Divergent Paths of Democratic Self-Defence: Comparing Institutional Responses to the Far Right in Brazil and the United States

This paper examines the contrasting strategies of democratic self-defence in Brazil and the United States, two major democracies that have faced sustained challenges to their institutional frameworks by far-right forces. Both countries have experienced significant pressures on their democratic institutions —most notably, efforts by incumbent presidents to block democratic alternation in office by electoral means—, yet their responses have taken notably different forms. While existing theories often associate democratic resilience with wealth, institutional consolidation, and longevity, recent developments suggest that these structural conditions alone do not determine outcomes. Using a comparative framework, this study explores how the interplay between institutional structures and political agency has shaped responses to perceived democratic threats in each case. In the United States, constitutional mechanisms of accountability have operated within a highly polarized political environment, in which partisan alignments and organizational incentives have constrained elite coordination and limited the scope of institutional action. In Brazil, by contrast, a multi-actor coalition engaged more actively in interpreting and enforcing constitutional norms following challenges to the democratic order. Rather than treating these outcomes as simple cases of institutional failure or success, the paper emphasizes how institutional design, political incentives, legal frameworks, and elite strategies interact to enable or constrain democratic self-defence. The paper argues that democratic self-defence should be understood as a contingent political process shaped jointly by structural contexts and the choices of political actors. This perspective contributes to ongoing debates on democratic resilience and backsliding by showing how similar challenges can generate divergent responses across different configurations of institutions, incentives, and agency.