
Ipsa Summer School 2010 Course: Qualitative Methods and Research Design - Proposed research design

Brazilian political thought, the goal here is to discuss the policy benchmark that may have
influenced federal arrangements design.
It is worth stressing that this project uses the singular to refer to policy paradigm only to
make the exposition easier to follow. Indeed, the main working hypothesis assumes the
predominance of a stable policy benchmark, but that does not mean the research is only looking
for invariant orientations or path dependent trajectories. On the contrary, the intention is to
explore variations, spot and understand critical junctures, overruns and resilience over time.
Keeping the focus on the decision-making centralization-decentralization axis, the proposal is to
take this hypothesis as a starting point, aware that ruptures may be equally or even more relevant
than continuities. It is also useful to emphasize that, at this stage, the research ambition is not
pointing out direct causation between policy benchmark and policy development. The idea is to
detect normative guidelines that might have served as reference for political actors regarding the
federation arrangement something quite different from inferring that these principles did shape
the concrete world, what would be another investigative focus.
In the interpretation of results arising from the empirical data collection, this study is
particularly attentive to avert the potential risk of anachronism. That does not mean following the
strict view of Skinner and colleagues from Cambridge for whom the study of ideas and theories
from the past should be conducted as the observation of a foreign country, only understandable
in its historical and, over all, linguistic context. But there is always the temptation of attributing to
authors and ancient publics conceptions strange to the intellectual universe of their time. Treating
the right to decide and the right to act as separate dimensions, as suggested by the central
hypothesis, might sound natural in the light of contemporary literature, but these were alien
categories to the debates Oliveira Vianna [1883-1951] and Victor Nunes Leal [1914-1985], e.g.,
where inserted in. Taking into account the historical context and conceptual framework in which
ideas are embedded is an indispensable part of the effort to understand them. The task here is
not just "read and reread the text using an expression critically repeated by Skinner (1988)
expecting the book reveals its deep contents. It is rather a question of reconstituting the political,
social and conceptual context in which it fits.
At the same time I cannot accept the condemnation of all attempts to understand ideas
from the past as pernicious. As harmful as the risk of anachronism is that of antiquarianism. The
exegeses and commentaries also end up forming a given tradition and it is inevitable that past
research is informed by present interests (Gademer, 2004; Brando, 2007). In historical political
theory, the investigation must not be understood as having as its object "dead authors, but living

Ipsa Summer School 2010 Course: Qualitative Methods and Research Design - Proposed research design

books"; the intention is precisely explain how certain works can survive their past to talk about
our present (Harlan, 1989: 609).
As Silva points out (2010: 326), this form of knowledge production is a "problem-solving
activity, in which the diversity of problems explains the diversity of methods and heuristic
techniques. This is precisely the case of the study I propose, which has the ambition to dig into
the political imagination of a century.

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Ipsa Summer School 2010 Course: Qualitative Methods and Research Design - Proposed research design