Is the Brazilian state “patrimonial”?

Manuscript submitted to Latin American Perspectives (BZS-15)First submitted 20 February 2013

Revised and resubmitted 6 August 2013Revised again and resubmitted 21 February 2014

Introduction

The concept of patrimonialism is an appealing one to scholars of the Brazilian

state. “Patrimonialism” apparently has much to offer: the notion of an incomplete

separation of the public and private spheres; a theory about the late and uneven

development of a rational-legal public administration; and an explanation of the origins

and persistence of personalism, clientelism, patronage, and corruption that are said to

distinguish the Brazilian state. If the success of a concept can be gauged by its use, then

“patrimonialism” is extremely successful.

However, “patrimonialism” is frequently used in ways that are very different from

Weber’s original usage and has a variety of sometimes contradictory meanings in the

hands of different authors. How to empirically measure patrimonialism is also contested.

The term is often employed as a descriptive (and wholly pejorative) label for near-

universal political practices, rather than as an explanatory concept. This conceptual

stretching and imprecision limit the usefulness of the term. Patrimonialism is also often

used to create a dichotomy (patrimonial or personalistic, clientelistic practices versus

rational legal, universalistic procedures) that obscures the complexity of the Brazilian

state. Furthermore, the patrimonial concept is sometimes used to justify orthodox liberal

prescriptions for the Brazilian state, in which the only viable solution for personalism and

clientelism and the creation of universalism is the radical downsizing of the state in favor

of the alleged impersonalism of the market.

This article attempts to gauge the applicability of the patrimonial concept to the

Brazilian state. It first examines the evolution and appeal of the concept, from Max

Weber through Raymundo Faoro to contemporary authors. It then argues that

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patrimonialism is increasingly misleading as an explanation of the workings of the

“commanding heights” of the Brazilian state, the top level of the Federal public

administration. In the conclusion, I suggest that the concept of patrimonialism should not

be discarded entirely but instead applied in a more limited way to particular attitudes and

practices within the Brazilian state and society. Patrimonialism is thus best seen as one of

several different grammars or logics operating within the Brazilian state.

This topic is important because patrimonialism is one of those concepts that have

been used as a key to understanding Brazil. Others are Freyre’s casa grande e senzala (big

house and slave quarters); Sergio Buarque de Holanda’s homen cordial (cordial man);

Caio Prado Jr.’s colonial capitalist development; Oliveira Viana’s organic idealism; Vitor

Nunes Leal’s coronelismo; and Roberta da Mata’s personhood. Patrimonialism is

ubiquitous in popular discourse, journalism, and scholarly analysis. The patrimonialism

of the Brazilian state is taken by many as a given. But because it has become so

commonplace, it is especially necessary to critically examine the concept.

I Some uses of Patrimonialism as a Concept

Max Weber is generally recognized as the originator of the contemporary concept

of patrimonialism. His ideas about the subject can be found in Economy and Society

(Weber 1978). For Weber, a patrimonial state is based at least partly on traditional,

rather than rational-legal, authority and is characterized by a fusion of personal and

public power in the state’s leaders, originally the monarch and his court. For Weber,

patrimonial domination “regards all governing powers and the corresponding economic

rights as privately appropriated economic advantages…In particular, the appropriation of

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judicial and military powers tends to be treated as a legal basis for a privileged status

position of those appropriating them…” (Weber, 1978: 236). Furthermore, in a

patrimonial state “the prince organizes his political power…just like the exercise of his

patriarchal power…[and] military and judicial authority are exercised without any

restraint by the master as components of his patrimonial power” (Weber, 1978: 1013).1

For Weber, patrimonialist domination grows out of patriarchal domination, or the

master’s personal subjugation of the dependents in his household. Patriarchal domination

is based on traditional claims to legitimacy, the most basic being filial piety, and

compliance with norms based on subjects’ strict personal loyalty to the master. Weber

contrasts this type of power to bureaucratic domination, in which norms are based on

rationality and appeals to abstract legality, and rules are enforced through administrators

who posses specialized professional knowledge (Weber, 1978: 1006-7). Weber considers

patrimonial domination to be an outgrowth of patriarchal rule; as larger political units

evolved out of households, so domination became more complex.

