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This chapter analyzes the historical development and contemporary functionality of the Brazilian party system, emphasizing the post-1985 democratic regime. Environmental factors such as authoritarianism, federalism, presidentialism, statism, corporatism, personalism, and clientelism have all exercised strong anti-party effects in Brazil. The current party system is depicted as highly fragmented, highly competitive, highly volatile, and weakly institutionalized. The system is also extremely uneven in terms of parties' commitments to ideology and organization — the major exception being the Workers' Party (PT), which finally captured the presidency in 2002. The primary explanatory focus is on the electoral system used for the lower house (open-list proportional representation or OLPR), but the analysis also illustrates how OLPR interacts with various structural, historical, and institutional variables in Brazil. The chapter concludes by explaining how the party system persistently undermines the possibilities for governability in Brazil.

While there is no definite relationship between the organization of interests and the system of wage regulation, these labour relation dimensions may have different effects on performance. The differentiation between collective bargaining, coverage, centralization, bargaining coordination, and its government capacity are simplified as follows: centralization and coordination do not co-vary but performance values coordination more. Along with this notion, horizontal coordination — bargaining on behalf of different jobs and sectors — should be differentiated with vertical coordination which involves ranking. The distinction between horizontal and vertical coordination lies in the difference between macroeconomic coordination and bargaining governability. Governability or state action on procedural regulation may also affect performance through the bargaining process.

Peak-level coordination involves bargaining structures — the most important factor in determining performance — that are most sensitive to wage externalities when under high governability and pattern bargaining. Under the Keynesian regime during the 1970s, the main contribution of labour relations to performance was to limit demand management by keeping price stability compatible with full employment by making use of an incomes policy. In cases like the 1973 oil shock, the need for an incomes policy increased because absorbing income loss required wage increases to be scaled down for investment so that probability could be maintained. It was during this period that only a few countries were able to attain the right combination of incomes policy and centralized structures or corporatism. Other countries tried to apply a state-sponsored wage coordination accompanied by more centralized bargaining. This chapter describes and compares how institutions responded to shifts in the first and last subperiods of the 1970s.

Because of the change from demand-side to supply-side policies, both liberal and corporatist labour relations underwent shifts in the period under consideratin in this book: from pluralism to neoliberalism on one hand, and from classic to lean corporatism on the other. In the 1970s though, the experience of no form of coordinated bargaining did not match with empirical evidence. Nonetheless, uncoordinated bargaining outperformed peak-level coordination under low governability. Decentralized and uncoordinated bargaining and poorly organized labour relations thus proved to be more effective because they were more consistent with supply-side policies than with Keynesianism. The opposite, however, applies to classic corporatism. This chapter attempts to further explain these metamorphoses and shifts while also differentiating the different labour-relations regimes with one another in terms of coordination, bargaining, participation, centralization, and other such criteria.

This chapter explores the roots of neopopulism and the emergence of outsider politicians in the Andean countries. It identifies the causes for the emergence of outsiders and their rise to power, looks at the sequences and patterns of party system collapse and analyzes the negative impact of outsiders' politics on liberal democracy and democratic institutions. It examines the common patterns and qualitative differences in Peru, Venezuela and Bolivia and suggests that the main cause of the decomposition of party systems is a crisis of governability.

This chapter examines Orissa’s brush with India’s ‘crisis of governability,’ dramatized by the rise of Hindutva politics in the Orissa countryside, raging debates on religious conversion, frequent instances of murderous violence against Christian missionaries, and the emergence of Maoist extreme left-wing movements in many tribal areas. It also takes stock of the current trends in party politics in the state, with special reference to the increasing importance of the tribal population of the Orissa hills for the electoral arithmetic of Congress, BJP and the Biju Janata Dal. It concludes that along with the rising political assertiveness of the region’s backward castes, these developments point towards a reorientation of Orissa’s politics of relative quiescence, ushering in an era of mounting community conflict.

The third chapter expands on this theoretical argument by developing a historical account of the shift from the national Keynesian state to the contemporary member state. It looks at the origins of the Keynesian consensus in the post-1945 period and studies in detail its conflicts and contradictions. It argues that the early period of European integration was a reflection of these contradictions but integration was constrained by the strength of state–society relations at the time. Political strategies beyond national frameworks were stillborn as the institutionalized role of organized labour in the Golden Age era gave cohesiveness to the nation state framework. The chapter goes on to look at the crisis of this framework in the 1970s and 1980s, the political resolution of the crisis, and its institutional legacy in the form of European integration.

Central banks have increasingly used communication to guide market actors’ expectations of future rates of interest, inflation, and growth. However, aware of the pitfalls of (financial) central planning, central bankers until recently drew a line by restricting their monetary policy interventions to short-term interest rates. Longer-term rates, they argued, reflected decentralized knowledge and should be determined by market forces. By embracing forward guidance and quantitative easing (QE) to target long-term rates, central banks have crossed that line. While consistent with the post-1980s expansion of the temporal reach of monetary policy further into the future, these unconventional policies nevertheless mark a structural break—the return of hydraulic macroeconomic state agency, refashioned for a financialized economy. This chapter analyses the theoretical and practical reasoning behind this shift in the governability paradigm and examines the epistemic and reputational costs of modern central bank planning and the non-market setting of long-term bond prices.

The chapter starts with an account of the brief Janata Party government (1977-79) and shows how this changed Indian politics in several ways. It then presents an analysis of the 1980 elections in a broader historical context. The main focus of the chapter is on the changes occurred within the Congress party during the early 1980s and their political implications. It argues that there was substantial continuity with earlier trends, in particular as far as the de-institutionalization of the Congress is concerned. The chapter illustrates the rise of the Youth Congress under Sanjay Gandhi’s leadership and how the latter’s death in 1980 affected the Congress party and the entire national party system. The chapter also describes Rajiv Gandhi’s unsuccessful attempt to reform the party. The de-institutionalization of the party is linked with the growing problems of governability, with special reference to the law and order situation in key areas.

This book has highlighted the importance of the political structures established by constitutions, focusing on the positive effects of well-designed structures and how poorly designed constitutions may lead to “ungovernability.” To conclude the discussion, this chapter asks whether the United States was “governable” during the civil war, when two percent of its population lost their lives over a dispute about the degree to which the Constitution protected slavery. It considers the claim that the U.S. Constitution was unable to forestall dissolution and war, as well as the minimalist notion of governability and its implications for democracy or “rights” beyond security and stability. It also calls for a new constitutional convention that could engage in a comprehensive overview of the U.S. Constitution and the usefulness of many of its provisions to Americans in the twenty-first century.