This article aims to analyze the relationship between political regime and the organizational and legal structures of intelligence activities in Brazil. According to minimum aggregate measures, the country is approaching a threshold that allows one to consider it a consolidated democratic regime. This is expressed in a legal framework developed for the intelligence field, with explicit mechanisms for coordination, supervision, and oversight. However, there are persistent problems in the performance of new organizational structures that are also consistent with the challenges of democratic consolidation. The article demonstrates how the use of more disaggregated measurements of democratic consolidation and state capability allow a clearer association between the political regime’s characteristics and the changes observed in different countries in the field of intelligence in the last fifteen years.
democracy; intelligence services; political regime; oversight
