Brazilian democracy is in the spotlight of the North American political science community. The renewed interest in Brazilian democracy represents a change in perspective in relation to both democracy and Brazilian politics. Brazil democratized in 1985 after more than 20 years of authoritarianism, and the restoration of democracy produced a deep change in the country's social and political organization. In 1988, a new constitution was enacted, introducing new directives for social policies and new forms of political participation that profoundly altered the institutional configuration of the country. However, within North American academic circles, a deep pessimism with Brazilian democracy and the new constitution emerged. A few authors claimed that Brazilian democracy generated a “dysfunctional political system” and that the National Constituent Assembly imposed severe constraints on governability. This was the view that generated a collection of essays edited by Peter Kingstone and Timothy Power called Democratic Brazil (2000). However, since the year 2000, the Brazilian economy has thrived, and the government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (“Lula”) has become a symbol of political stability in the developing world. The need for a new evaluation of Brazilian democracy has thus emerged. Democratic Brazil Revisited provides the English-speaking academic community with a very different picture than the one presented in the earlier Democratic Brazil. While focused on the Brazilian political system, it also covers other dimensions such as state/civil society relations.

A second issue has been present in the literature on Brazil, namely, racial inequality. Brazil has the largest black population outside of Africa and since the late 1940s has provided a different path for race relations than the one pursued in the United States. In spite of the fact that the country never had a racial politics demarcating black and white, Brazil shows large inequalities in access to income and education that generates a hierarchy among the different racial groups. However, for a very long time, racial inclusion was not part of the Brazilian political agenda and became so only in the last 10 years. The debate concerning how racial inclusion and exclusion affects democracy is the key concern of two other books discussed in this review, Bernd Reiter's Negotiating Democracy in Brazil and Brazil's New Racial Politics, edited by Reiter and Gladys Mitchell. While the Brazilian constitution did not generate any policy of inclusion for the black population, since the 2002 Durban meeting Brazil has introduced several affirmative action policies at the university level. Today, more than 50 universities have affirmative action. Last April, the Brazilian Congress approved the Statute on Racial Equality, effectively placing an end to a policy of nonlegislation on race that had prevailed in the country since the abolition of slavery. These two books try to integrate racial politics in the overall debate about democracy in Brazil, and they also provide the North American reader with the first comparative evaluation of the results of these policies. Overall, the two books leave behind a tendency within North American studies to approach Brazilian race politics with an American paradigm, missing the most important characteristics of race politics in Brazil. They argue that in Brazil, color rather than race establishes a pattern of both inclusion and exclusion that needs to be disassembled. In this review, I first cover the debate on democracy and the organization of the political system and then move to the politics of racial inclusion.

Brazilian democracy is the result of a long process that started in 1974 and came to a close in 1985. This process determined the political system of democratic Brazil. None of the parties that existed before the democratic breakdown of 1964 survived the 21 years of authoritarianism. Today Brazil has four major parties, two of which express the politics of democratization (PMBD and PFL) and two of which express the postdemocratization politics (PSDB and P.T.). The political system created after democratization, called “coalition presidentialism,” is a system in which the president is elected with a solid majority although his party controls less than 20% of the seats in the National Congress. This has been the case with Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Lula, who crafted broad coalitions in order to guarantee governability. Broad coalitions eventually lead to pork and to government inefficiency, this being the major charge made against Brazilian democracy.

The contributors to Democratic Brazil Revisited are all by Brazilian and North American political scientists who acknowledge the new positive phase of Brazilian democracy. However, disagreements on the performance of the new Brazilian democracy remain important throughout this book, which is divided into three sections: one on the Workers' Party (P.T.) in power, one on the institutional debate on democracy in Brazil, and one on policy changes. My focus is on the evolution of the Brazilian political system and the Workers' Party.

The evaluation of the Brazilian political system is a difficult task. This system produces stability at a very high cost. The state needs to engage in pork politics in order to build majorities in Congress. The trade-off between governability and pork politics can receive different interpretations. In their piece for the book, Barry Ames, Andy Baker, and Lucio R. Rennó show that the Brazilian political system still has trade-offs at the electoral level: Candidates for federal deputy seek support at the local level and after being elected, garner public funds to their basis of support. However, this view should not be central to an analysis of democracy in Brazil, according to Brazilian authors such as Fabiano Santos and Márcio Grijó Vilarouca. In their contribution, “Political Institutions and Governability from FHC to Lula,” they argue that in spite of the pork and trade-offs, the system works well, particularly if we think about the executive branch's rate of success in approving legislation and maintaining party discipline. The picture that emerges from the book is of a political system that is working in terms of governability and electoral coherence, though at a high price in terms of party coherence and administrative performance. This leads us to the approaches on Lula's government and the P.T (Workers' Party).

