Mancur Olson’s The Rise and Decline of Nations shows how small groups can undermine broader prosperity.
In recent years, a broad sentiment has emerged that America needs to build more stuff. This conversation arguably began in housing, where intense shortages in economically important areas like the Bay Area or New York City have driven exploding rents. Pretty soon major economists and then activists hit on expanded housing construction as the key solution, and they’ve had remarkable success in states like Oregon and California despite the dedicated opposition of incumbent homeowners and other NIMBYs.
But the “abundance agenda” is about much more than housing. Moving away from fossil fuels requires building massively: building vast new solar arrays, far more wind turbines, and huge new transmission lines. Those projects are no less threatened by NIMBYs than housing developments. Last year, Maine residents voted to block a transmission line bringing clean hydropower from Quebec. Offshore wind projects reliably spark opposition from coastal communities who value their views more than clean power.
So too with health care: The US has fewer doctors than most of its peers, which helps drive high salaries and thus high medical costs.
And so too with transportation as well: Mass transit construction is vastly more expensive in the US than abroad, leaving America with transport infrastructure that’s frankly embarrassing and easily surpassed by, say, wartime Kyiv.
These are all interlinked problems, and perhaps the best place to start understanding these challenges is a short book from 1982 by economist Mancur Olson, humbly titled The Rise and Decline of Nations.
Why do small cabals win?
The book, recently rereleased by Yale University Press, is a sequel of sorts to Olson’s better-known The Logic of Collective Action. That work, published in 1965, sought to explain why even rational, well-informed actors might not work together, despite collaboration being in the best interest of a given group of actors.
“Collective action problems,” to use a term Olson popularized, are everywhere. Everyone would have been better off in the early days of the pandemic with universal masking. But for each individual, the decision to mask may have seemed irrational: It imposed some discomfort on them for a hard-to-perceive reduction in their personal risk of contracting Covid.
Climate change is another collective action failure. We’d all be better off as a global community with lower greenhouse emissions, but it’s easy for each individual to ask, “Is my plane ticket really going to make a difference on climate change?”
But here’s the thing: Collective action does happen anyway. Olson’s second book is all about cases where people do manage to collaborate. These are typically cases where the group coordinating is small and homogenous, with clearly shared interests. They are, in other words, cases of special interest groups.
Olson, seeking to evade the negative connotation of “special interests,” uses the term “distributive coalition” instead, and once one groks the concept, one starts seeing distributive coalitions everywhere. And they seem particularly important in thinking about abundance, because distributive coalitions are the dedicated enemies of abundance.
The American Medical Association, which has historically fought tooth and nail to reduce residency spots and limit the procedures nurse practitioners can perform, all in a cynical effort to keep doctor salaries high? Distributive coalition.
Neighborhood alliances of homeowners seeking to block new construction that their fear disrupts “neighborhood character” and lowers their property values? Distributive coalitions. (Here’s one particularly blood-boiling recent example in DC.)
The union/shipping industry alliance that fights for the Jones Act, a law that was starving Puerto Rico of fuel this week before the island received an emergency waiver, and costs tens of billions of dollars in lost GDP every year? Distributive coalition.
Of course, Olson did not come up with the idea of special interest groups. What he did do is formalize the reasons why they succeed in a uniquely compelling way.
As Harvard economist Ed Glaeser summarizes in an introduction to the new edition of Olson’s book, “The essential ingredient leading to the success of these groups is that their benefits flow to a concentrated set of members while their costs are imposed on society at large. Those costs are spread sufficiently wide to preclude sufficient public anger to stifle these efforts or create a backlash-based countermovement.”
How do you beat the cabals?
It’s hard to find an optimistic vision in Olson’s work. Tellingly, when Matt Yglesias wrote about Rise and Decline recently, his cheeriest takeaway was Olson’s observation that this kind of growth in interest group power is only possible in relatively stable societies.