Weber refers to three key elements of patrimonial rule. First, in a patrimonial

order, the armed forces are personally loyal to the ruler and are used to quash other

potential rulers. Because the armed forces are not loyal to the state as such, but merely a

particular ruler, patrimonial rule tends to be unstable. A challenge to, removal of, or death

of a ruler often provokes the fragmentation of the military. The second element is that the

ruler’s political and economic needs are met through the obligations of collectivities,

such as corps, guilds, or communities. Typically, rulers grant monopoly privileges to

these collectivities, in which membership is compulsory, in return for the collectivities’

regular fulfillment of certain material obligations. Finally, the administration of a

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patrimonial state consists primarily of officials who are personally dependent on the

ruler. This administration is not bureaucratic, nor is it based on professional

specialization; it responds directly to and represents the personal will of the sovereign.2

Weber’s account of how administration in patrimonial states works is complex.

Weber uses several different adjectives and refers to the “estate type of patrimonialism”,

the “patrimonial-military” state, the “patrimonial-bureaucratic state”, “semi-bureaucratic

political patrimonialism” and the “stereotyped and arbitrary pattern of [the] patrimonial

state”. He also distinguishes between local and central patrimonialism, and uses the term

to apply both to states and to countries. These terms arise because Weber recognized that

patrimonial rulers, while desirous of utterly dependent soldiers and administrators who

were personally loyal to them, often had to sacrifice some degree of control for pragmatic

reasons. The social forces that they were most likely to share power with were the landed

aristocracy or notables rooted in local areas. For example, landed aristocrats often gained

considerable control over armed forces, as can be seen in the case of Prussia in the

nineteenth century, while elite groups often gained considerable power within state

institutions. This process of “appropriation” of the state administration by elites took

several forms, depending on the type of elite involved: “proprietary office holding”,

where elites gained hereditary rights to offices in the state administration; “enterprising”,

in which commercial elites engaged in tax farming, the sale of offices, and other

activities, managing the state administration for their own profit; and “local

patrimonialism”, in which local elites, usually landed aristocrats, monopolized state

authority in their regions (Ertman, 1997: 8). Despite his recognition of the ubiquity of

“appropriation” of offices, however, Weber seems to have regarded patrimonialism in its

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purest form to be unmediated rule by dependents of the ruler – i.e. the macropolitical

equivalent of the patriarch’s rule over his own household.3

In Weber’s treatment, the patrimonial state is marked by a struggle between, on

one hand, a ruler who desires to rule through dependent subjects who will maximize the

execution of his arbitrary will, and local notables, with their own claims to aristocratic

privilege and position, who will want to maximize their place within the state. Weber

refers to the ebb and flow of this struggle, but nowhere does he suggest that history

everywhere resolves itself in one clear direction. Thus the estate type of patrimonial state

is a mixture of arbitrary rule through personal dependents of the ruler and hereditary

offices controlled by local notables. In the bureaucratic patrimonial state, the ruler has

taken away the hereditary offices from the local notables and professionalized the

administration. Administrative structures consisting of different combinations of

hereditary offices and positions held by the rulers’ dependents – at least in Western

Europe – are eventually replaced by bureaucratic, modern states run on the basis of well-

known precepts of professional public administration.4

Throughout his writings on the subject, Weber consistently sees patrimonial rule

as the opposite of rational-legal bureaucracy (and of feudalism). Patrimonial states are

marked by state agencies whose jurisdictions are not rationally or consistently divided; in

which arbitrary rule-making and the invocation of tradition are the norm; and in which

the separation of the public and the private is incomplete or nonexistent – the “public”

administration serves to aggrandize the personal interests of the ruler(s), without a

commitment to the greater good of some larger entity. Furthermore, patrimonialism,

marked by arbitrariness and personal loyalty to rulers, may encourage and coexist easily

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with “political” or mercantile capitalism; state authorities can cartelize production among

an oligarchy of privileged producers. However, patrimonial rule inhibits the development

of the industrial capitalism that flourished in Weber’s day. This depends upon rational

calculation, a mass market, and predictable rules.

