The Brazilian Multi-Party System: a Case for Contextual Political Rationality.

This dissertation analyzes the Brazilian political parties from a systemic perspective using state data for all legislative elections held during the 1945-1962 period. By a systemic perspective we mean that the party system is defined as an analytical unit and that we seek to identify its main trends and behavioral aspects of its parties. The central hypothesis states that Brazil had a highly fragmented party system which, from an institutional point of view, nominally comprised thirteen parties; in reality the party system functioned with a much smaller number of parties. A second important point concerns the diversity of party structures within the same legally established party system. As a matter of fact, three different types of party sub-systems are identified: these are a two-party system; a moderately fragmented three-to-five party system; and a highly fragmented party system comprising at least six parties. These party structures varied across the states of the federation over time and depending on whether the level of political competition was federal or state. In order to demonstrate our central hypothesis, we examine three problem areas showing that the different political processes which characterized each problem area had one aspect in common. Regardless of their intrinsic nature, all these processes implied variations in the number of effective parties and electoral preferences. The problem areas that we analyze include the process of alliance formation, the growth and decline of parties, and the effect of electoral laws on the dynamics of the party system. In each of these problem areas, the following procedures are taken: first, we present and discuss the existing conventional hypotheses and their pertinent evidence. Secondly, we review these hypotheses showing that they do not adequately account for the evidence and that they are consistent with a premise of invariant political rationality. Finally, we substitute for the notion of invariant political rationality the notion of contextual political rationality and present our own hypotheses which are consistent with the notion of contextual rationality. We offer as well the evidence we gathered to prove them.PhDPolitical scienceUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/157947/1/8025716.pd