Part of Germany and Japan’s rise in the postwar era relative to the US was that the Allies had bombed those countries to hell and, especially in Germany, uprooted most of their existing civic institutions. Once the rubble cleared, many former government and business leaders had been sentenced to prison, and the de-Nazification process was complete, so there weren’t many distributive coalitions left to deal with. Postwar Germany and Japan didn’t have the time to develop our kind of corrupt interest group politics. And, y’know, at least the US’s problems are a sign that we weren’t bombed to hell too?
Matt’s a very good friend but he can also be a pretty gloomy guy on occasion, so I’ll try to offer a cheerier lesson from Olson. Coursing through Rise and Decline is an opposing notion to distributive coalitions: encompassing coalitions.
These are distributive coalitions that manage to represent a broad, not narrow, swathe of a community or nation. They’re much harder to build than narrow coalitions. But they do exist. Olson cites the example of unions in Scandinavia, which tend to represent the whole class of workers, not specific industries. That means those unions, unlike some in America, have a broad interest in economic growth that can supersede the narrow interests of a specific industry. If repealing the Jones Act boosts economic growth and wage growth overall, an encompassing union will support repeal, even if its shipbuilding members raise a stink.
I think the rise of mass online communication might make encompassing coalitions easier to form. Recall Glaeser’s observation that distributive coalitions succeed when “sufficient public anger” or “backlash” do not arise, because of diffuse costs. And true, the internet does not make the costs of the Jones Act any less diffuse.
But whereas the newspaper and TV era only allowed a few national stories to gain prominence, the current news ecosystem allows dozens to, which provides more opportunities for outrage. That’s, of course, irritating, but it’s also an opportunity.
The Jones Act preventing much-needed fuel from reaching a hurricane-stricken Puerto Rico wouldn’t likely have made it to Walter Cronkite’s desk in 1968. But because there are many more national news outlets targeting increasingly niche subsets of national news consumers, the Jones Act fiasco is able to be national news in 2022, to foster broad outrage, and to culminate in the White House suspending the Jones Act temporarily.
Or, to take an example close to my heart, the distributive coalition of tax preparers who have fought tooth and nail against a free or automatic tax filing option took a blow recently with the passage of a provision instructing the IRS to look into setting up just such a free system. I think this measure succeeded largely due to the efforts of ProPublica’s Justin Elliott and Paul Kiel to publicize and make a scandal of TurboTax and H&R Block’s efforts to make taxes more complicated. Elliott and Kiel helped build an encompassing coalition that refused to accept the diffuse costs of the tax preparers’ regime.
This model cannot work on every issue, of course. But it gives me hope that the Mancur Olson doom loop can be evaded — not least because it suggests that journalists like me have a small role to play in solving the problem.
A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!
Merrill v. Milligan could eliminate one of the few remaining nationwide safeguards against rigged legislative maps.
Cases alleging racial gerrymandering are notoriously difficult to litigate, much less to win. And the path that brought Merrill v. Milligan to the Supreme Court — the justices will hear the case on Tuesday — shows why.
The lawsuit deals with Alabama’s congressional maps, which would give only one of the state’s seven congressional districts — 14 percent of the state’s total population — a real chance of electing a Black representative, even though African Americans make up about 27 percent of Alabama’s population.
In a decision handed down in January, a panel of three federal judges spent 225 pages walking through the nauseatingly complex legal test for identifying such gerrymanders laid out by the Supreme Court’s decision in Thornburg v. Gingles (1986). Ultimately, that panel — which includes two judges appointed by then-President Donald Trump — concluded that Alabama must draw new maps that would effectively double the number of Black US House members from Alabama.
Indeed, this panel, despite being dominated by Trump appointees, wrote that they did not view the question of whether Alabama violated the federal Voting Rights Act to be “a close one.”
Just a couple of weeks after the lower court ruled, however, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to reinstate the challenged maps for the 2022 midterms. The Court will now hear arguments about whether to reinstate those maps permanently. Given the Court’s earlier decision in this case, and most of the justices’ record of hostility toward Voting Rights Act claims, there isn’t much doubt who will prevail in this case.
