October 1998 marked the tenth anniversary of the promulgation of Brazil’s most recent democratic constitution—and the debates about how to reform that same constitution have been going on just as long. The continuing efforts at constitutional reform in Brazil suggest the gravity of institutional choice in new democracies. The importance of “getting institutions right” is underscored, in political science, by the notion that institutional choices can undermine or solidify democratic rule.

Federalism has increasingly shaped Brazilian politics in the 1990s. Because the military regime of 1964 to 1985 heavily centralized government in Brasília, civilian political forces since 1985, in reaction, have expanded decentralization in the name of representation and participation. Institutional reforms, free-market (“neoliberal”) policies, and privatizations since 1990 have moved the country away from the legacy of statist authoritarian rule. The executive has lost power to the legislative and judicial branches, the union to states and municipalities, and the state to society, private enterprise, and market forces. The Constitution of 1988 recognized the local government units called municípios (loosely, municipalities) as component parts of the federation and shifted considerable political power and tax resources from the federal government to the states and municipalities (Selcher 1989).

Brazil is changing rapidly under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Cardoso’s watershed election in October 1994 allowed Brazil to resume the agenda of neoliberal economic reform first initiated by the disgraced former president, Fernando Collor de Mello, who was impeached in 1992. The size of Cardoso’s electoral majority, the breadth of the party coalition that backed him, and the consistently neoliberal programmatic content of his legislative agenda in 1995 and 1996 signified to many observers that Brazil was embarking on a fundamental transformation of its political economy. To call this a “paradigm shift” or the “adoption of a new development model” may not be hyperbole: after fits and starts in the early 1990s, Brazil under Cardoso appears to be definitively abandoning the dirigiste, import-substituting model of the past 60 years in favor of a model based on market reforms and a drastic reduction in the role of the state.

Like many other Latin American business communities, Brazilian business leaders sharply increased their political mobilization in the 1980s. They were responding to the context of economic and policymaking uncertainty that emerged in the New Republic (1985), the regime following the end of military rule. Two broad concerns lay at the heart of their mobilizing efforts. First, business leaders had come to believe that Brazil needed a new strategic program for economic development. Import substitution industrialization was widely perceived as an exhausted model. Thus, a number of business leaders believed it was necessaty to begin a dialogue about the country’s developmental priorities. These business leaders, moreover, hoped to reverse the tendency under the Ernest0 Geisel administration (1964–85) to exclude business groups from policy making.

In examining politics, legislatures, and elected officials, scholars often make a distinction between descriptive and substantive representation. In the former, representatives share the social or demographic characteristics of the represented (Pitkin 1967, 60–91; Mansbridge 1996). In the latter, representatives pursue policies favorable to the interests of the represented (Swain 1993, 5; Lublin 1997, 12). From the perspective of these scholars, substantive representation may be achieved without descriptive representation. At the same time, these two types of representation are not mutually exclusive.

Reform agendas are no novelty in Brazilian politics. Perhaps the first “reform agenda” was foisted on Brazil by the Marquis de Pombal during the colonial period (Maxwell 1995). In the independence period during the Second Empire (1840–89), reforms were frequent, especially after the Triple Alliance War in the 1870s and 1880s, as successive cabinets labored under strong pressures for change.