Collective action and political authority:Rural workers, church, and state in Brazil

PETER P. HOUTZAGERUniversity of Sussex

This article explores how new political actors form and reproducethemselves within societies' most vulnerable sectors, those marginalizedfrom the state's authoritative decision-making centers. It explores thisquestion in national settings that characterize much of the contemporaryworld ^ that is, settings marked by high levels of political con£ict overbasic parameters of the political system and hence by signi¢cant institu-tional change. Dominant theories of collective action, such as thoserooted in rational choice, political process, and ` new social movements''literatures, are based on the experience of relatively stable Westerndemocracies.1 This article suggests that such theories may not travelwell to regions where key background conditions, such as the stabilityof institutional arrangements that link state and society, do not hold.

It develops an approach to collective action that theorizes the impactof high levels of con£ict over national patterns of political authority ^that is, over the boundaries and nature of the state and nationalpolitical regime ^ on the formation and reproduction of new politicalactors. This ` authority-centered'' approach understands the interactionbetween political elites and politically marginalized groups to be centralto actor formation. It suggests that this interaction is shaped by histor-ically contingent con¢gurations of three sets of factors: (a) the level ofintra-elite con£ict over the pattern of political authority, (b) the relativestrength of a group's social base, and (c) the nature of the structuraland political linkages that bind state and society.

The analytic value of this approach is nicely illustrated by the formationand reproduction of the Rural Workers' Union Movement (MovimentoSindical dos Trabalhadores Rurais), the principal political representa-tive of peasants, small farmers, and rural wage laborers in Brazil,during the 1964^1989 period. The rural workers' movement claimed to

Theory and Society 30: 1^45, 2001.ß 2001Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

represent over 8.3 million members by 1989, making it the largest of itskind in Latin America. Government data suggest that by the end ofthe 1980s unionization in rural areas ran at over 40 percent of theeconomically active population (for urban labor it was 15 percent).2

These elevated numbers in part re£ect the movement's formation withina corporatist labor framework and the analysis that follows is carefulto sort out their historical meaning.3 For the two dominant explanationsof collective action, rational choice and political process, this move-ment poses several signi¢cant puzzles.

First, diverse rural social groups in Brazil coalesced around a newinclusive identity as rural workers, despite the fact that most were smallfarmers and peasants, and that a variety of regional, racial, and genderdi¡erences divided these groups. The movement, for example, had asigni¢cant presence among wage laborers in the plantation zones ofthe Northeast and Southeast, the peasant farmers of the Amazonregion, and the immigrant small farmer communities in the South.Rational choice places the constitution of preferences outside of itsanalytic framework and cannot tell us why people coalesce around oneset of identities rather than another. Political process until recently hada structuralist bent and read identities of social structure.4 Recentwork within process borrows analytic tools from culturalist and con-structivist theories to explore processes of identity formation, some ofwhich are incorporated into the authority-centered approach. There isas yet, however, no distinct political process explanation of how newidentities are constructed and reproduced.5

Second, political process, along with earlier rational choice basedexplanations, predicts that where rural social networks are weak, collec-tive action will be scarce.6 The rural workers' movement de¢es thisprediction. The movement mobilized despite the relative weakness ofits social base ^ most rural communities in Brazil, with exception ofimmigrant settlements in the south, lack the density of social networksand autonomy from local elite groups that movement theorists suggestare central to the emergence and reproduction of movements. Third,political process suggests that collective action is likely to increase whenthe political system becomes more ` open,'' and the cost of engaging inpolitical mobilization is lower. When a system ``closes,'' for examplewhen state repression of new claimants increases, collective action islikely to decrease. In Brazil, however, the rural workers' movementemerged in a relatively hostile political environment under authoritarianrule and entered into profound crisis at the moment when political

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conditions appeared most favorable, with the full restoration of demo-cratic rule late in the 1980s.

To solve the three puzzles posed above, this article draws on muchexisting research on state-society relations within comparative historicalsociology and historical institutionalism, and on research of the micro-foundations of collective action (particularly that on social movements).It also suggests a few new analytic tools. It introduces the conceptsinstitutional hosts and structural linkages, and seeks to develop anapproach particular to the study of actor formation in contexts withhigh levels of political con£ict over the basic parameters of politicalauthority.7

Institutional hosts are elite actors who stimulate and support groupformation and go beyond the traditional role of movement allies.Hostsdraw unorganized peoples into their organizational and ideological¢elds, help rede¢ne them as social groups, and sponsor their constitu-tion as new collective actors. Allies support existing actors in variousways; institutional hosts attempt to create new actors and thereby re-make political cleavages and re-orient political contestation. Unlikeallies, hosts intentionally contribute in critical ways to the local socialnetworks, organizational resources, and ideological material needed toovercome the obstacles to collective action. Such elite actors thereforehave a signi¢cant (and intentional) impact on the identities and organ-ization of hosted actors. The degree of autonomy such actors are ableto negotiate from their hosts varies over time according to broaderpolitical regime dynamics. In Brazil, I argue, the church and stateassumed the role of institutional host for di¡erent segments of therural workers' movement ^ they compensated for the rural sector'sweak social base and lack of resources, o¡ered critical protection fromrepression threatened by other elite groups, and provided much of theideological material for the construction of new collective identities.

