REGIONAL CLEAVAGES AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION IN BRAZIL
CHAPTER 7
CONCLUSION: WHICH KIND OF POLITICAL SYSTEM?
1. Political system: types
Political science as an independent discipline can only
justify its existence by contributing to a political arrangement
in which the political process can be constantly examined,
evaluated, criticized and improved. The idea of this criticism
and improvement is to provide a balance between efficiency and
the range and scope of the political debate. Very often one of
these items is sacrificed to the other's benefit. But to renounce
this role altogether is to transform political science into
either a sterile description of the exercise of power, or an
instrument for the engineering of power administration. That is
why this conclusion is addressed to a survey of the alternatives
for political development, which are still within the range of
Brazil s possibilities, in an attempt to bring the discussion
from the past into the future in a meaningful way.
I have been referring throughout this work to a dimension of
the political system which goes from an extreme of absenteeism to
a maximum of intervention and control in the country's political
life. This is the same kind of problem that concerned Reinhard
Bendix in his classic comparison of entrepreneurial ideologies in
four countries(1). What
distinguishes England and the United States from Russia and
Eastern Europe is, says Bendix, the intervention of the State in
the labor relations of the latter two, which leads to a series of
difficulties in the adjustment of authority relations in the
economic sphere. David Apter, in a completely different context,
refers to the same idea when he suggests the distinction between
"hierarchical" and "pyramidal" structures of
authority.(2) While the
"pyramidal"
system corresponds to a political model with the State as the
target for political demands and pressures, the hierarchical
system corresponds to the notion of a tutorial state intervening
in social and economic life, and discouraging the emergence of
autonomous political representation, either through coercion, or
through the co-optation of emerging leadership, or both. A
hierarchical structure of authority tends to limit political and
public forms of participation and replace them with a combination
of private demands and forms of expressive social mobilization.
An attempt to utilize Apter's conceptualization in an
interpretation of Brazilian politics can be found in an article
by Antonio Octávio Cintra and Fábio Wanderley Reis.(3) The Brazilian regime up to 1964 is
defined as "consociational," that is, pyramidal, with a
non ideological, instrumental political culture. Political power
in Brazil is seen, in that period, as "held, in general, by
a traditional elite, which derived its power from the property of
land." The relatively small presence of pressure groups
favoring economic development is attributed to electoral
mechanisms, which limit the access of new interest and pressure
groups to the Congress. The fact, later studied in detail by
Phillipe Schmitter, that pressure groups in Brazil tend to
operate in the area of the executive, does not seem to be so much
an effect of the electoral system as a consequence of the
continuous presence of the central government as an agent of
social and economic intervention and initiative. There is little
doubt that the 1945-64 Republic, together with the 1889-1930
period, is the most "consociational" period in
Brazilian political history, but it is not less true that
hierarchical structures were dominant during the imperial period
throughout the nineteenth century, during the Vargas Regime and
after 1964. The concentration of power in the executive branch of
the central government was for Brazil not only one of the main
reasons for the poor functioning of the liberal constitutional
forms imported from Europe and the United States, but it also
explains a high degree of state intervention in the social and
economic life of society.
2. Political systems: determinants
Which factors lead to the different types of political systems
discussed above? It is possible to say, generally speaking, that
the way in which contemporary states have been solving the
political problems of their integration into the modern world
will determine their power structure, authority system and style.
The political problems of modernization are of two types. One
derives from the causal chain which goes from socioeconomic
development to the demands of political participation. The other
is dependent upon the history of the system and the history of
its relations with the outside world. It is impossible to offer
here a general approach to these problems, but it is not
impossible to find good examples of it in the literature. A first
example is given by Alexander Gerschenkron (1962).(4)
Economic development can start in different ways depending on the
timing of its beginning: in England, the capitalist accumulation
of capital was enough; in Germany, a financial capitalism was
necessary; and in Russia, the State itself had to take the lead.
He does not offer a theory on why some countries started their
development before others but, in the case of Russia, he says
that serfdom was the paramount obstacle to its early development.
Barrington Moore starts from factors of this kind, namely the
alternatives of modernization in the countryside, as keys for
predicting the formation of different systems(5).
