Brazilian Party Politics and the Coup of 1964

Brazilian Party Politics and the Coup of 1964 By Ollie Andrew Johnson III. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001.176p. $55.00 cloth.

Deborah L. Norden, Whittier College

In 1964, Brazil embarked on one of Latin America's longest experiments in modern military authoritarianism. Ollie Johnson's Brazilian Party Politics seeks to understand one of the important antecedents to the coup by looking at the political party system during the 1945-64 period. While the book does not succeed in demonstrating a strong causal connection between party politics and the coup, it does provide a very interesting new perspective on party politics and realignment, looking beyond the more immediate electoral indicators of the Brazilian party system.

According to Johnson, Brazilian party politics during the pre-coup period "is fundamentally the story of the rise of leftist and nationalist party forces committed to changing the political and socioeconomic system and the reaction of more conservative party forces against such change" (p. 14). The book effectively demonstrates this shift to the left in Brazilian politics by looking beyond merely electoral results to a consideration of intraparty factions and transparty alliances. By doing this, Johnson manages to build a much clearer picture of trends in Brazilian politics than the often amorphous, or "cloudy" (p. 35), image that emerges from considering only electoral support for the political parties.

As described, the three principal parties of the period, the PSD (Social Democratic Party, a centrist party), the PTB (Brazilian Labor Party, a party of the left), and the UDN (National Democratic Union, a conservative party), composed only the surface of organized political representation in Brazil. According to Johnson, by the early 1960s, each of these parties had developed progressive factions with similar agendas (p. 53). In the PTB, this faction succeeded in shifting the party to the left, while reactions against these factions encouraged the other two parties to shift...