Structural linkages re£ect the form and degree of state presence inlocal communities. They are the institutional arrangements (the legalframework and administrative organizations of the state) and publicpolicies through which the state exercises its productive, social, andregulatory functions.8 These institutional arrangements stand in con-trast to political linkages ^ i.e., the political regime ^ which encompassthe formal and informal institutions involved in the aggregation ofinterests, leadership selection, and regulation of political con£ict, suchas party systems and forms of clientelism. The impact of political

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regimes on collective action has received considerable attention; theimpact of structural linkages has not. Yet such linkages profoundlyin£uenced around which claims non-elite rural groups coalesced inBrazil. As manifestations of public action, structural linkages (i) drewnew issues into the public sphere and thereby legitimized contestationaround these, reduced the risk of repression (which became morecostly for state or other actors), and facilitated coalition building.They (ii) created new collective interests and bases for alternativecollective identities ^ legislation setting out new rights to legally con-stituted categories of people, and public programs serving particularconstituencies, created interests that cut across previous cleavages andfacilitated group formation across otherwise heterogeneous commun-ities. And they (iii) provided physical points of access to the state,facilitating petitioning, protesting, and negotiating.

The notion of institutional hosts and of structural/political linkagesare part of an approach that focuses on how contestation over nationalpatterns of political authority shapes the formation and reproductionof new political actors within societies' most vulnerable sectors. Itsauthority-centered focus shares essential features with Skocpol's polity-centered framework and Tilly's polity model but it adopts a historicallycontingent constructivist interpretation of collective identities and isgeared speci¢cally to national contexts characterized by high levels ofinstitutional uncertainty and change.9 It sits at the intersection of muchrecent work in historical institutionalism, including that on state-corporatism, and research on collective action, in an e¡ort to link local-level dynamics of group formation and collective action to national-levelpolitical dynamics associated with state and regime transformation.10

The approach has four components. First, whether social groups coa-lesce and form national political actors is contingent on the interplaybetween (a) the level of intra-elite con£ict over the pattern of politicalauthority and (b) the strength of a group's social base. Second, thegeography of institutional linkages that bind state and society (structuraland political) in£uences the issues around which intra-elite contestationrevolves and new actors construct identities, make claims, and formalliances. In line with recent historical institutionalism, the approachsuggests that political institutions shape the ability of groups to achieveself-consciousness, organize, and make alliances, they facilitate certaintypes of claim making while inhibiting others, and they provide somegroups with greater access to state power than others.11 Third, collectiveidentities cannot be read o¡ institutional arrangements but are instead

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socially constructed within broad historical parameters set by thedominant ideology (including those embedded in political institutions,and in the legal code in particular), the normative order of localcommunities, and the identities of potential allies or hosts. Fourth, theformation of new national political actors produces shifts in politicalauthority ^ that is, in either the nature of the state or regime ^ andthereby alters the terrain on which subsequent contestation takesplace.

Argument and methodology

The formation and reproduction of the rural workers' movement,I argue here, was tied to elite con£ict associated with two processes:the expansion of the developmental state into the countryside after1964 and its gradual erosion in the mid-1980s; and the shift ¢rst to anauthoritarian political regime in 1964 and then in the late 1970s agradual transition to a democratic one. These processes of profoundinstitutional change occurred against the backdrop of a particularlyweak Brazilian peasantry ^ rural communities in most of the countrylacked the density of local networks and autonomy from local elitesthat are thought to sustain collective action.12

Much as Tilly found in England and France, change in the nature andlocus of political authority during the 1964^1989 period led to a basicshift in rural contention.13 Forms of rural protest such as localized landcon£ict, social banditry, and messianic movements (common prior tothe 1960s), were replaced by national movements, including promi-nently the rural workers' movement and at a later point in time theMovement of the Landless (Movimento dosTrabalhadores Rurais SemTerra, MST). The former helped break the historic pattern of oligarchicdomination over the countryside that had survived the end of theBrazilian Empire in the late nineteenth century, the corporatist EstadoNovo of the 1930s and 1940s, and the post-war populist period. Itplayed a pivotal role in the formation of new national labor confeder-ations during the 1980s ^ the Central Uè nica dos Trabalhadores (CUT)and Confederac° a¬ o Geral dos Trabalhadores (CGT) ^ and won a varietyof gains for rural workers. Its minority radical wing, associated withthe new unionism of CUT, was behind much of the expansion intorural areas of Brazil's principal progressive party, the Workers' Party(Partido dos Trabalhadores, PT).