His theory is too well-known to be spelled out here, and it is
enough to note how the kind of predictions of fascist vs.
democratic vs. socialist outcomes depart so radically from the
kind of predictions one could get from standard correlation
analysis, which never went much further than Lipset's
correlations between democracy and levels of development.
It would be difficult, and out of place, to try to generalize
from the insights of Gerschenkron and Moore. It is obvious that
the situation in Latin America today is radically different from
the countries they studied. But there seems to be an almost
perfect correlation between a decentralized political system in
the past, combined with a strong feudal structure, and economic
development in the present. Flourishing centralized empires of
the past were unable to adapt themselves to industrial society,
while countries with a relatively smaller and underdeveloped
political superstructure were much more able to absorb more
modern and efficient patterns of organization and production.
Contrary to what is often said, feudalism does not seem to be a
determinant of underdevelopment: it is its absence, and the
predominance of an overdeveloped state structure, which seems to
be at the roots of underdevelopment. Having arrived late in the
industrialized world, these countries can count only on an
out-of-date and oversized political structure, their patrimonial
inheritance, to make the jump towards the high standards to which
they aspire.
3. The scope
of the political community: costs and benefits
We have now the general idea of what determines the scope of
the political community, understood as the set of persons and
groups who actually participate in the political decisions of the
country. This scope can be measured in terms of amplitude (how
many people participate?), its relevance (what kind of issues are
brought to political decision?) and its level of coercion against
deviant behavior. These three measures tap a general dimension of
political openness, and we can now proceed to a systematic
discussion of its consequences in terms of costs and benefits.
This topic was already sketched, in the discussion on the
desirability of more political vs. more private forms of
participation. It is possible to resume this discussion here in
terms of the proposed negative relation between coercion and
information.(6) The general idea
behind this proposition, suggested by D. Apter, is that a
legitimate, non coercive political establishment is able to
receive a free flow of information that ceases to exist when
coercion is exerted and compliance ceases to be voluntary. In our
terms, information corresponds to situations of ample political
participation, in which political (allocative) decisions are
taken, following a more or less complex bargaining process; where
coercion corresponds to situations where the structure of
political participation is narrow, and decisions are imposed upon
the "non-political" sphere of society. The following
alternatives seem to correspond to these two poles:
a) intelligence and information: it is not by chance
that highly coercive regimes are those which have to develop more
elaborate intelligence systems, in order to compensate for the
lack of political information, which tends to flow freely in an
open political community. The data collected through intelligence
devices (whether by means of an institutionalized intelligence
agency or not) are sufficiently different from the other kind of
information to deserve a separate analysis. The object of
intelligence observation is defined from the outset in terms of
its utility or disutility for the political establishment and its
goals; this leads to a situation in which any bargaining between
observer and observed falls necessarily into a zero-sum type of
situation. Data gathering through intelligence systems implies,
thus, a rigidity which is exactly the Opposite of the information
gathered from partners in a community, where the situation is
non-zero-sum and the rights of others are recognized.
b) policy making and policy implementation : information, as
distinguished from intelligence, can be essential in the process
of policy making, but can be a nuisance in the process of policy
implementation Since intelligence gathering implies a previous
definition of the situation in terms of who are "the
others," it is possible to imagine that, the more a
political center relies on intelligence data, the less able it
will be to change this previous definition. If one considers that
policy making consists, precisely, of decisions that somehow
alter the previous patterns of value allocations and
distribution, we can assume that, the higher the reliance on
intelligence, the lower the capability of policy making. On the
other hand, data from intelligence is compatible with the very
effective policy implementation of some previously defined goals,
if all the relevant factors are within the range of governmental
action. The other side of the coin is that when intelligence is
lacking, the political establishment is entirely open to
information, data from intelligence sources is not considered.
This is an indication of the lack of autonomy of the political
systems for which constant political bargaining is an essential
survival condition. The basic characteristics of this situation
are a combination of sweeping policy making decisions and little
or no policy implementation The conclusion seems to be that a
Political system needs to be autonomous enough to be able to
process all the information it can get without losing its
capability of gathering the intelligence data necessary for its
policy implementation, so as to avoid falling in an
all-intelligence or all-information kind of situation.
