This book develops an alternative approach to understanding the dynamics of political change through the case of Brazil. Much of the existing literature has examined political change within Western paradigms…
This book develops an alternative approach to understanding the dynamics of political change through the case of Brazil. Much of the existing literature has examined political change within Western paradigms, often treating the state, institutions, and processes of modernization apart from their broader social and historical contexts. The analysis presented here takes a different path. Rather than viewing political change solely as a process of institutional evolution or as the outcome of economic cycles, it approaches change as a multilayered process shaped by the historical, cultural, and structural dimensions of state-society relations. From this perspective, the book comparatively examines Western and Critical approaches to political change. Western perspectives centered on modernization, including institutionalist, dichotomous, sociological-empirical, historical continuity, and economic approaches, are considered alongside Critical approaches that emerged in response to modernization, including Orientalist, postcolonial, critical economic, and Liberation Theology perspectives. The explanatory capacity of these approaches is examined systematically across distinct periods of Brazilian political history: the Old Republic, the Vargas era, the Democratic Period, the Military Dictatorship, and the period of redemocratization.