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The argument revolves around three causal accounts. The ¢rst tellshow the military-technocrat elite that seized power in 1964 sought tobreak the traditional pattern of oligarchic domination in the country-side and modernize the agrarian sector. This new state elite imposedauthoritarian rule and extended the developmental state into ruralcommunities. It brought to life an array of new structural linkages,including the corporatist institutions set out in the Rural WorkersStatute of 1963 (which created the legal category rural worker), thesystem of land regulation anchored in the Land Statute of 1964, andthe system of rural social security and health provision FUNRU-RAL.14 These linkages drew new issues into the public sphere, creatednew axes of political con£ict, and provided new bases for broad collec-tive identities that could supersede local and regional identi¢cations.

The military-technocrat elite also assumed the role of institutional hostfor poor rural social groups, as part of its e¡orts to centralize authorityand assert its presence in rural communities, giving rise to what becamethe ``corporative wing'' of the rural workers' movement. Althoughcorporatism was intended to control and demobilize rural ``labor,'' themovement won a substantial degree of autonomy during the transitionto democracy and engaged in an impressive wave of collective action.Through a combination of strikes, public demonstrations, and acts ofcivil disobedience, the rural workers movement addressed an array ofpolitical and rural livelihood claims, ranging from wages and workconditions in plantations, to access to land and pricing and taxationof agricultural commodities, to healthcare and pensions.

The second causal account tells of the growing con£ict between theCatholic Church and military-technocrat elite during the 1970s overwhat pattern of political authority would prevail in both rural andurban areas. This con£ict pushed key sectors of the church to take onthe role of institutional host for a new ``popular'' wing of the move-ment. Although it formed as an alternative to the corporative wing,and di¡ered from it in important ways, the popular wing also bore themark of the corporatist framework and other structural linkages. Thethird account concerns the impact of the democratic transition anderosion of the developmental state on the movement. Growing elitedivisions in the early stages of the transition made possible masscollective action by the two movement-wings and their insertion intonew national alliances. In the later stages of the transition, changingalliance patterns, the new dynamics of the party system, and the declineof the developmental state helped trigger severe crises of both wings.

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The break between the two movement wings and their respective hosts,a partial one in the case of the corporative wing, played a central rolein triggering these crises.

Single country case studies are well suited for concept formation andassessing causality through in-depth process tracing.15 They su¡er, how-ever, from an inherent lack of variation on the explanatory variables(as well as on outcomes). To compensate partially for this shortcoming,the analysis is built on a comparative analysis of six ` within countrycases.'' It compares the two markedly di¡erent segments of the ruralworkers' movement across three periods that varied on all of theindependent variables but one (see Table 1).16

The ``corporative'' wing of the movement organized within the legalparameters of the corporatist labor framework, built an identity around

Table 1. Patterns of authority and collective action in the Brazilian countryside,1964^1989

1964^1974 1975^1984 1985^1989

Elite con£ict Moderate-highmilitary vs.oligarchy

High military vs.church

Moderate

Movement socialbase

Weak Moderate (withconsiderable regionalvariation)

Moderate (withconsiderable regionalvariation)

Regime type Authoritarian Authoritarian withregime transition

Democratic

State Extensiondevelopmentalstate

Developmental state Erosiondevelopmental state

Elite-movementrelations

State hostscorporativewing

State hostscorporative wing

Erosion state-corporative wingrelations

Church hostspopular wing

Rupture church-popular wing relations

Movementoutcome

Formation ofcorporativewing

Mobilization ofcorporative wing

Crises of corporativeand popular wings

Formation andmobilization ofpopular wing

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the legal category of rural worker, and pursued a reformist unionismthat avoided entanglement with political parties. It represented anarray of rural social groups but during the 1980s had particularlystrong support among rural wage laborers in the Northeast's sugarcanezone and small farmer immigrant communities in the south. The ` popu-lar'' wing of the movement challenged the corporatist framework andengaged in direct action in pursuit of a radical socialist transformationfrom below. It built a radical Catholic rural worker identity and wasclosely identi¢ed with the left's peak labor organization Central Uè nicados Trabalhadores (CUT) and the Workers' Party. Strongest amongpeasant groups in the north (the Amazon region) and small farmers inthe South, it acquired a signi¢cant presence among peasants in theNortheast as the 1980s wore on.