The essential difference between intelligence and other types
of information is that political information induces a system to
adjust itself to new realities of the environment, whereas
intelligence data is mainly feed-back on the system by the system
itself. The self-adjustment of a system to new information - the
quality that Karl Deutsch calls "autonomy" - depends
also on the system's capacity to keep its integrity, which can be
a matter of internal resources of another type. To be completely
open to information, or to rely exclusively on intelligence, seem
to be alternative ways of coping with the same problem of little
autonomy.(7)
c) two types of bargaining: political issues and political
scope. There are two types of bargaining that go on in a
political system: one regarding the allocation of specific
values, or options about the specific social, economic and
cultural issues, and the other regarding the scope of the
political sphere itself - who can vote, who can be elected, who
should be heard for which kind of decisions, etc. Bargaining on
political scope is carried on at the periphery of the political
community, since it concerns precisely the rights of entrance
into this community; whereas bargaining on issues follows some
institutionalized patterns (because it occurs within a community
where the form and extent of participation by all parts are
accepted by all). Bargaining on scope tends to take on an aspect
of "political crisis" concerning the rules of the game
and the spectrum of political participation.
Schattschneider suggests that the most important strategy in
politics is that related to the scope of conflict, in the sense
that, in any conflict, there is always a movement towards
increasing the number of persons involved(8).
In spite of this, he also notes that the scope of the political
community in the United States has remained stationary at the
level of about 60 per cent of the potential electorate. The
recent emergence of black and youth minorities in the political
community is probably changing this situation, which is being
accompanied by the well-known characteristics of political
crisis.
The relative weight of either type of bargaining is a function
of the actual structures of participation, and the levels and
types of political emergence at a given point. It is possible to
consider bargaining on political scope as disruptive to other
types of bargaining inherent in the process of decision making.
It is possible to think that, the higher the gap between the
demands and the structure of participation, the more the
questions of scope will prevail; this would lead to the upgrading
of security problems concerning policy making and implementation,
and a predominance of intelligence upon information, which in
turn would lead to increasing difficulties in political
bargaining regarding issues, and so on.
d) technical vs. political decision making. The
alternative between information and intelligence can be
re-examined in terms of the alternative between technical vs.
political decision making. In effect, when a former Brazilian
president stated that "the social problem is a police
problem," he was denying the right of participation to a
given group in the political community. All governmental policy
regarding this group becomes, in consequence, a technical matter,
handled through the respective technical body, namely the police,
which uses intelligence data as its normal sources of
information. This kind of "technical" treatment was a
consequence of the fact that the "social question"
implied an attempt to widen the scope of the political system.
During the Vargas regime, however, the political community was
closed: nevertheless the social question was handled through
other technical bodies of the Ministry of Labor and the welfare
system. It is possible to provide job security, a system of
medical assistance, institutionalized systems of wage bargaining
and so on, in a "technical" way, if two conditions are
met. First, there must be a consensus on the qualification and
impartiality of the technicians who make these decisions. Insofar
as the Labor Justice is recognized be all parts as neutral and
impartial, and its criteria of good and evil are shared by all
those affected by it, its decisions will be accepted as
"technically" correct. The second condition is that the
conflicting parts must not try to escalate the scope of their
conflict from the private to the public area. If these two
conditions are not met the only way of keeping the issue within a
technical frame is through coercion - and this is when the
expression "technocracy" can be properly used. It
characterizes a "technical" handling of issues which
would tend to be political, but are contained through some form
of coercion.
In which conditions are the depoliticization and
technification of a given issue a real process, that is, a
process without technocratic connotations? It is important to
note that there is always a continuing process of politicization
and technification of issues of all kinds - the local
administration in the United States tends to become technical
nowadays, while issues of foreign affairs are moving rapidly from
the technical to the political sphere(9).
The essential condition for technification seems to be the
institutionalization of scientific and technical communities;
this institutionalization is, again, a function of time and of a
"reasonable" level of conflicts, which allows it to
grow mature without sclerosis, and to acquire value and prestige.
The implications of this process of transfer from the technical
to the political sphere, with a technocratic alternative, are
very significant. It has a direct bearing on questions such as
the role of the legislative, the development of bodies of central
planning, local and regional government, etc.
Another factor that influences this process is of a much more
difficult conceptualization. Samuel Huntington uses the
expression "praetorianism" to characterize societies in
which all groups try to play a direct political role in the
distribution of power and status throughout the political system.
