Contributions toward understanding the political-electoral cultural of Brazilian democracy

Abstract

Abstract: Contemporary Brazilian electoral democracy is facing a dilemma that can be defined in the following terms: an efficient formal representative democracy exists alongside serious social problems. This coexistence has generated a sort of hybridism in political cultural that propitiates the maintenance of old political practices - such as clientelism, nepotism and patrimonialism - during electoral period. In addition to these factors, electoral democracy tends to privilege candidate’s persona, in detriment of the strengthening of political institutions as catalysts for building collective identities. In this article, we examine the consequences that these factors have for the process of building democracy. In order to explain this dilemma, we resort to longitudinal empirical data from research on political culture that was carried out in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in the hopes that it, in turn, enables us to make some generalizations on Brazil as a whole. The data that we examine suggest that political scientists are confronted by the challenge of establishing a balance between formal and social democracy. Such an effort should aid in creating a more civic political and electoral culture that stimulates active citizens’ participation. Keywords: political culture, democracy, economics, social capital.