Understanding the Changes in Governance and Participation in Brazil

This paper examines the rise and fall of participatory democracy in Brazil, when much of the literature on the topic still considers the country a laboratory of democratic innovations with practices of citizenship inclusion and institutional inclusion. Brazil captured the world’s attention because people there have achieved great accomplishments in democratic governance in the past 20 years, but in the past two, the conservative Temer administration has promoted a systematic dismantling of of hard-won participatory spaces. The paper a brief contextual analysis of the golden years of the centre-left Worker’s Party administration and then it moves to the eroded trust on the Worker’s Party and the reorganisation of conservative movements in congress, which had its first big win with the impeachment on thin charges of the democratically elected president, Dilma Rousseff. The data I present in this paper indicates how the come to power of a right-wing government aligned with the international neoliberal agenda and averse to democratic participation is undoing participatory citizenship in Brazil.