Praetorianism is the opposite of institutionalization; it is
caused, he says, by the absence of political institutions, which
could mediate between some groups and the rest of the political
system.(10)
The lack of intermediate groups and the instability and
briefness of power and authority taken together, put a high
premium on rapid and direct access to central power and a low
premium on long-term loyalty to a less sensational but more
stable share of responsibilities and institutionalization.(11)
The consequence seems to be a downhill process of increasing
instability and praetorianism for the underdeveloped countries,
which can only be stopped by coercive means.
It is again Schattschneider who gives us a hint on an
alternative. He makes a brilliant analysis of the contribution of
American trade unions to the Democratic party, and the conclusion
is that what the party gains with this support is probably less
than what it loses for being identified as the party of "big
labor."(12) The conclusion
seems to be that political party is something more, and something
other than the sum of the interest groups which they aggregate.
There is a high cost in the total politicization of an interest
group and, in spite of examples such as Indonesia after Sukarno,
growing praetorianism is not a necessary future for a country
like Brazil. But the example of Indonesia is probably a warning
in the sense that, the further this process goes, the more
difficult it is to stop it, and the more predictable the final
technocratic and coercive outcome will be.
The general conclusion seems to be that at a given level of
political openness, the emphasis on the free flow of information,
and the gradual development and institutionalization of different
institutions are not only ethical principles but also functional
needs without which no political system can develop properly and
play its role in the search for the highest standards of life and
social participation in the contemporary underdeveloped world.
There is always the possibility of a coercive technocratization
of the political system, aiming at the implementation of given
policies of economic development, combined perhaps with a
long-term promise of political openness. The main attractiveness
of this alternative is its simplicity, but its ethical costs,
combined with its functional difficulties, are big enough to
justify a constant effort to avoid it.
4. Conclusions
The discussion so far can be summarized in terms of the links
between the flow of communications and the characteristics of the
political system and processes. One model suggests that a link
exists between a political system's openness to bargaining and
the free flow of information, and its ability to engage in a
process of decision making. The opposite model describes a closed
political system, in which demands are privatized, information is
channeled through intelligence-gathering agencies, and the
system's capability for decision making is impaired, although the
capability for policy implementation is increased. The first
model was said to be conducive to the institutionalization of
technical decision making bodies; in the second model, the
technical bodies tend to become technocratic. It is therefore
necessary to conclude with a brief discussion of the assumptions
implied in these models(13)
The crucial point seems to be the difference between
intelligence and information. The expression intelligence,"
as used in this context, has less the broad meaning of
"control of the environment" than the more specific
sense of "data gathering" of a specific type: namely,
the data necessary for developing the means to reach a given end.
Once the goal is defined, data gathering is essentially a
technical task. The definition of a task as "technical"
implies that the circle of participants in the decision is
frozen, the hierarchy of values is established, and value
differences are assumed not to exist. There are two ways of
defining a situation as technical, by institutionalization or by
superordination. In the first case, there is both developed
competence and social legitimation of the decision- making body;
in the second, the lack of legitimacy changes the technical into
the technocratic. Technocracy is thus sub- politicization - a
process by which the political content of politics is concealed
through its transformation into a simple operational decision.(14)
The term "information," as opposed to
"intelligence," was used here in the sense of a flow of
data referred to the ends, rather than to the means of political
action. The kind of data which flows in an
"information" situation refers precisely to the values
of the parts involved, the scope of the political community, the
rearrangement of technical structures, and so on. The exchange of
this kind of data is exactly what a political process is about,
and this is why there is a logical incompatibility between free
information flow, in this sense, and political closure. This is
also why the lack of information is in principle incompatible
with political decision making: without information, values and
goals are taken for granted.