The two segments of the movement, despite these substantial di¡erencesin organization, identity, and alliance strategies, travelled remarkablysimilar paths across the three periods, placing in bold relief the impor-tance of broader patterns of national political change and the conse-quent shifts in the relationship between the wings and their respectiveinstitutional hosts. Changes in the pattern of elite con£ict demarcatethe three analytic periods. The 1964^1974 period was characterized bysigni¢cant levels of con£ict between the military-technocratic stateelite and rural oligarchy, the 1975^1984 period by accentuated levelsbetween the Catholic Church and this same state elite, and the 1985^1989 period by moderate to low levels of con£ict between the latterthree in the new democratic regime. The nature of both the state andregime varied considerably across these three periods, while social basesof the movement remained relatively weak in most (but certainly not all)regions. The corporative movement wing emerged in the ¢rst period,the popular wing in the second. Both mobilized and ascended thenational political stage in the second period. In the third period bothsectors of the movement entered into crisis.

An authority-centered approach

The voluminous work on state-society relations in comparative historicalsociology and historical institutionalism has generated numerous in-sights into the relationship between intra-elite con£ict, political insti-tutions, and collective action. Much research in this area explores theways in which state institutions structure how social groups organizeand seek to institutionalize their access to society's centers of power.

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Tilly has explored the impact of state-building on collective action foralmost three decades, while Skocpol, in her work on social policy inthe United States, has perhaps gone furthest in crafting a coherentframework out of the accumulated insights in this area.17 Withincomparative politics, scholarship by Collier and Collier, Stepan, andothers on state corporatism has also explored this in considerable de-tail.18 The approach this article develops draws on the accumulatedinsight of this work to theorize how changes in national patterns ofpolitical authority a¡ect the micro-level dynamics of collective action.

Elite con£ict and collective action

At the heart of the approach is the view that, in settings of heightenedelite con£ict and institutional change, actor formation and reproduc-tion are contingent foremost on the relations among social groups thatmay constitute new political actors and political elites. These relationsare conditioned by (a) the interplay of elite contestation over thepattern of political authority and a group's social base and by (b) thegeography of state-society linkages (discussed in the next section).Four types of movement-elite relations are logically possible. Mostanalysts have focused on instances where elites and movements eitherstand in opposition to each other or forge alliances. Two additionalpossibilities exist, however. Elites may ignore movements or act asinstitutional hosts for them. Table 2 shows the four possibilities.19

The relationship between the level of intra-elite con£ict and elite re-sponse to new actors is of course more complex than Table 2 can capture.However, the table suggests that when contestation is low elites willtend to ignoremovements that are weak and represent a low threat-level,and oppose (or repress) strong movements. If contestation is high, rivalelites will seek to strengthen their position by one of two strategies:

Table 2. Elite-movement relations

Intensity of intra-elite contestation

Low High

Strength of social baseLow Ignore Host(ed)High Oppose Ally

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forging alliances with, or acting as institutional hosts for, previouslyexcluded political actors. Which of the two strategies is employeddepends to a large degree on the strength of potential movements'social bases ^ that is, social groups' ability to overcome the obstaclesto collective action on their own. If local networks are strong they aremore likely to produce movements on their own and elites may attemptto form alliances with these; if networks are weak, elite actors mayassume the role of institutional hosts and compensate for this weakness.

Elite actors take on the role of institutional hosts, therefore, when elitecon£ict over the basic parameters of the political system are high andnon-elite allies are not available due to the precarious nature ofthe social networks and associational forms of non-elite groups. Theemergence of hosts, however, is a contingent outcome. It requires thepresence of elite actors with the institutional requisites to play this role^ national actors with roots in local communities across a substantialportion of national territory. Secondly, it is contingent on whether ornot other elite actors are able to block potential hosts from pursuingthis strategy. In periods of heightened elite con£ict some elite actorsmay seek out new alliances or host new movements, while others willattempt to block such e¡orts and repress new claimants.20 In Brazil,for example, the military coup of 1964 temporarily cut short earlye¡orts by the Catholic Church and state to host a rural workers' move-ment. These e¡orts were renewed several years later when politicalconditions had changed once more.

