The long duration and the gradual character of the Brazilian transition to democracy have made this process the object of study taken up from various perspectives, and has thus turned it into a privileged case for the verification of hypothesis regarding the "third wave" of democratization. The main objective of this article is the analysis of the Brazilian transition, which starts in 1974, relating it to the strong slants present in the analytical perspectives on regime change that have been formulated over the last decade.
Brazilian politics; authoritarianism; transition; democracy; elites; military officers