This is not, however, the full picture. First, there is an
autonomy of the intelligence function. Technical knowledge also
brings information about ends because, even when the channels of
communication between man and man are closed, there can always be
channels open between man and "nature," be they
geographic, economic or even social. The notion that what one
expects determines the function of knowledge is not correct,
since information can always outgrow the expectations that may
exist about its content. The openness to unsuspected information
depends, however, on factors which go beyond the cognitive
aspects of the data flow: a highly bureaucratized intelligence-
gathering agency in a technocratic situation is more closed to
new information than a flexible and highly qualified technical
body in a less rigid context.(15)
Second, the linkage between information and political openness
can lead to an overestimation of the cognitive efficiency of the
political process. It is not true that every demand brings with
itself the information necessary for its satisfaction. A free
competitive political process is probably a necessary, but not a
sufficient condition for the satisfaction of the technical needs
of a modern complex society. This objection can be somewhat
reduced if one restricts the term "information" to the
meaning given here: a free political process is essential to the
circulation of political data about values, preferences and
relative strengths; this must not be mistaken with knowledge
necessary for the full implementation of these goals.
Third, a more profound objection may be that the suggested
connections between information flow and political bargaining
implies an overly restricted image of politics. Politics cannot
be reduced to bargaining - it also implies solidarity,
generosity, sacrifice, identifications, discoveries of new values
and new areas of solidarity and conflict. The usual concept of
politics as bargaining is not the same, however, as our view of
politics as a constant flow of information and interchanges on
values, preferences and goals. In its more traditional sense,
politics as bargaining implies a constant conflict over scarce
resources, according to some more or less well established rules
of the game. This model implies a basic consensus concerning
values, and an image of rigidity over time, which is alien to the
image suggested here. A truly open political system is able to
withstand not only hard bargaining over scarce values but also a
constant redefinition of these values, the bargainers and the
rules of the game. This type of political openness implies a kind
of stability which must be more deeply rooted, and much more
flexible, than the political stability based on superficial
consensus and reduced participation, which seems to have
satisfied the political scientists in the western world until
recent years.
Ultimately, the chances for political openness in a country
like Brazil seem to depend less on what will happen at the level
of social stratification and corresponding demands of
participation, than on what will happen inside the huge and
ever-growing governmental bureaucracy. The future of political
openness is probably not as much related to external controls and
pressures as it is to differentiation's and functional needs
developed inside the administrative apparatus as a whole. If this
is so, the next step in the analysis of the political development
of Brazil will be mainly a study of changing patterns of
authority and participation in large-scale organizations, rather
than the classic studies of political participation, ideologies,
political culture, and so on. It would be up to this new line of
studies to verify the empirical validity and historical chances
of the propositions contained in this overview of political
openness.
Notes
1. Reinhard Bendix (1956).
2. David E. Apter (1965).
3. Antônio Octávio Cintra and Fábio
Wanderley Reis (1966).
4. Harvard University Press (1962).
5. Barrington Moore (1966).
6. David E. Apter (1965), p. 300.
7. An example of the preponderance of
intelligence over information are the many difficulties brought
to the American government by its intelligence agency in the area
of foreign affairs, of which the Bay of Pigs incident is perhaps
the most notorious. The reliance of the American political
establishment on intelligence for internal affairs is much
smaller, and cannot remain for long when it occasionally occurs.
In Latin America, however, internal intelligence seems to be an
essential instrument of data gathering in military regimes. (This
was written before the Watergate affair brought up the startling
difficulties of an attempt to use systematic intelligence
operations in domestic affairs in the United States). Cf. Karl
Deutsch (l966a), and Peter Heintz (1964). For an application of
Heintz's model to Brazil see Alaor Passos (1968).
8. E. Schattschneider (1960), p. 3.
9. The depoliticization of the
international relations issues in the United States of 1958, as
related to questions on civil rights, is clearly shown by Miller
and Stokes in their article (1963). The correlations between the
perceptions the representatives have of the voters' attitudes and
the actual attitudes of the voters was of .63 for civil rights
issues, but fell to .19 on foreign relations issues. The
correlation between the voters' and representatives' attitudes on
foreign affairs was as low as .06.
10. Huntington (1968), p. 196.
11. Huntington (1968), pp. 196-97
12. E. Schattschneider (1960), p. 50 ff.
13. The following paragraphs benefit from
Prof. Karl Deutsch's comments on S. Schwartzman (1968), a paper
presented to the Rio Round Table of the International Political.
Science Association., October, 1969.
14. I owe to Prof. Hélio Jaguaribe this
precise conceptualization of technocracy.
15. This closure of well established
structures to new information is not a privilege, however, of
technocracies. Even purely scientific institutions have vested
interests to defend and are resistant to dissonant information.
Cf. Thomas S. Kuhn (1962).