Abstract
The article explores the strategic use of the Mercosur's Democratic Agreement, established by the Ushuaia Protocol in 1998. Although this agreement demands the existence of democratic institutions to be part of Mercosur, it doesn't explicit what is the democracy definition to be used. Therefore, the article aims to answer the following question: does the absence of a democracy definition in the Democratic Agreement allow its strategic use by Mercosur members and affect the interaction among them and their results? If yes, how? The main hypothesis affirms that the Democratic Agreement is strategically used by the Bloc's members: actor's political and economic interests, under certain conditions of the institutional and political contexts, are strategically translated into preferences for different democracy's definitions. It seeks to analyze how the different interests of the actors are changed into political preferences to verify whether, and how, the Democratic Agreement has been used by strategic action, sometimes through the procedural definition, or sometimes through the substantial definition of democracy. Two events are observed in two levels of analyses - domestic and regional. At first, it approaches the decision-making process in the Brazilian Senate about the admission of Venezuela in the Mercosur. After, it analyses the Paraguayan suspension of the Bloc after the destitution of the president Fernando Lugo in 2012. These two events are part of a single case, since the admission of Venezuela to Mercosur has only become permanent after Paraguay's suspension, the only veto point at the regional level. It has been shown that the actors that used the substantial definition of democracy to support, at the domestic level, the Venezuela's admission to Mercosur have done a strategic turnover, at the regional level, to the procedural definition in the decision-making process of Paraguay's suspension of the Bloc, in order to impede the action of the only veto player to the Venezuela's admission to Mercosur.
KEYWORDS:
Democratic Agreement; Mercosur; Strategic Action; Democracy; Interests and preferences
Fonte: As autoras, a partir de 
Fonte: As autoras, a partir de