There is an abundance of research to suggest that the leverage ofpolitically marginalized social groups vis-a© -vis elite actors is condi-tioned in part by their social base, the relative strength of whichin£uences both elite responses and the degree of dependence on eliteallies or hosts (when these are available).21 Social movements grow outof pre-existing local social networks. It is intact communities thatengage in sustained collective action, not the disrupted or collapsedcommunities of mass society and collective behavior approaches popu-lar in the late 1950s and 1960s, and of the agrarian hypothesis (discussedin the conclusion).22 Research suggests that the strength of the socialbase is a function of the density and autonomy of local networks.The density of local networks in£uences the most basic dynamics ofcollective action: the face-to-face interaction through which solidarityis reproduced and new identities are formed, the means through whichmovements recruit participants and particularly respected communityleaders, and the crucial communication networks and organizational

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bases through which resources are mobilized.23 Autonomy, for obviousreasons, is vital to a community's ability to develop strong bonds ofhorizontal solidarity, a shared identity that is in opposition to localelite groups, and opportunity to gather and mobilize.24 Social networksthat support dense associational life and signi¢cant autonomy from elitegroups are therefore most likely to support strong collective actors.

It is in the context of a weak social base and high levels of elite con£ictthat the progressive wing of the Catholic Church and the state in Brazilattempted to organize previously politically excluded groups and as-sumed the role of institutional hosts. As hosts, they promoted the devel-opment of union leadership and provided critical organizational resour-ces. The state, for example, provided subsidies to unions through suchmechanisms as the union tax, while progressive sectors of the churchused their elaborate network of Christian Base Communities, parishes,and pastoral institutes to support the formation of the popular wing.

The two hosts also played a critical role in granting the movementlegitimacy and protecting ` their'' respective wings from some of theworst forms of repression (though certainly not all) by other elite groups(local and national). Dozens of union leaders and lawyers, and manyhundreds of union members, were assassinated in the 1964^1989 period.In addition, in many areas local elites penetrated unions throughclientelist relations. Yet in the contest with elites who opposed ruralunionization, state and church created relatively (if limited) protectedspaces for rural organizing without which it is unlikely that the move-ment could have developed beyond local pockets of resistance. For thepopular wing of the movement, the church also shielded it from someof the worst forms of state intervention and harassment.

Institutional linkages and collective action

Tilly has argued over the years that the modern state embodies aparticular form of political authority that has transformed how peopleorganize to make claims, and the claims around which they organize.25

The modern state's centralization of authority and creation of uni-formity of beliefs over large geographic areas and populations hascreated new bases on which social groups can organize and constructcollective identities. States integrate societies by pursuing ` policiesintended for large populations and standardizing the procedures forcitizens to use in their relations with authority,'' facilitating collective

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claim making by new, and larger, social groups.26 They also create newnormative orders that legitimize their authority (and their usurpationof others' authority) and secure the voluntary compliance of theirsubject populations.27 The notion of structural and political linkageshelps highlight how very di¡erent institutional arrangements have beeninvolved in these processes and how these di¡erences shape collectiveaction by sectors marginalized from the centers of political power. Theinstitutional linkages that bind state and society set the boundarieswithin which most elite contestation occurs and the claims around whichmarginalized sectors mobilize. They also help establish what forms ofcontestation are acceptable.

Political linkages, those of the national political regime, in£uence howpolitical actors mobilize to make claims.28 The impact of these linkageson collective action, and particularly that of the party system, is muchstudied, including in the transitions to democracy literature. Brazil isperhaps somewhat anomalous in that the party system did not, likeelsewhere, play a central role in constructing rural political identitiesand in stimulating organizing. On the one hand, the corporativemovement was formed under military rule, when parties were eithermarginalized or repressed. On the other, the party system in Brazilis particularly weak and fragmented.29 The notable exception is theWorkers' Party, which emerged in the political opening of the late1970s and early 1980s. The popular wing, however, helped build theWorkers' Party in rural areas, not the reverse.30

Structural linkages re£ect the state's role in economic and socialspheres and play a signi¢cant role in de¢ning the boundaries of thepolitical arena ^ what is ``public'' and subject to political contestation.31

In Brazil, state corporatism was the most important linkage for thedevelopment of the rural workers' movement. Forged from above, itrepresents an extreme state e¡ort to rede¢ne not only state-societyrelations but also patterns of association within society itself. Corpora-tist institutions have been a critical structural linkage between the stateand rural social groups in numerous countries during the twentiethcentury, and in Latin America in particular.32 The strong historicallegacy of corporatism in Brazil re£ects the dominant position of thestate. Corporatist institutions were ¢rst introduced to regulate urbanlabor during the 1930s. They emerged as a critical structural linkagein rural areas only in the late 1960s. As elsewhere in Latin America,the Brazilian state facilitated the organization of particular socialgroups in functional organizations (i.e., by economic category) by

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granting subsidies and territorially based representational monopolies.In exchange, these organizations sacri¢ced autonomy and acceptedhigh levels of state control.33

Much of the literature has emphasized corporatism's role as an instru-ment of state control and its evisceration of organized social groupssuch as urban labor. Corporatist institutions, however, can also createnew political spaces and new bases for making claims on the state. Thedegree of state control exercised through corporatist channels variesover time according to broader regime dynamics: the same institutionsthat, under hard-line authoritarian rule, exercise state control over socialgroups, under democratic rule, can provide bases for mass mobilizationand aggregation and expression of demands.34 It is true that the goal ofstate corporatism has historically been to shape and restrict whoorganizes, how they organize, and around what claims they organize.This, however, does not foreclose the possibility of this linkage becomingpoliticized and of social groups mobilizing around it to forward theirclaims against political elites.