But a lot still hinges on how the Court might decide to rule in Alabama’s favor — assuming that the five most conservative justices follow the same path they took last winter. In its brief defending its congressional maps, Alabama briefly nods to a narrow, fact-bound argument that could allow the Supreme Court to bless its maps without having to tear up any existing law. But it also pushes several arguments that would require the Court to overrule Gingles, neutralize much of what remains of the Voting Rights Act, and potentially eliminate nearly all federal safeguards against racial gerrymanders.
Alabama’s most radical arguments would effectively abolish the Voting Right Act’s safeguards against racial gerrymandering. They would preserve separate limits that the Constitution’s 14th and 15th Amendments impose on state election laws that discriminate on the basis of race. But, as anyone even vaguely familiar with the history of the Jim Crow South would know, these constitutional safeguards did virtually nothing to prevent the South from suppressing the Black vote.
In the worst-case scenario for voting rights, in other words, Merrill could enable states to draw maps that destroy nonwhite voters’ ability to cast a ballot that actually means anything.
Winning a racial gerrymandering lawsuit is already quite difficult
A few years ago, in Rucho v. Common Cause (2019), the Court’s Republican appointees declared that federal courts may do nothing to stop partisan gerrymandering — that is, legislative maps that give an unfair advantage to Democrats or Republicans. But the Voting Rights Act still provides important safeguards against racial gerrymandering, maps that give voters of a particular race an unfair advantage over voters of a different race.
While direct challenges to partisan gerrymanders are no longer permitted in federal court (they do sometimes prevail in some state courts), racial gerrymandering lawsuits often have significant partisan implications. In Alabama, for example, 89 percent of Black voters supported Democratic President Joe Biden in 2020, while 77 percent of white voters supported Republican Donald Trump, according to CNN’s exit polls. So a map that targets Black voters will also weaken Democrats.
This all said, the law currently governing racial gerrymandering is a bit of a mess. Although Chief Justice John Roberts dissented from the Court’s decision reinstating Alabama’s maps for the midterm election, he also signaled that he is dissatisfied with current law and eager to make a change. The legal rule laid out in Gingles, Roberts wrote, has “engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours” of a racial gerrymandering claim brought under the Voting Rights Act.”
He’s not wrong about that.
The rule laid out in Gingles requires a voting rights plaintiff to make several demonstrations just to get a court to consider their claim that a map is an illegal racial gerrymander. Plaintiffs alleging that a state’s maps do not give enough representation to Black voters must show that the state’s African American population is “sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority” within an additional district.
Ordinarily, voting rights plaintiffs make this demonstration by producing one or more sample maps that include the required number of districts where a racial minority group makes up a majority of voters. As Justice Elena Kagan explained in her dissent from the Court’s first decision in Milligan, the purpose of these sample maps is to show “that what [the plaintiffs] are asking for is possible.”
Plaintiffs must also show that Black voters in the state are “political cohesive,” and that the state’s white majority “votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it . . . usually to defeat the minority’s preferred candidate.” In other words, the voting rights plaintiff must show that Black voters in a state tend to vote together for one candidate or one party, while white voters tend to vote together for opposing candidates or parties.
Even if a voting rights plaintiff clears these bars, however, that’s only the beginning of their journey. A court hearing Voting Rights Act challenge to a gerrymandered map must still consider a non-exhaustive list of at least nine factors, ranging from whether the state in question has a “history of official discrimination” to “whether political campaigns have been characterized by overt or subtle racial appeals,” before it can declare a map invalid.
Alabama proposes several alternatives to Gingles, some of which would make these kinds of lawsuits impossible to win
The plaintiffs in Merrill primarily ask the Supreme Court to stick to the Gingles framework — an understandable strategy, given that they won in a lower court that applied Gingles, and because the current Court is prone to move the law dramatically to the right if it does decide to overrule longstanding precedents.
Alabama, meanwhile, proposes a hodgepodge of ways that the Court could rule in its favor. Some of these proposals are relatively modest, while others would eliminate the Voting Rights Act’s protections against racial gerrymandering almost in their entirety.
