When Authoritarians Embrace Democracy: The Hidden Hand of Pre-Existing Oligarchies in Brazil's Transition

Political regimes rarely emerge in a vacuum, instead building upon and often incorporating pre-existing societal and political structures. This paper investigates how the strength of historically entrenched, pre-regime regional elites shapes the strategic behavior and persistence of newer authoritarian elites. It argues that both the career survival of authoritarian-era politicians, and their inclination to strategically endorse democratization, are significantly contingent upon the power of these pre-existing regional structures. These propositions are empirically examined using Brazil's extended transition from military rule (c. 1974-1985). The analysis leverages an original dataset encompassing the entire universe of Brazilian politicians active from 1945 to 2023 (approximately 13,000 individuals). Utilizing a difference-in-differences approach centered on Brazil's 1974 regime liberalization, supplemented by analyses of complete career trajectories and key democratization votes ten years later, this paper finds that authoritarian elites from regions with strong pre-existing regional oligarchies exhibited greater career longevity and a higher likelihood of strategically supporting the democratic transition. Ultimately, this research underscores that the resilience of deep-seated local power structures is a critical factor determining how authoritarian elites navigate democratic transitions, thereby influencing the persistence of elite networks and the character of emerging democracies.

Coordination and Career: What Happens to Legislators Who Vote for Democratic Reform in Authoritarian Legislatures?

Why do the elites who hold power under an authoritarian regime ever consent to dismantling it? Existing accounts explain the aggregate outcome, but say little about the individuals: which insiders break toward democracy, and what becomes of them. We take up both questions at the individual level, using the revealing settings in which the choice is made on a public vote that forces each member of the old regime to take a visible side on the transition. We study two structurally different cases of democratization from within, Spain's vote on the Ley de Reforma Política (1976) and Brazil's Electoral College vote (1985), drawing on original biographical panels that track the political, administrative, and professional careers of all the authoritarian legislators who cast these votes for up to five decades, together with the professional networks linking them. First, what explains how an insider votes? Decomposing the decisive vote into ideology, the expectation of faring well under democracy, and network position, we find the determinants differ by setting: within Brazil's ruling party the vote is structured by professional networks rather than ideology, while in Spain it runs partly along the old fascist-party line, but in neither case does regional political fortune explain it. Second, does siding with the democratic majority pay? Tracking these careers for up to three decades, we find that those who voted with the majority sustained substantially higher rates of political activity afterward. The premium survives controlling for the factors that produced the vote, is specific to the decisive vote rather than to a prior failed reform or an earlier dissenting position, and persists across later governments with no obligation to reward reformers. The pattern is hard to square with reward for ideology, network, or prior disposition alone, and points instead to the public, verifiable act of siding with the majority itself.

Surviving the Transition: How the Post-Transition Trajectories and Strategies of Authoritarian Elite

Fathers Shape Their Children’s Position in Democracy with Aline Van Neutgem & Ryan Higgs 

When authoritarian regimes give way to democracy, the families that held elite positions under the old regime face a question: can they pass their positions to their children under new rules? This paper offers an answer organized around three hypotheses about how authoritarian elite status crosses regime change. The father’s fate hypothesis predicts that children of fathers who continue to hold elite positions after the transition reach elite positions themselves at higher rates — a resource-transmission story. The reformist hypothesis predicts that the father’s public stance at the critical-juncture transition vote (supporting reform versus opposing it) itself transmits to the next generation, independent of whether his personal status survived — a signaling story. The revolving-door hypothesis predicts that fathers who moved between elite tracks during their careers transmit cross-track institutional fluency to their children. The broader project will test these hypotheses across the universe of authoritarian-to-democratic transitions in the past seventy-five years, using a cross-national dataset of dictators’ children that is under construction. In this paper, we test all three hypotheses on the two cases where deep biographical data on the wider authoritarian elite is currently available — post-Franco Spain (903 children) and post-military-regime Brazil (803 children) — by combining descriptive evidence with a regression-discontinuity design on the 1986 Brazilian Chamber elections.

It Takes a Village to Remember: The Role of Local Repression Awareness in Post-Civil War Spain 

With Joe Kendall and Pedro Martín

Remembrance of repression represents a challenge in the long term for post-conflict societies. Institutions, local repression, or demographic changes affect the intergenerational transmission of past collective memories. Specifically, institutions favoring victors may prevent the (re)generation of local collective memories through victim-blaming, ideological indoctrination, or mere unawareness of local-level repression. This study examines the impact of localized historical awareness on collective memory and political behavior in areas of Spain that supported the fascist coup during the civil war. We leverage the fact that the Spanish civil war evolved differently across regions depending on initial local support by society and key institutional actors, most notably the army. In the Pro-Francoist areas, more conservative on average, we document a diminished collective memory of war-time repression by the victors. Following previous research on the importance of familial repression genealogies to trigger empathy towards out-groups, we investigate whether enhancing awareness about local repression can alter political attitudes and behaviors. In a survey list experiment, we provide participants with information about the civil war repression in their familial or childhood municipalities. We then measure changes in a set of variables measuring their current political views, their support for far-right parties, and their willingness to support memory recovery initiatives. Our findings demonstrate the potential of targeted educational efforts in addressing historical amnesia and shaping informed political engagement in post-conflict societies. 

The Spillover Effects of Center-Periphery Dynamics on Politically Disenfranchised Regions 

With Alberto López Ortega and Álvaro Canalejo-Molero

What effect do center-periphery dynamics have on the political attitudes of citizens from third regions? This study develops a theoretical model to answer this question and tests it with an original survey and two embedded experiments. The first experiment exposes participants to randomized video vignettes showing hypothetical negotiations between the Spanish government and (some/all of) its regions over devolution. The vignettes randomize whether devolution occurs for all regions or only for one peripheral region (Catalonia), which receives special treatment. Moreover, the vignettes vary by the tone of the negotiations -cooperative or conflictual. The results show that giving special treatment to Catalonia increases demands for devolution for the own region, while conflictual scenarios increase support for authoritarian practices. In addition, the second experiment shows that citizens from third regions are willing to admit more decentralization if they are included among the regions with special treatment, whereas citizens from peripheral regions become less supportive of it when third regions are included in the delivery of decentralization. These findings have implications for the design of asymmetric federal institutions in fragmented nation states with distinct levels of regions' enfranchisement for political autonomy.