1 Representative Government and the Development of Democracy in Brazil: A Historical Shift, 1889-1945

The consolidated literature about Brazil's political history frequently states that the evolution of democracy, in this country, seems to reflect some signs of imperfection or unfulfillment and is branded as a peculiar and exceptional case of trajectory. The present research arises from the questioning of the above assumptions stated by the specialized literature. I believe that the idea of an unstable democracy in countries like Brazil requires a better explanation. Thus, the main goal is to understand the evolution of Brazilian political institutions within a framework that is marked by the tensions inherent to the establishment and practice of representative government and its development towards a democratic government. In this paper I focus on the legislative elections that were held between the first Republican period in Brazil and the period known as the country's first democratic experience (1889-1945), that is, elections that were held before the emergence of democracy in the country. Using a new data set I was able to challenge the established literature, by showing that the electoral practices of this pre-democratic period were not innocuous and mere façade for a purely formalistic representative system. Rather, I specifically find that the First Republican Congress was a deliberative organ, capable of addressing national issues and transcending regional conflicts and oligarchic influences. My findings thus cast doubt on deterministic social and economic arguments, establishing the preeminence of political and institutional variables as the roots of early competitive elections