To summarize Weber’s view of patrimonialism, it is first of all a form of

traditional rule – distinct from charismatic and rational-legal rule - that grew out of the

patriarchal household. Second, it is a historical category that Weber applied largely to

premodern states. Third, patrimonialism exists across cultures and is a relatively broad

term, not referring to any particular type of political system (Jary and Jary, 1995: 478-

479). Weber considered the people in his own county, Germany, to have a preference for

a strong leader who could play the role of “father of the nation”, and saw this as a legacy

of patrimonial rule. Weber discusses a huge number of variants – patrimonialism can

refer to both rule by dependents of a ruler and rule by elites who have appropriated public

offices, or some mixture of the two. Patrimonialism is an ideal-type whose elements

could be found throughout history, all over the world. It is part of a spectrum with the

modern European Rechsstaat on one end, and Oriental “sultanism” (a strictly patriarchal

variant of patrimonialism) on the other (Weber, 1978: 1091). Fourth, patrimonialism is

defined in contrast to rational-legal public administration marked by meritocratic

recruitment, professional training, performance-based promotion, long-term civil service

careers, competitive salaries, and orientation to “objective” state interests rather than

personal ones – the ideal-type “Weberian” bureaucracy. Finally, the concept of

patrimonialism was part of Weber’s ambitious attempt to develop a theory of the

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mutually constitutive development of industrial capitalism and rational, bureaucratic

public administration in the West.

If Weber’s ideas about patrimonialism are well known, the use of the term to

describe the Brazilian state is a less familiar story. Perhaps surprisingly, its use is fairly

recent, dating to the late 1950s. Paradoxically, the term appears not to have been used

before the end of World War II, when the Brazilian state was more “patrimonial” than it

has been since. Karl Loewenstein’s analysis of the Vargas regime (1942) one of the most

serious treatments of Brazilian politics by a U.S.-based political scientist of the 1940s, for

example, does not mention the word. Similarly, Victor Nunes Leal’s landmark

Coronelismo, Enxada e Voto [Coronelism, the Hoe and the Vote] (1949) does not use the

term. What was common in this era was to refer to the patriarchalism of Brazilian society

– the unbridled power of the master of the big house or casa grande over the household,

both slaves and family members. References to this can be found, for example, in

Gilberto Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves (1978: xxxii), first published in 1933, and

Sergio Buarque de Holanda’s Raízes do Brasil [Roots of Brazil] (1956: 102-3).5 Given

that Weber saw patriarchalism as the foundation of the patrimonial state, it might have

been logical to make this connection, but nobody seems to have done so before 1957.

It was the publication of Raymundo Faoro’s Os Donos do Brasil [The Masters of

Brazil] in that year that seems to have prepared the way for the subsequent flood. That

flood was not immediate, however; Faoro’s book was admired but not widely imitated.

Foreign observers such as Richard Morse (1973) used the term, but neo-Weberian

analysis had few adherents in Brazil itself. Scholars such as Caio Prado Junior (2001)

held to the traditional Marxist view that state forms were ultimately shaped by the forces

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of production. As long as Marxism remained powerful in Brazilian intellectual life, the

idea that the Brazilian state was “patrimonial” remained a minority view. The publication

of Simon Schwartzman’s Bases do Autoritarismo Brasileiro [Bases of Brazilian

Authoritarianism] in 1975 (reissued in 1982 and 1988) was another important step in the

process. Schwartzman’s book appealed to readers tired of authoritarian rule. Subsequent

developments in global and Brazilian politics, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and

the decline of orthodox Marxism, turned the trickle into a flood, and the term increasingly

came into vogue. What is striking today is how many social scientists, both within and

outside of Brazil, are willing to characterize the Brazilian state as patrimonial.

