Patterns of Democratic Resilience and Civil-Military Relations in Brazil and the US

Brazil and the US have experienced democratic backsliding in the governments of Jair Bolsonaro (2019-2022) and Donald Trump (2017-2021 and 2025-2029), but the ways for responding to it differ significantly, as well as who has been putting pressure on whom to take authoritarian measures. While the Brazilian judicial system has been able of holding accountable those in charge of trying a coup in 2023, with a trial and prisons even of Bolsonaro himself, the US institutions have allowed Trump to do whatever he wants. The sources of authoritarian pressure are also different. As a military, Bolsonaro put pressure on civilian institutions, backed by sectors of the Armed Forces, to resist his authoritarian measures and behavior. In the US, the pressure comes from the civilians, and the military are who have to demonstrate their loyalty to the Constitution. The paper reconstructs these scenarios using process tracing and tries to explain why, contrary to one might expect, Brazilian democracy has been more resilient. The findings show that the institutional design and the dispersion of power derived from it have allowed the Brazilian control institutions to resist the authoritarian pressure.