DEEPENING DEMOCRACY: POPULAR

MOVEMENT NETWORKS,
CONSTITUCIONAL REFORM, AND
RADICAL URBAN REGIMENES IN
CONTEMPORANY BRAZIL.
South americas recent democratic transitions provided fertile
terrain for the growth of a wide variety of social movements
and other forms of collective resistance to regressive
economic policies, cultural authoritarianism, and repressive
military regimes. In brazil new movents of the urband and
rural poor, along whith other grass-roots movements linked to
the labor movement, the human rights movement, and the
feminist, black, gay, and environmental movements
articulated democratic demanda for expanded citizenship,
social justice, and political and cultural transformation, adding
new dimennsions to the struggle against military authoritarian
rule. As negotiations between civilian and military elites
increasingly narrowed the scope of democratization, some
observers vested great hopes in the transformative potential
embodied by brazil s new social movements, heralding them
as portenders of a deeper, more thoroughgoing, more genuine
democracy-the last, best hope for real democratizatin.
Since the first civillian administratin in 21 years was installed
in 1985, brazilian movements arguably have contributed to
the democratizatin of social and cultural life by challenging
hegemonic discourses and chipping away at socital patterns
of domination and subordination. But brazil democratic
institutions remain elite dominated. The political class
enthroned in the new democracy shows remarkable continuity
whith its authoritarian predecessor. The party and electoral

legislation favor weak partiens, limit accountabillity, and

encourage personalistic, clientelistic, and individualistic styles
of representantin. Acces to and influence in policymaking
arenas remain restricted to powerful national and trans
nationalized economic interesets and traditional clientele
newworks. And most brazilians continue to be excluded from
meaninfungl participation in the formal political process. At
the institutional level, at leats, the hopes once vestd in the
democratizing potential of grass- roots and liberation
movements would appear to have been dashed. Most
movement demands expanded citizenship and social justice,
moreover, have been indefinitely deferred. Though some basic
civil liberties were restorend and suffrage was extended to
illiterate adult citizens in 1985, the institutional and
ideological continuities between authoritarian and
posthauthoritarian politics have severel y restricted the scop
eof social, political, and economic reform underthaken by
brazil civilian rulers. The structural adjustiment and neoliberal
economic policies implemented in brazil new republic ,
moreover, differ little from those pursued ander authoritarian
rule, further dampening movement hopes thas
democratization would bring about a new politics of
redistribution and thus expand social citizenship.
But, as i will suggets, struggle over the nature and future
course of brazilian democratization is hardly over and social
movents are still actively cointesting the would-be
entrenchment of restricted, elite democracy. Radical
democratic alternatives, inspired by grass- roots social
movement practices, grounded in the poor and working
classes, and articulated by social movement networks and
progressive political parties, are very much alive brazil today,
as in several other south American nations, in countries as
diverse as brazil. Colombia, venezuela, and, Uruguay,
coalitions of social movements, and new or reconstituted

parties of the left are articulating competing conceptions of

social and political, citizenship and democracy, though these
democratic experiments currebtly are largely restricted to the
local level .
Such efforts to deepen south american democracy stand out
as islands of resistance to the tide of neoliberalism and elitedominated democratization thas has swept the region since
the mid 1980. Deep-ening political democracy- especially in
dependent capitalist societies characterized by egregious
social and economic inequalities entails devising politicalinstitutional arrangements that redistribute information about,
acces to, and influence in the governmental arenas in which
collectively binding policy decisions are made. In latin
america, even under formaly democratic political regimes,
such information, acces, and influence have been enjoyed by
a very small, priviliged fraction of the population but
effectively have been denied to subaltern groups and classes.
Since the return of civilian rule in brazil in the mid- 1980,
social movement activist and their political allies in the church
and on the left have struggled to develop concrete, if not yet
fully coherent, strategies four promotion alternatives to tho
restricted democratic regime envi sioned by the military and
civilian elites who seek to control the democratization process,
their strategies are the focus of this chapter. My principal,
empirical examples are drawn from metropolitan. Sao pauloa
megacity af some 15 millions inhabitans that accounts for
close to a third of brazil industrial production. I first trace the
evolution of urban popular movements is san paulo over the
course of brazil transition, underscoring the strategic role of
political articulators in weaving together disparate urban
struggles, other social movements, and progressive opposition
political currents to advance an alternative radical democratic
vision. I the turn to an anlysis of how such movement worked
to expand the institutional parameters of brazil a

postauthoritarian regime through their participation in the

process of drafting new federal, state, and municipal
constitutions. Focusing on local politics, the final section
discusses the efforts of the workens party (partido dos
trabalhadore, or pt) popular democratic municial
administrations to implement an alternative democratic projec
at the local level, a project whose professed goal is to
transform and democratize the relationship between poor and
working- class citizens and the state. Foundded in 1980 by
militant trade unionists social movement activists,
practitioners of liberation theology, menbers of marxist
political organizations and leftist intellectuals, the pt today
defines itself as a democratic and socialist mass party. As a
party born of popular movements, its professend goal is to
grive institutional expression to such movements and thus
dispute the hegemony of brazil political and economic elites
through both institutional and social strugle. Since it assumed
the reins of municipal power is san paulo and over two dozen
other brazilian cities afther impressive victories in the
municipal elections of 1998, the pt has been struggling to put
its long avowed goal of popular democracy into practice.