Buried deep in Alabama’s brief (on pages 63 and 64 of an 81-page brief, to be precise) is a perfectly normal argument that Black voters in Alabama do not live close enough together to justify drawing a second majority-Black district — an argument that would permit Alabama to prevail under Gingles. “Black voters are concentrated in the State’s four largest cities: Huntsville, Birmingham, Montgomery, and Mobile,” the state’s lawyers write, claiming that “none of these geographically dispersed cities includes enough black Alabamians to constitute a majority of a single congressional district.”
The problem with this argument is that the Merrill plaintiffs introduced several sample maps that show that, yes, it is possible to draw two majority-Black districts in Alabama. One group of plaintiffs, for example, hired Tufts University mathematics professor Moon Duchin to produce four sample maps.
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US District Court for the Northern District of Alabama
Meanwhile, one of Alabama’s most extreme proposals asks the Court to rule that the Voting Rights Act “does not apply to challenges to single-member districts” — meaning that the act’s safeguards against racial gerrymandering would cease to exist altogether, so long as a state uses legislative districts that each elect exactly one person to office, as opposed to a system where a single district elects multiple lawmakers.
No state currently uses multi-member districts to select members of Congress, although some use them to choose state lawmakers.
Elsewhere in its brief, Alabama proposes imposing a kind of Catch-22 on plaintiffs challenging racial gerrymanders: Keep the requirement that these plaintiffs produce a sample map demonstrating that it is possible to draw more districts where racial minority groups are in the majority, but require plaintiffs to do so without paying too much attention to race.
“If Gingles is to serve any gatekeeping role, race cannot predominate in the districts a plaintiff proposes to satisfy that precondition,” the state’s lawyers write.
But it’s unclear how this proposal is supposed to work — unless its sole purpose is to shut down challenges to racial gerrymanders altogether. If the law requires the Merrill plaintiffs to produce sample maps that include at least two majority-Black districts, how, exactly are they supposed to do that without paying close attention to race while they draw the sample maps? It’s like asking an artist to produce a detailed and realistic painting of a camel, without ever allowing that artist to look at a camel.
In yet another part of its brief, Alabama suggests that a map should be upheld so long as it comports with “race-neutral, traditional redistricting criteria,” such as drawing compact districts, limiting the number of counties that are split, and ensuring that “communities of interest” — groups of people who share a similar culture, economic interest, or livelihood — are combined together in one district.
In theory, this approach would preserve some safeguards against racial gerrymandering — maps featuring ugly, misshapen districts, for example, could still potentially be vulnerable. In practice, however, it likely raises more questions than it answers. Exactly how compact must a district be before it becomes too sprawling? If splitting counties is unavoidable, how many may be split before the maps become invalid? And what happens if mapmakers have to choose between splitting one community of interest or another?
Alabama, for example, faults the lower court for “dismantling the Gulf Coast district,” which, according to one of the state’s witnesses, “has a distinct shared culture based on its French and Spanish colonial heritage.” But the lower court countered that the plaintiffs’ maps do a better job of preserving Alabama’s Black Belt, a culturally distinct region known for its fertile soil and history of using enslaved Black labor to harvest cotton.
Alabama’s “traditional redistricting criteria” proposal, in other words, would likely give enormous discretion to a judiciary dominated by conservative Republican appointees. There are no clear answers to questions like “how compact must congressional districts be?” or “is it better to split up Gulf Coast communities or Black Belt communities?” So this proposal would likely give the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 Republican-appointed supermajority, a tremendous amount of leeway to strike down maps it wants to strike down, and to uphold maps it wishes to uphold.
It would also give states a fair amount of freedom to draw gerrymandered maps, so long as those maps have districts that aren’t misshapen or obviously flawed in some way.
Alabama wants to relitigate a fight that Congress settled in 1982
Although Alabama proposes many alternatives to Gingles, a common theme that runs throughout its brief is that states should be allowed to draw maps freely so long as they do not do so with racist intent. At one point, the brief claims that a voting rights plaintiff should only prevail if they can “establish irregularities in the State’s enacted plan that can be explained only by racial discrimination.” At another, it argues that “the absence of racially discriminatory intent” must be a “relevant consideration” in any legislation seeking to combat racism in elections.