However, these “patrimonialisms” are not equal. It is important to understand

how the Weberian concept, in the hands of Faoro, undergoes a fundamental

transformation. For Faoro, patrimonialism is a subtype that is peculiar to Luso-Brazilian

state formation. It is medieval in origin but now modern – it does not tend to wither away

with the development of capitalism, as it did for Weber, and hinders the development of a

pluralistic civil society in Brazil. It is defined in contrast to an ideal-typical modern state

characterized by a capitalist rule of law. For Faoro, patrimonialism explains Brazilian

economic and political backwardness and is the original sin and ultimate destiny of the

Brazilian state. In Faoro’s words, “The power – sovereignty – is appropriated exclusively

by the minority, which does not emanate from the nation, but rather formed and shaped

the latter. It does not act as a delegate of the people – as the state is understood in

democratic doctrine –“ but is instead an ordering power [mandatário] and a maker of

deals [gestor de negócios]…” (Faoro, 2001: 263).

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In Faoro, patrimonialism leads to what could be called “Luso-pessimism” about

the prospects of the Brazilian state. No matter how modern the Brazilian state appears to

be, the patrimonial status order within the state apparatus maintains its archaic practices,

holding the country back and resisting every attempt at modernization. Faoro ends his

monumental work with a Faulknerian rumination on the unchanging nature of the essence

of the Brazilian state. “The state machine…maintained itself Portuguese, hypocritically

caste-like, obstinately administrative, aristocratically superior. Instead of renovation, the

Lusitanian embrace produced a `social enormity’, in which old cadres and anachronistic

institutions frustrate the growth of the virgin world…[It] generated a civilization marked

by obscurity…an opaque clarity, light covered by dark glass, a vague and transparent

figure covered by fog…a shadow that walks among shadows, being but not being, going

but not going, a lack of definition in its form and its creative will. Covering it, over the

skeleton in the air, is the rigid tunic of the inexhaustible past, heavy and suffocating”

(Faoro 2001: 837-838.).

For Faoro, but not for Weber, patrimonialism is compatible with rational-legal

public administration. Behind a façade of meritocracy and professionalism, the

personalism and clentelism of patrimonial practices persist. Those practices create a

permanent divide beween leaders and subjects, as well as state and nation. The managers

of the patrimonial state will not respect the Brazilian people’s demands for rights. This is

a very different vision from the Weberian one.

Contemporary scholars who use patrimonialism, however, do not necessarily

reproduce all the elements of Faoro’s analysis. For Schwartzman, the patrimonial state is

marked by “bureaucratic despotism” in which “heavy” bureaucratic administration

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dominates a weak and poorly articulated civil society, and citizens are generally

“dependent and alienated…dependent on public power and guidance for the obtainment

of its favors” (Schwartzman, 1988: 14, 23). According to Uricoechea, the patrimonial

state is not based purely on traditional and personal authority, nor is it uniform. In

Uricoechea’s version of the concept, the patrimonial state “is a synthetic construction that

accentuates the coexistence, within one pattern of political rule, of the universalistic and

legal-rational elements at the center of the power structure and the particularistic and

traditional elements at the periphery of the power structure” (Uricoechea, 1980: 2).

For others, patrimonialism is described more specifically as an authoritative

federal bureaucracy controlled by political elites who limit popular participation and

influence and who use the bureaucracy’s resources to benefit themselves and their small

coteries of supporters (Roett, 1999: 21-26).6 A more comprehensive definition of

patrimonialism is “a situation in which political rulers treat the state as if it were their

own property…Rather than allocate public resources according to universalistic criteria,

politicians do so on the basis of personal connections, bestowing favors on their friends,

family and parentela. They use public monies as though they came from their personal

bank accounts; they require that supposedly public servants work to further their personal

political projects; they hire their relatives and friends for public jobs, regardless of their

qualifications and job performance; they award public contracts to friends and relatives.

There is a weak sense of public consciousness and the res publica” (Mainwaring, 1999:

179).7

Other social scientists use patrimonialism in a less comprehensive fashion to

allude to specific practices within or features of the Brazilian state. For political scientist

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Leonardo Avritzer, patrimonialism is a series of exchanges between patrons and clients in

which representatives in Congress receive federal patronage in return for support for the

executive’s bills; this patronage is then passed on to representatives’ clients in their home

state. This is the politics of “pork barrel”, in U.S. parlance (Avritzer, 2002: 119-122;

Avelino Filho, 1994). For sociologist Francisco de Oliveira, it appears to be something

quite different – what Weber called “political capitalism”, in which capitalists receive

monopolies from the state (De Oliveira, 2003: 44). In the writings of philosopher

Marilena Chaui, patrimonialism appears in its classic sense as a politics based on

obedience to the father’s personal will within his dominion. This produces a state in

which the governors “reign”, exercising power personalistically, conflating their person

with the office they hold and dispensing favors to dependent subjects. This form of power

thwarts the achievement of genuine republican democracy based on equality of

citizenship, the temporary holding of offices by representatives beholden to the people,

and the recognition of rights (Chaui, 2000: 15, 83-91).

