This article discusses Brazilian political history, from the military-political coup in 1964 through Fernando Henrique Cardoso´s second presidential term. Written in the form of an explanatory summary, three themes are joined in a narrative on the transition from a military dictatorship to a liberal democratic regime: the military, the political and the bureaucratic. We seek to establish causal inferences linking content, methods and the reasons for and meaning of political change beginning in 1974 with the quality of the democratic regime as it emerged during the 1990s. Our explanation is premised on the need to analyze two different but interconnected spaces of the political: transformation in the institutional systems of the State apparatus and the evolution of the broader political scenario. We conclude that neo-liberal economic reforms not only dispensed with true political reform able to increase representation and with reform of the State in ways that would favor participation. Neo-liberal reforms also continued to be premised on authoritarian arrangements of governing processes inherited from the previous political period.
Brazilian politics; military dictatorship; political transition; democracy; neoliberalism