This of course amounts to a revisionist interpretation of state-corpo-ratism. It suggests that under certain conditions (such as a permissivepolitical regime) corporatism a¡ords important opportunities forcollective action.35 It also reminds students of Latin American politicsthat corporatism is not a relic of a distant past but remains a signi¢-cant state-society linkage in at least some countries.

Political identities

The rural worker identity constructed in Brazil during the 1964^1989period cannot be read o¡ institutional arrangements. Melucci andother constructivist scholars have argued convincingly that the centraltask of movements is to develop a collective interpretation of goals,means, and opportunities ^ that is, a collective identity.36 Identitiesconstruct group unity (a ` we'') and give the group, and its politicalenvironment, meaning, thereby enabling collective action. Identities aretherefore relational. Furthermore, they are contested by groups withinmovements and by other actors in the political system, and conse-quently change over time as relations to other actors change, or as theinstitutions through which these relations are mediated change.37 Thisraises the question, when do collective identities succeed in holdingpeople together for sustained collective action?

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In Brazil, the identities that succeed in establishing and maintainingthe unity of the rural workers' movement appear to have performedthree tasks. These often stood in contradiction to each other, creating astrong centrifugal pressure. First, movement identities were based inpart on reinterpretations of the dominant ideology, and speci¢cally onthe claims of legitimacy used by the state.38 All dominant ideologiesseek to legitimize the prevailing pattern of authority by making universalclaims because, as Scott suggests, ` a hegemonic ideology requires, byde¢nition, that what are in fact particular interests be reformulatedand presented as general interests.'' Claims by subordinate groups, ``canbe said to arise from the inevitable gap between the promises that anyhegemony necessarily makes and the equally inevitable failure of thesocial order to ful¢ll some or all of these promises.''39 Second, thesecollective interpretations were congruent with the normative order andfolk conceptions of how society functions that were embedded in, andthat helped hold together, local social networks.40 Third, a substantialdegree of overlap developed between the interpretations of movementwings and their hosts. Recent work on identity formation suggeststhat movement allies seek to bring their own interpretive frameworkto bear on their partners and can exercise a powerful in£uence onmovement identities.41 In the case of institutional hosts, which purpose-fully attempted to frame groups' new collective interpretations, thisin£uence was profound.

The two movement wings in Brazil constructed identities around quitedi¡erent interpretations of the legal category of rural worker as they` juggled'' the three tasks in distinct ways. These interpretationschanged over time as their relationships to their hosts, other politicalactors, and political institutions shifted. The identities were originallybuilt within the ideological framework provided by the church andstate. The corporative wing explicitly built its identity around land andlabor legislation enacted in the 1960s that de¢ned a new legal persona^ the rural worker ^ and granted it a speci¢c set of rights. The People'sChurch created an identity within the framework of LiberationTheologythat also drew on this legal de¢nition of rural worker. The di¡erence,however, was that progressive clergy de¢ned rural workers as part of asingle national movement to rebuild the left and induce a radical trans-formation of Brazilian society. These identities shifted as the salienceof the corporatist framework declined and that of the party and electoralsystems grew, as legislative bodies acquired greater power vis-a© -vis thoseof the executive, and as the urban left remade itself and became aviable ally.

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As the preceding discussion makes clear, the authority-centered ap-proach draws on insights generated by the extensive research on themicro-foundations of collective action of rational choice and politicalprocess scholars. However, the task of explaining actor formation insettings characterized by frequent institutional change and signi¢cantelite con£ict over the boundaries of the political arena di¡ers consider-ably from that in democratic contexts of the United States and WesternEurope, characterized by relative political-institutional stability. Inorder to do so, the approach di¡ers signi¢cantly from both rationalchoice and political process inspired approaches.

