The Determinants of Subnational Democracy in Brazil

While increasingly salient, there is still no consensus on the determinants of the democratic unevenness observed inside Brazil. In this article, we investigate the main determinants of state-level democracy across contemporary Brazil. Using original panel data covering the last three decades, we first describe the patterns of democracy across Brazilian states. We then take stock of the three most salient explanatory factors that have been argued to explain the variation of democracy within countries – modernization, informal rules and ideology. We test for structural factors such as the effect of economic development, and fiscal transfers. We examine the effect of agency and political dynasties; and we test for institutional effects using a party-weighted ideological score. By disentangling the determinants of subnational democracy, our findings have broader implications for understanding the challenges and opportunities inherent in sustaining competitive and inclusive politics in Brazil and Latin America more broadly.