At first glance, these definitions seem to reflect a common, core understanding.

As applied to Brazil, the patrimonial state contains several elements: a combination of

rational-legal and personal, traditional authority; the use of force and the law as

instruments of personal domination of the ruler; the appropriation of public resources by

privileged, private actors; the existence of clientelistic networks attached to those

privileged actors; and a weak sense of a public good and universalistic citizenship.

Patrimonialist state policies are also highly inegalitarian, frequently following a pattern

well summarized by Sorj: “the state takes responsibility for the onus, the bonus is

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distributed among the dominant classes, and the crumbs [migalhas] left over are for the

subaltern groups” (Sorj, 1998: 28).

In a country such as Brazil, with its slave-owning past, its small, fabulously

wealthy elites, insecure middle class, and impoverished masses, “patrimonialism” offers

a powerful label that resonates on a deep level. The word is also pejorative, connoting

disgust with parasitic rulers and the politics of the status quo. Patrimonialism is not

modern; it impedes a fuller and more equitable development of capitalism in Brazil; it

fosters corruption; for Faoro, it even inhibits the development of a truly national culture.

Furthermore, it generates a distinctive pattern of state-society relations marked by a large

social distance between political elites and the poor, and mutual incomprehension

between the rationalist, technocratic, theoretical discourse of the former and the mystical,

miracle-seeking desperation of the latter. The Brazilian patrimonial state, it seems,

creates what another analyst calls a “dangerous legitimacy gap” in the political system

(Lamounier, 1999: 149).

Furthermore, for many years Brazil’s public administration, even at the federal

level, did not come close to Weber’s ideal-type of a rational-legal bureaucracy. Graham

(1978: 129) estimates that in 1960-1962, “only approximately 17.8 percent of the civil

servants” of the 500,000 then employed at the Federal level “gained admission through

public examination.” Mainwaring asserts that as recently as 1985 only 125,000 public

employees of 1,825,000 functionaries (or less than 7 percent) in federal public direct

administration had been hired through public service examinations. The rest had been

hired according to political criteria (Mainwaring, 1999: 182.)

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Another striking example of apparent patrimonialism is the appointment power of

Brazil’s incoming presidents. Brazil’s President Luís Inácio “Lula” da Silva (2003-2010)

made roughly 20,000 appointments at the Federal level when first taking office (Flynn,

2005: 1252), compared to the U.S. presidents’ 4,000.8 Similarly, Brazilian welfare

spending has been strikingly skewed to the better-off segments of the population (at least

before the creation of Bolsa Familia under the Lula presidency). Schwartzman noted at

the end of the 1990s that 21 percent of Brazil’s public expenditure on health, education,

and housing went to sectors in the upper quintile of income distribution, with only 15.5

percent going to the lower strata. The corresponding figures for Chile were 4 percent and

36.3 percent (Schwartzman, 2000: 54).

The concept of the patrimonial state also seems to capture elements of Brazil’s

agrarian past, and even its present. Traditionally, land was not merely a factor of

production but was a reward for service and proximity to power, as well as a foundation

for the accumulation and maintenance of more power and privilege. This power included

the ability to direct the legal and coercive apparatus of the state in one’s region. It also

entails control over and obligations to subaltern populations. The original division of the

colonial capitanias among a handful of “amigos do rei” (friends of the king) reflects this

reality (Gonçalo, 2001: 23). It is argued that in Brazil, unlike the United States, the state’s

patrimonial tendencies were not substantially mitigated in later stages of development by

a frontier in which settlers could gain easy access to public lands, thus democratizing and

deconcentrating land ownership. Brazil’s 1850 Land Law (Lei da Terra) prohibited the

acquisition of public land by any means other than purchase, thus putting an end to

previous rights to gain land through occupancy (posse) (Viotti da Costa, 2000: 78-79).9

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II Is the Brazilian state patrimonial?