But this argument is entirely at odds with the text of the Voting Rights Act, which provides that any state law that “results in a denial or abridgement of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color” is illegal, even if the law was not motivated by racist intent.
This fight, over whether voting rights plaintiffs need to show racist intent or merely need to prove that a law has negative effects on a minority group, flared up early in the 1980s. In City of Mobile v. Bolden (1980), the Supreme Court took a position much like the one Alabama urges it to adopt now — ruling that a law is only vulnerable to a Voting Rights Act lawsuit if the lawmakers who enacted it acted with “racially discriminatory motivation.”
But Congress disagreed with the Court’s decision in Mobile, and it enacted legislation adding the Voting Rights Act’s current “results in a denial or abridgement” language for the specific purpose of changing the rule announced in Mobile.
Although President Ronald Reagan eventually signed this legislation into law, a conservative faction within Reagan’s administration urged him to veto it. One of the central figures in this faction was future Chief Justice John Roberts. According to voting rights journalist Ari Berman, “Roberts wrote upwards of 25 memos opposing an effects test.” He “drafted talking points, speeches and op-eds for” senior Justice Department officials opposing the amendment, and “prepared administration officials for their testimony before the Senate; attended weekly strategy sessions; and worked closely with like-minded senators on Capitol Hill.”
Now, however, Roberts is one of six Republican appointees to the Supreme Court — indeed, if anything, he’s the most moderate member of the Court’s GOP bloc. That means that he and his five allies now have the power to rewrite history, and to rule that the Voting Rights Act must be interpreted as the losing faction wanted it to be understood in 1982.
And all they have to do to accomplish this goal is ignore the explicit text of the law.
A loss by President Jair Bolsanaro could cause chaos. But experts say a coup is unlikely.
The first round of Brazil’s presidential election is set to take place on Sunday, with current far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and the center-left former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, or Lula as he’s commonly known, as the frontrunners of 11 candidates. The campaign has mimicked the 2020 US election in some crucial ways, with Bolsonaro claiming that the election is rigged and that the only way his opposition can keep him out of power is by stealing the election.
Lula has a clear lead in the polls with Bolsonaro trailing by 14 percentage points according to a Datafolha poll released Thursday. Bolsonaro, though, has repeatedly pushed bogus election fraud claims, much like former president Donald Trump did in the lead-up to the 2020 election. Though there’s no evidence for Bolsonaro’s claims of election fraud, it may not matter to some of his most die-hard followers. Bolsonaro’s base of supporters believe he shouldn’t accept the results of the election if he doesn’t win, Oliver Steunkel, a professor at the School of International Relations at Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo, Brazil, wrote in Foreign Affairs.
Despite his own low approval ratings, Bolsonaro himself is a strong supporter of Trump and has parroted many of his tactics in trying to retain his grip on power, including casting doubt on the voting process and instructing his base to “go to war” if Lula “steals” the election.
Those election-denial tactics and the high levels of distrust that most Brazilians have in honesty of the elections — not to mention Bolsonaro’s fondness for Brazil’s recent history as a military dictatorship — have raised concerns about a disruption to the peaceful transfer of power in the case of Lula’s likely victory. While experts say Bolsonaro likely doesn’t have the political or military support necessary for a successful military coup, the more likely scenario is that he attempts to capitalize on regional outbreaks of violence to try and delegitimize the results of the elections if they don’t go in his favor.
Still, both Brazilian and international institutions have focused over the past year on shoring up Brazil’s resilience to a coup or other disruption in the democratic process. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has been working with Brazil’s armed forces to ensure their loyalty to the constitution, rather than Bolsonaro, and CIA chief William Burns warned Bolsonaro last year to stop casting doubt on the election system.
All signs point to a Bolsonaro defeat
Bolsonaro has never been a particularly popular president, according to Patricio Navia, a professor of liberal studies and in the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at New York University. At the time of Bolsonaro’s 2018 victory, the country was struggling after the presidency of Dilma Rousseff, a former left-wing revolutionary during Brazil’s military dictatorship from 1964 through 1985 and who was Lula’s chosen successor after his first stint in office. Rousseff was impeached in 2016 for her role in multiple corruption scandals. Brazil had slid into a recession under Rousseff and Michel Temer, who finished Rousseff’s term after she was removed from office, got caught up in a corruption scandal of his own.
