4 - Brazil

Summary

This chapter presents a novel electoral strategy by which landowners have successfully influenced policymaking in democratic Brazil: a multiparty congressional caucus known as the Bancada Ruralista. It shows how agrarian elites finance the campaigns, encourage other producers to support, and subsidize the work of like-minded legislators independently of their partisan affiliation, as well as how legislators of agrarian origin collaborate across partisan lines. The chapter argues that Brazil’s Agrarian Caucus is the product of agrarian elites’ collective efforts to build a channel of electoral representation to protect their interests under democracy in a context of high political fragmentation. The threat of radical land reform during the democratic transition prompted landowners to engage in electoral politics. However, high political fragmentation among the agrarian elite rendered party-building unfeasible. The chapter discusses the advantages of an electoral, candidate-centered, multipartisan strategy over other strategies available to economic elites in democracies such as lobbying or party-building, and illustrates these advantages through the analysis of the Forest Code reform of 2012.