All of this may be taken as very powerful evidence that the Brazilian state is

patrimonial. There seems to be a consensus in favor of this argument. The category is

used by scholars with a Weberian theoretical perspective (Faoro, Schwartzman) as well

as those with a Marxist one (Chilcote, De Oliveira). It is used by historians of different

generations (Morse, Eakin), a centrist political scientist (Roett) and a more leftist one

(Avrtizer), as well as a radical philosopher (Chaui).

However, patrimonialism is what Reinhard Bendix called a “generalization in

disguise”,10 not just a label but also an explanation for the peculiarities of the Brazilian

state. A closer reading of the theorists mentioned above reveals that their explanations are

quite contradictory. To take one example, for Chaui, neoliberal economic reform

reinforced Brazil’s patrimonial tendencies. This is because it depended on personalism,

political marketing, and autocratic power – neoliberal reformers appealed to popular

desires for a “father of the nation” (Chaui, 2000: 87). For Roett, on the other hand,

neoliberal reform diminished patrimonialism by streamlining the state and displacing

traditional politicians who relied on state patronage to buy support. This is just one

example of the lack of consensus in the literature on the relationship between the

category, the information it is supposed to subsume, and the explanation behind it.

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Many of the authors cited above use the patrimonial label without reference to

either concrete characteristics of public administration such as the extent of meritocratic

recruitment, patterns of internal promotion and career stability, and the competitiveness

of salaries, on one hand, or the connections between the state bureaucracy and the world

market, on the other. While this work represents a valuable contribution on many levels,

it obscures two processes. The first is the increasing rational-legal character of the

Brazilian state, and the second is the development of capitalism.

The rationalization of the Brazilian state is a process that has a long lineage, with

many advances and reversals, and dates back at least to the 1938 creation of the DASP

(Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público, or Public Service Administrative

Department) under the Vargas regime of 1930-45 (Alves de Abreu, Beloch, Lattman-

Weltman and Niemeyer Lamarão, 2001: 1827-1830). In DASP’s first phase of existence,

which lasted until 1945, a Statute of Civil Federal Public Functionaries was created in

1938, programs of training for Federal civil servants were inaugurated, “scientific”

methods of public administration were adopted, and semi-public agencies such as the

CVRD, CSN, and Instituto de Reseguros do Brasil were established.

Another step forward in the process occurred after the end of the military regime

(1964-1985). In 1988 a new constitution was passed that, in the words of two experts,

“extended fairly rigid Weberian reforms, such as entrance only by examination and

tenure for all civil servants” to the Federal public administration (Heredia and Schneider,

2003: 11).

In the mid and late 1990s another reform of public administration took place.

While described by its chief architect as a post-Weberian managerial reform (Bresser

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Pereira, 2003: 90), these measures largely preserved and expanded the Weberian

constitutional modifications of 1988 by, for example, regularly scheduling civil service

exams that had formerly been irregular and ad hoc (Bresser Pereira, 2003: 103-104; see

also Rezende 2004). Melo notes that in 1995, at the beginning of the presidency of

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the Federal government announced the immediate hiring of

240 civil servants in areas such as budgeting, finance and public policy in the name of

greater governmental efficiency (Melo, 2002: 169). Rezende shows that the reforms of

the late 1990s were closely monitored and encouraged by international financial

institutions. In 1999, for example, the IMF applauded Brazilian efforts to reduce overall

spending on public employees while at the same time making civil service salaries,

especially at the top levels, commensurate with salaries in the private sector (Rezende

2004: 89).

In Brazil today, below the level of the 20,000 presidential appointments

mentioned earlier, employment at the Federal level is now virtually impossible without a

competitive exam (concurso) except in the case of consultants hired on a short-term

basis. ).11 A recent study claimed that “servidores comissionados”, hired without a

concurso, represented only 14.5 percent of all the civilian functionaries registered in the

Federal government, and only 7.6 percent of all 1,011,065 Federal employees (from

“Aquario nobre para peixes do governo” in Correio Braziliense, 30 July 2009, editorial).