Historically, the P.T. was seen as a party that had departed from the main practices of the Brazilian political system; in other words, it had not resorted to clientelism or adhered to the pork politics of the Brazilian Congress. In her article for the edited volume, Wendy Hunter shows how the party used to focus on “discipline, loyalty and cohesion” throughout its political history. For her, Lula's government represented an adaptation of the P.T. to the main practices of the Brazilian political system. Lula and the P.T. chose to govern with small parties and not to leave the most important ministries up for grabs, particularly the ones in the area of social policies. However, co-optation of small parties in the Brazilian Congress proved difficult, and the so-called mensalão scandal ensued. Hunter mentions “mensalão” as a systematic attempt at corruption by the P.T.: “Mensalão and related malfeasance were far more systematic and sustained than anything President Fernando Collor has done. Corruption charges ultimately hurt the party more than they hurt Lula himself, tarnishing its image of standard-bearer of ethics in politics. They led to the resignation of Lula's chief of staff Jose Dirceu as well as the president of the party, Jose Genuíno and of several other historic P.T. figures” (p. 29). Hunter's view of Lula's government and of the adaptation of the P.T. to the mainstream culture of the Brazilian political system seems highly exaggerated. Mensalão could never be compared to Collor's scandals in terms of the scale of the misuse of public resources as well as its impact on public finances. But the real issue is that the author misses the most important consequence of mensalão: It led to a separation between Lula's government and the P.T. party machine. As Hunter mentions, after mensalão important P.T. leadership was insulated from the government. At the same time, other important P.T. leaders with more professional profiles assumed key roles within the government. This is the movement that is at the root of the amazing success of Lula's government, a point missed by the author.

Overall, it is possible to evaluate the articles of the book in terms of a much more realistic assessment of the workings of Brazilian democracy. Brazil today has a political system that makes a great difference in the lives of poor Brazilians, and the book sheds new light on the subject. Brazil is presented as a successful democracy in spite of mixed political practices. This is a step forward in relation to previous analyses by the same authors. However, the authors could have provided a better diagnosis of Brazilian democracy if they had made a better assessment of the evolution of the Workers Party.

The new Brazil is in charge of providing solutions to government problems as in any other democracy, and, at the same time, of proposing solutions that can disassemble centuries-old structures of exclusion. One of the main issues today is race inclusion. Brazil's New Racial Politics and Negotiating Democracy in Brazil focus on the relationship between democracy and race. They both share the view that “it is not inequality per se that renders Brazilian democracy problematic. It is the constant efforts of historically included groups to uphold inequality and protect their privileged access to citizenship that casts a deep shadow over Brazilian democracy” (Negotiating, p. 3). The argument claims that certain groups long ago established a structure of inclusion and exclusion that gave them privileged access to the state. This structure continues to operate in democratic Brazil. This argument, which is a serious one, is corroborated in different ways in the two books, in spite of their shared authorship. It is important to establish the parameters for an analysis of the relation between race and democracy in Brazil in order to evaluate the arguments contained in the two books.

The role of slavery is key to an understanding of the formation of Brazil. Slavery was comprehensive, and no other country employed so many slaves in so many activities. However, from the very beginning, the Brazilian slave system and relations among the races were different from the well-known U.S. model. Race relations were more complicated in Brazil, as the two books acknowledge. As Mitchell states in her contribution to Brazil's New Racial Politics, “The Brazilian state did not impose an official policy of legal segregation against afro-Brazilians” (p. 36). As a matter of fact, the Brazilian state did not legislate on race relations, either before or after the abolition of slavery. Between 1888 and 1988 when the new democratic constitution was enacted, no law on race issues was passed. In addition, “black and brown have historically represented distinct color identities,” as Seth Racusen points out in his own contribution to the volume (p. 89). In spite of racial exclusion, the Brazilian model provided blacks with a private strategy of social integration through racial miscegenation, a strategy that has always been available in Brazil. Thus, the Brazilian state interfered very little on race issues, making the tackling of race relations in public more difficult and more contentious politically. However, race-based inequality is a clear phenomenon, with 41,7% of the blacks considered poor, a percentage that is higher in the poorest regions of Brazil like the Northeast (see Negotiating Democracy, p. 23). The question that needs to be answered is this: Is there a process of structural racialized violence and poverty in Brazil, as Reiter claims in Negotiating Democracy, or has the Brazilian state been unable so far to disassemble centuries-old structures of exclusion?

In the edited volume, Reiter makes the argument for comprehensive racialized exclusion. He goes through many aspects of Brazilian society, from urban violence to participatory budgeting in order to make the same argument, namely, “the continued force of domination of the historically excluded” (p. 123). Such a structural argument about Brazilian society is made with the analysis of just one case, that of the city of Salvador, in which attempts at social innovation and broad political participation failed until 2004. However, the point is not whether participation and democratic innovation have failed in Salvador but why it happened and what it tells us about Brazilian democracy. Reiter's analysis is comprehensive and simplistic. In his analysis of Salvador in the state of Bahia, he claims that the city epitomizes exclusion in Brazil: “Focusing on the ways Bahians reproduce inclusion and exclusion tells us so much about how this is done in Brazil in general. Bahia is after all, a place where the mechanisms used to defend privilege, while constantly employed amongst all Brazilians, have been allowed to blossom more brilliantly and extravagantly” (p. 146). The argument seems to have two major flaws: One is the uncorroborated transformation of empirical research into structural analysis. The other is the uncorroborated transformation of the most problematic case of social participation into a general rule for racial exclusion. Both arguments do not stand and are contradicted by the the edited volume, which shows Brazil's contentious racial politics in a different light. Support versus criticism of racial inclusion is the theme of the book, particularly in regard to affirmative action policies. In his excellent piece, Racusen summarizes his view that “affirmative action surely represents a paradigm shift in Brazil. Affirmative action represents the first material incentive in Brazil to identify as black or brown, an important counterweight to racial democracy (p. 112). Thus, what Reiter claims to be structural inequality is shown to be a political dispute in a new democracy.

Overall, the three books present a clear picture of the process of construction of democracy in Brazil. They represent an important adjustment in the view held within the Anglo-Saxon academy on Brazil. They show the evolution of a new democracy that is struggling to create structures for social and political equality. If the results so far fall short of the standards of old and well-established democracies, they nevertheless represent a huge advancement in terms of the creation of new democracy in the developing world.