Deinstitutionalization and resilience of participatory councils in the Bolsonaro government

Abstract

We argue that the Bolsonaro government's measures and their effects against national councils are not homogeneous and that understanding their variation requires an analytical and empirically sensitive approach to the logic of institutional change in policy subsystems. Specifically, we argue that the set of measures against councils and the effects produced by them vary depending on two factors: i) the council’s policy agenda and its relationship with the programmatic and political choices of the government, ii) and resilience of the council. We work on the first factor as a previous move to focus on the second. The council’s policy agenda matters, we argue, because the government's strategy in relation to participation is political, not doctrinal. In this sense, decree 9,759 is an expression of an adverse position on the agendas of certain policy areas that challenge the programmatic and political choices of the Bolsonaro government, causing that deinstitutionalization unequally affects these areas. The second factor, resilience, is the result of the combination of two dimensions: the stronger or weaker institutional design and its more or less central insertion in the respective policy communities. Therefore, we propose to analyze the effects of the decree considering the distinction between macro policy areas: economic development and infrastructure, social policies, human rights and minority defenses, and environment and sustainable development. In summary, the analysis allows us to affirm that the councils most strongly affected are related to policy areas in which agendas were contrary to the political agenda of the Bolsonaro government, and also had lower resilience, considered in its two dimensions. Proportionally, the area of the environment was the most affected by councils’ revocation and the area of human rights, in turn, underwent more changes in their councils’ regulation.