A large proportion of those hired by the Federal administration have university degrees.

From 1995 to 2009, 152,674 people were recruited into the Federal civil service via

concurso, and 91,631 of them, or 60 percent, had a university degree (from Boletin

Estatistico de Pessoal, Brasilia: Ministerio do Planejamento, Orcamento e Gestao,

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Secretaria de Recursos Humanos, July 2009, 159, p. 85). Key Federal agencies such as

the Treasury, Central Bank, Planning, Development Industry and Commerce, and Foreign

ministries, as well as the development bank (BNDES) are widely seen as high on the

“Weberianness” scale (for more discussion of some of these agencies, see Arbix and

Martin 2011).

The second process that a loose application of the patrimonialist label obscures is

the development of capitalism. This has changed Brazilian society in a number of ways,

some of them predicted by Weber. Historians recognize that the 19th-century Brazilian

state was highly attuned to the needs of agrarian exporters, with “one eye on the interior

and one on the City of London” (Topik, 2002: 130). While agriculture is still important

for Brazil, its manufactured exports are worth roughly twice the value of its primary

product exports (IBGE, 2001: 307-308). Industrialization and its concomitant,

urbanization, have contributed to a level of intergenerational social mobility in Brazil that

is higher than that of Western Europe and only slightly lower than in the United States

(Gordon, 2001: 95; see also Skidmore, 2004).

Brazil’s changing export profile, coupled with shifts in the global economy, have

also led to demands (both domestic and international) for a more sophisticated state

apparatus that can facilitate capitalist calculations about the market. Several measures

suggest that the Brazilian state is not particularly “Pantagruellian” (an evocative term

used by Paulo Roberto de Almeida), despite popular perceptions of overstaffing and

bloatedness. Public sector workers per 1,000 people were reported as 5.3 in Brazil in

2008, compared to 9.8 in the USA, 8.5 in Mexico, and 6.1 in Germany (2008 data).

Government spending represented slightly more than 30 percent of GDP in Brazil in

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2009, compared to about 40 percent in the United States (The Economist, April 14 2012:

50). The overall number of Federal civil public functionaries has declined since 1988

from 705,548 to 528,420 in 2007.

There is additional evidence that the Federal bureaucracy has become increasingly

professionalized. Decree Law 5,497 of July 21 2005 establishes the minimum number of

DAS political appointments that must be taken by civil servants. DAS (Direcao e

Assessoramento Superiores) are top-level appointments made by the President and her

staff. In 2008, more than 71 percent of the 21,715 DAS appointees were civil service

(servidores com vincula ao service public). So even though this system gives a large

degree of discretion to the President, the appointments made are largely of qualified,

career civil servants.

In the “commanding heights” of the Federal bureaucracy, the Brazilian state does

not look very patrimonial. Conventional measures that could reveal a distinctively

patrimonial pattern in Brazil seem to find a state that looks remarkably similar to others

in societies with similar and higher levels of economic development. Similarly, the

corruption at this level, often ascribed to patrimonialism, does not necessarily have

patrimonial roots. Ertman makes the same point when he compares absolutist states of

medieval Europe with ancient Rome. He writes, “The Roman state, like many states

today, may have been corrupt, meaning that private interests may have subverted the

prescribed operation of public institutions. However, such corruption must be sharply

distinguished from a set of practices which converted public or proto-public offices into

permanently private property, thereby subverting not the norms of behavior thought

proper for a public official, but the very notion of a public official itself.”12

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A loose application of the patrimonial label to Brazil’s state obscures the

rationalization of public administration (at least at the Federal level), and the integration

of the economy into world markets, supervised by key Federal agencies. That is not to

say that patrimonialism might not be a valid explanatory variable at lower levels of the

state apparatus, or concerning non-state attitudes and behaviors. There is much evidence

that clientelistic relations are common at the municipal level, in the management of

public services, and in the ways in which Brazilians perceive power. A good example of

the latter can be seen in an article by the social scientist and critic of the PT government