“Bolsonaro just emerged when a lot of people were discontent,” Navia explained. “He was a rebound person.” When Bolsonaro first ran for the presidency in 2018, Brazilians just wanted an alternative — any alternative — to the dominant Partido dos Trabalhadores, or PT.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain under the military dictatorship and a member of Brazil’s fast-growing evangelical Christian community, had a long but largely fruitless career in Brazil’s congress, the Associated Press reported. During his 27 years in the legislature, Bolsonaro made 642 legislative filings, including proposed bills and amendments as well as requests for information, but the legislature passed only two of his bills, according to an analysis by the AP. Many of those proposals were aimed against progressive causes like LGBTQ and reproductive rights and affirmative action, instead promoting nationalistic and military ideologies.
Although Bolsonaro struck a chord by promising to control surging crime and touting his outsider status, his calamitous handling of the Covid-19 pandemic caused inhumane suffering and contributed to Brazil’s high death toll. Bolsonaro repeatedly downplayed the severity of the disease in a bid to achieve herd immunity and avoid lockdowns. He slowed vaccine distribution, encouraged mass, maskless gatherings, touted unproven treatments like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, and undermined the healthcare system and any efforts to impose restrictions like social distancing. All of this had had political consequences.
“Regardless of whether Lula was the candidate, Bolsonaro would have struggled to win re-election,” Navia said, adding that no Latin American country has kept its incumbent leader in post-2020 elections. “He truly messed up on the pandemic. Brazilians did suffer a lot.”
And though the Brazilian economy is improving and Bolsonaro has approved assistance for the poorest Brazilians to the tune of $7.7 billion, salaries aren’t keeping up with inflation. In August, Felipe Nunes, founder of pollster Quaest, told the Financial Times that though, “It is a fact that a country that is doing well economically tends to re-elect its presidents,” it’s not clear that the gains are significant enough, or reaching enough people, to make a difference.
That’s a space where challenger Lula has a strong record, Navia told Vox. During his first stint as president, from 2003 to 2010, Lula introduced or strengthened three key social welfare programs designed to fight hunger and poverty. Under those programs, severe poverty dropped by 12 percent from 2003 to 2008 during Lula’s presidency. The best-known program, a cash transfer initiative called Bolsa Familia, reached about 11 million families.
Although much of the Brazilian electorate is under 30, “There are two things that you need to keep in mind,” Navia told Vox. “First, the older people vote more than younger people, so turnout is much higher among those who do remember Lula and have good memories of Lula. And second, people have parents. So, younger voters might not remember Lula but their parents will tell them, ‘We had plenty of food when Lula was president, I had a job, we bought televisions, we bought a cell phone. We were better off when Lula was president.’”
Like his successor Rousseff, Lula has his own history of corruption. An investigation found a wide-ranging kickback scheme throughout the Brazilian government and though Lula has always maintained his innocence, he was convicted of corruption and began a 12-year prison sentence in 2018. His convictions were thrown out last year, when the Supreme Court ruled that the judges in his case were biased.
It’s unclear just how much Lula’s conviction will be a political liability. “I’m not going to say that Lula was not involved in illegal campaign finance practices,” Navia told Vox. “He probably was. The campaign finance system in Brazil, it kind of forces people to find ways to bypass it. No Brazilian politician is a good candidate for an anti-corruption initiative, so it’s hard to single Lula out as more corrupt than the average Brazilian politician.”
For the average Brazilian, that’s probably not much of a deterrent, Navia said. “Since they are all going to be corrupt, I’d rather take as my president, a guy who was corrupt but who did things for me.”
The conditions for a military coup just aren’t there
That doesn’t mean that Bolsonaro isn’t trying to paint Lula as a Communist and corrupt, all while undermining the political system. While the former attack doesn’t seem to be gaining much traction, the latter does. According to a recent Gallup poll, 67 percent of Brazilians surveyed said they don’t have confidence in the honesty of the election process.