Rational choice helps explicate some of the causal mechanisms in-volved in group formation and mobilization, particularly the role oforganization, leadership, and select incentives.42 Rational choice, how-ever, has de¢ned its ¢eld of inquiry narrowly and excludes questionsabout how actors' identities (or preferences) are constituted.43 In doingso rational choice excludes some of the central questions of collectiveaction from its research agenda ^ it cannot tell us why people atparticular historical moments coalesce around particular identities.As Melucci perceptively points out, this is not an insigni¢cant limita-tion: rational choices require ` a yardstick to measure the investmentand rewards . . . [and to estimate] relative yield from the various possi-ble courses of action .. . [S]uch a standard is formed previous to theperformance of the calculation itself, . . . [this standard] I call identity.Identity is what people choose to be, the incalculable: they choose tode¢ne themselves in a certain way .. . primarily under a¡ective bondsand based on the intuitive capacity of mutual recognition.. . . The for-mation of expectations and the assessment of the possibilities andlimits of action presupposes that the actor is able to de¢ne itself and itsenvironment.''44 In contrast to historical institutionalism, choice alsodoes not provide a basis for explaining the conditions that shape andset in motion the processes of collective action, a central concern ofthis article.

Political process approaches in social movement theory highlight howindigenous organizational capability of social groups and politicalopportunities interact to produce collective action and point to a numberof important variables that shape actor formation.45 As McAdam,Tarrow, and Tilly observe in a partial auto-critique, however, processhas ` worked best as a story about a single uni¢ed actor in democraticpolitics . . . [B]ecause it is a static, cause-free single-actor model and .. .contains built in a¤nities with relatively [stable] democratic social

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movement politics, it serves poorly as a guide to contentious politics . . .outside the world of democratic Western politics.''46 These limitationsare rooted in part in a thin notion of political opportunities ^ that is,one that is generally static and atheoretical. Neither abstract formula-tions of political opportunities nor the more operationalizable notionof political opportunity structures (POS), which has become a conceptualcenterpoint for this literature, theorize how the diverse independentvariables thought to in£uence movement behavior relate to one another,why they vary over time, and how di¡erent combinations shape theinteraction between movements and other actors over time.47

Period I: Remaking authority and collective action in Brazil,1964^1974

The pattern of political authority that emerged in Brazil during the1964^1974 period transformed the bases for collective action in ruralareas. The military-technocratic elite extended the developmental stateinto the countryside in an e¡ort to modernize the agrarian sector and,in doing so, sought to replace an oligarchic pattern of authority basedon traditional and clientelist forms of social control, and in whichagricultural wage laborers and small farmers in various forms of landtenure were e¡ectively excluded from existing labor legislation, socialsecurity, and national law generally. It created an array of new struc-tural linkages as it sought to increase its role in regulating land, labor,credit, and the distribution of agricultural commodities. The author-itarian political regime greatly narrowed who could engage in politicalactivity, around what kinds of issues, and through what political link-ages. The coalitional basis of the state and regime shifted from an` accommodationist alliance'' between a modernizing urban elite andthe rural oligarchies, which had left the latter's hegemony in the coun-tryside intact, to a ` triple alliance'' among state elite, national, andinternational capital.48

The military seized power in a period of heightened concerns that a` backward'' agrarian sector posed an insurmountable bottleneck toeconomic growth and represented a breeding ground for Communist-inspired insurgency.49 The latter fear was provoked by new regionalpockets of rural mobilization, and most prominently by the PeasantLeagues of the Northeast of Brazil. Shortly before the coup, the RuralWorker Statute of 1963 was enacted with the intention of bringingcorporatism to the countryside and channelling these incipient organiz-

16

ing e¡orts. The statute, after modi¢cations made in 1965, allowed fortwo types of rural unions: rural worker unions and rural employerunions.50 It de¢ned the legal category rural worker to cover rural wagelaborers, sharecroppers, posseiros (literally squatters, but which in Brazilis a recognized legal category with a set of rights), tenant farmers, andsmall holders. Women were not covered and would have to wait untilthe 1980s for the right to join unions (won in practice) and to achieveparity with men in labor rights and social bene¢ts. The law provokedthe formation of the ¢rst rural worker unions and of the NationalConfederation of Agricultural Workers (CONTAG), but this precociousorganizing process was cut short by the coup in 1964.51

In the ¢rst four years of military rule the state expanded its legal author-ity to act in the countryside but in practice little changed. After 1968,however, military hard-liners won control over the state and initiated aseries of policies that constituted a relatively coherent agrarian project.At that moment the military's position, along with that of urban-industrial groups centered in Sa¬ o Paulo and abroad, was unassailable.In contrast, the rural oligarchies, among the most vocal supporters ofthe coup, found themselves further from the halls of power than everbefore ^ even in areas of agricultural policy urban-industrial interestsprevailed.52

The agrarian project was a form of agrarian developmentalism and hadthree closely intertwined components: increasing agricultural produc-tion, fostering national integration, and incorporating rural ` labor''into national society.53 The modernization of agriculture was inevitablyintertwined with national integration ^ it required the national state toenter rural areas where historically it had neither authority nor bu-reaucratic capacity to act. The corporatist labor regime was a struc-tural linkage intended to help rede¢ne state-society relations in thecountryside by bringing rural labor into an institutionalized relation-ship with the state. The agrarian project therefore represented a directchallenge to local authority ^ it entailed gaining an unprecedented,although still far from complete, degree of control over labor, land,and capital in the countryside. This required a period of state buildingunseen since the Estado Novo (1937^1945).