Francisco de Oliveira. In a recent article, he writes “Eight years of government led by the

PT devoted R$14 billion reais to the poor [via Bolsa Familia], and more than R$200

billion reais to the holders of the internal public debt” (“A Clonagem” in Piaui, 61,

October 2011, p. 34). In this formulation, power is personalized. The fact that the

issuance of internal public debt is a structural feature of the Brazilian state is ignored in

favor of an interpretation that sees interest on the debt as a personally-bestowed favor

from the government to rich people. This is a patrimonial view of power. But its ubiquity

should not lead us directly to the conclusion that the state is patrimonial.

Conclusion

Conceptual stretching does not require the elimination of the patrimonialist label.

But it does point to the urgent need to re-examine the concept and disaggregate it into

measurable characteristic of public administration, such as the balance between

recruitment on merit-based measures as opposed to political loyalty, the career path and

20

prospects of promotion of civil servants, the relative attractiveness of salaries, and the

relationship between key agencies of the central state and world markets.

In the Brazilian case, the term has been increasingly applied to the state at

precisely the period in which industrialization and urbanization have weakened the power

of traditional agrarian elites, and reforms have made the Federal civil service far more

“Weberian” than it was before. This article therefore ends with the hope for “creative

rejuvenation” in the theoretical realm – the rebuilding of our understanding of the

Brazilian state, on careful conceptual and empirical foundations.

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1 Elsewhere Weber writes that in patrimonial domains “the political realm as a whole is approximately identical with a huge princely manor”. He adds: “We shall speak of a patrimonial state when the prince organizes his political power over extrapatrimonial areas and political subjects – which is not discretionary and not enforced by physical coercion – just like the exercise of his patriarchal power.” (Weber, 1978: 1013). 2 This last factor is the main element of the standard definition of patrimonialism in sociological dictionaries; see Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner, 1994: 309; Jary and Jary, 1995: 478-479; Marshall, 1998: 485; and Johnson, 2000: 224. 3 Weber writes that “the [Imperial] Chinese state of officials, which in its own way is the most consistent political form of patrimonialism, is not based on landed estates, but, as we have seen, is so uniformly patrimonial because of their absence.” From Weber, 1978: 1090-1091. 4 This is the theme of Ertman, 1997. 5 For more contemporary references, see Viotti da Costa (2000, chapter 10) and Stein (1976: 147-149). 6 Roett draws heavily on Faoro (2001). 7 Eakin adds in a similar vein that the patrimonial state “controlled and dispensed resources (patrimony) to allies and friends and denied patronage to enemies. The state bureaucracy took on a life of its own, certifying, verifying, and acting as the buffer between the powerful and the powerless. The patrimonial system, with its corporatist ethos of hierarchy, stability, and concentration of power…was pluralistic, but not representative. It compartmentalized privilege rather than promoting equality before the law. The components of society interacted with each other through the paternalistic state rather than relating directly to each other” (Eakin, 1998: 167-168). For Chilcote, patrimonialism “is a natural outgrowth of the rural society that historically has profoundly influenced the Brazilian political economy, and it provides support for the nation’s ruling class - `the plantation owners and cattle ranchers of the Northeast, the coffee entrepreneurs of São Paulo, and the cattle ranchers of Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul’” (Chilcote, 1990: 122-123). 8 “Confiança de Quem?” in Jornal do Commercio (Recife), July 21, 2005, p. 12. 9 Viotti da Costa (2000: 85) contrasts the 1850 Brazilian law with the Homestead Act of 1862 in the U.S., which granted frontier land to anyone willing to settle it. 10 Quoted in Sartori, 1970: 1040. 11 These were some of the agencies evaluated by the country experts canvassed by Evans and Rausch 1999 and Rausch and Evans, 2000, producing a score of 7.60 for the Brazilian state, or the median for the 35 states evaluated. See also Evans, 1995, in which he characterizes the Brazilian state as an intermediate one, in between the high “Weberianness” of some of the East Asian developmental states and the “predatory” nature of states such as Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo).12 Ertman, 1997: 154