Within Brazilian Political Sociology, there are four different views on state Administrative Departments, apparatuses created by the Vargas dictatorship in 1939 as a complement to the system of federal interventors. On the basis of these interpretations, there are also four different ways of looking at the New State regime (1937-1945) itself. Views on administrative departments diverge both according to observers' convictions regarding the way the authoritarian political system functions and according to which of these agencies' roles (political, economic, bureaucratic) the analyst considers as most salient. In this essay I analyze existing interpretations on this issue; I emphasize that which I consider to be their major difficulties and limitations in explaining the relationship between old state political elites and the new federal political institutions springing up in the Brazil of the 1940s.
New State; Getúlio Vargas; dictatorship; State Administrative Departments; Brazilian Political Sociology