That widespread election mistrust is where Bolsonaro and his supporters might be able to cause some chaos. This likely won’t happen with the military’s help, despite Bolsonaro’s nostalgia for Brazil’s dictatorship, his campaign to have the military conduct a parallel vote count, and his efforts to tie himself to the military in voters’ minds.
Although Bolsonaro stacked his cabinet with retired and active-duty military officers and touted his own military record, experts said that doesn’t have much of a bearing on whether the military would actually support him should he try to stage a coup. “I don’t know whether that’s either necessary or sufficient,” Naunihal Singh, the author of Seizing Power: The Strategic Logic of Military Coups, told Vox. Bolsonaro can contest the results of the election, but the military leaders associated with Bolsonaro aren’t necessarily tied to the active forces, and they aren’t clearly making plans or signaling an intention to stage a coup.
“My understanding is that even pro-Bolsonaro officers aren’t eager for a coup,” Singh said. “There have been very few coup attempts in Latin America recently, and the countries which have had them, are the countries that other countries don’t want to be associated with — like Venezuela.” Singh added that “the Brazilian military tends to be highly interconnected with the elite,” as well as highly professionalized.
Singh’s research looks at the dynamics of military coups, and finds that three different factors play a role in determining a nation’s vulnerability to a coup. “One of them is whether there’s been a successful coup recently,” he told Vox. While Brazil’s democracy is young and certainly has its struggles, it has been consistent since the end of the military dictatorship. Furthermore, as Navia said, “The last time the military was in power was in 1985, but that was the time of the Cold War, so the US supported a military government in Brazil in order to prevent a Communist revolution.” Now, because the Cold War specter of Communism is gone, “nobody is going to support a military coup.”
Other conditions which could lead to a military coup, Singh told Vox, aren’t alarmingly present in Brazil. Poverty, for example, often lays fertile ground for successful military coups, and while there is poverty in Brazil, the country has seen significant economic progress overall in recent decades. And despite Bolsonaro’s best efforts, Brazil still qualifies as a democracy with relatively stable (if sometimes problematic and ineffectual) institutions, making it difficult for a military coup to successfully dismantle them.
English teacher Luiz Eduardo da Silva, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, said he was more concerned about violence from Bolsonaro’s supporters. “I think [Bolsonaro] won’t have the political support not to leave office,” he told Vox via WhatsApp. However, he said, he was concerned about what Bolsonaro’s most ardent supporters might do should their candidate lose. “They’ve become violent,” he told Vox. “The followers are the biggest issue.” What’s more, if violence does break out in Brazilian cities, “The police here is as violent as his followers. If [the followers] try something, they’ll probably face violent backlash.”
Such chaos could present an opportunity for Bolsonaro to encourage an insurrection similar to a “Brazilian January 6,” some analysts fear. But while Bolsonaro does have some armed supporters in the federal police, in addition to his virulent civilian supporters, they’re more likely to cause scattered regional flare-ups than a march on Brasilia, the national capital, Navia said. That’s because Brasilia, Brazil’s capitol, unlike Washington, DC, “is in the middle of nowhere. And most of Bolsonaro’s supporters are not in Brasilia and they’re not going to be able to get there,” he told Vox.
Even if Bolsonaro’s tactics can’t keep him in power, they may be able to keep him relevant, much as Trump’s attempt to remain in office have. Should he face criminal investigation, as he did last year over his handling over the Covid-19 pandemic, the mistrust he’s already sown in the government and Brazil’s democratic institutions could justify claims that any criticism or inquiry is politically motivated. “It doesn’t guarantee immunity, but it provides you with an extra layer of protection,” Steunkel told Time magazine. “Bolsonaro’s interpretation is that there is an actual incentive not to concede and that in many ways he’d be better off if he contested the result.”
Still, Brazil’s democratic institutions — the courts and the legislature, as well as business leaders and celebrities — have mobilized in support of Brazilian democracy and the rule of law. Despite disinformation, polarization, and extremism, Brazilian institutions and individuals have demonstrated a willingness strengthen their democratic system against further erosion; on Sunday, the world will see if those efforts have paid off.