The ability of the state to extend its reach into rural communities variedsigni¢cantly by region, social group, and policy area. Nonetheless, avariety of new structural linkages were created. Alongside the corpora-tist labor institutions, there emerged new institutions to regulate land

17

tenure (the most important of which was the National Institute forAgrarian Reform and Colonization, INCRA), provide a social wage,(FUNRURAL), and various other linkages, including ¢nancial ones,such as the Bank of Brazil (which, as the principal conduit forcredit, became the state's capital accumulation arm in rural areas),and the national extension and research services (EMBRATER andEMBRAPA), which provided the technical underpinning for themodernization of agriculture.54

In order to centralize power out of the hands of regional oligarchiesand local elites and modernize the agrarian sector, the state assumedthe role of institutional host for what became the corporative wing.Having ¢rst repressed the pre-1964 mobilization, the state now encour-aged and supported the growth of the movement under its tutelage.Rural unions were expected to organize the rural poor, help providethem a social wage, educate them about their rights under national law(as citizens and rural workers), and demand enforcement of legislationthrough the labor courts. In this manner they would give the centralstate a stronger presence in rural areas and undermine both the ruraloligarchies and the perceived communist threat. Through the Ministry ofLabor, INCRA, the national extension service, and various regionaldevelopment bodies the state elite supported the formation of themovement ^ state agencies collected and distributed the union tax,o¡ered a variety of public contracts to unions (particularly in the areaof healthcare delivery), supported various leadership training initia-tives and union gatherings, and granted rapid legal recognition to newunions.55 It goes without saying that the movement that emerged washeavily regulated by the state and enjoyed little autonomy.

The impact of the new institutional linkages was conditioned by theweak social base of rural groups in Brazil. The legacy of the slave-basedplantation economy in some regions and latifundio-based agriculturein others helped produce precarious local social networks and forms ofassociation. When combined with the particular federal structure ofthe Brazilian state, this has ensured the survival of various forms ofclientelism. Until recently, local elites dominated all local institutionsand brokered relations with the national state, leaving subordinatesocial groups with little bases of autonomy. In this context, the high-levelof geographic mobility further contributed to the precarious natureof local social networks. Brazil has had a moving agricultural frontierfrom its independence in the nineteenth century up until today, whilethe last three decades have seen an exodus to the cities of truly biblical

18

proportions (an estimated 20 million people during the 1970s alone).Horizontal ties among small farmers, peasants, and agricultural workerswere therefore weak relative to other regions of Latin America and tothe rural villages on which much previous theorizing about peasantmobilization are based.56

In the context of authoritarian rule and limited political linkages, thesigni¢cant threat of state repression, and a weak social base, masscollective action was out of the question. Nonetheless, union leaders,supported by moderate sectors of the Catholic Church and individualsassociated with the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), succeeded inbuilding the ¢rst national rural movement in Brazil during this period.The movement sought to capture the new £ow of state resources anduse the new (albeit limited) institutional opportunities to overcome theobstacles to rural organizing. It launched a ` campaign for rights'' to ¢ghtthe arbitrary power of landowners through labor courts and to forceimplementation of national legislation. Unions educated membersabout their legal rights and encouraged workers to bring individualcases before the labor courts.

The movement also constructed a new class-based identity around thelegal category of rural worker a in subtle politicization of a term origi-nally introduced to depoliticize rural movements. The rural workerwas to supersede the old left's campesino (a revolutionary term) andthe multitude of regional identities that still prevailed. The identity hadto embody a common vision of the movement's goals and environ-ment, yet it clearly re£ected the in£uence of its institutional host andthe new structural linkages. The rural worker was, before all else, acitizen, with a set of legally de¢ned rights spelled out in particular inthe Rural Worker Statute and Land Statute. The movement's strugglewas to seek full enforcement of those rights. The rural worker, how-ever, was also a member of an oppressed class, whose roots lay in theheroic pre-1964 struggles.57 At the center of the worker's struggle wasthe ¢ght for ``massive and immediate'' agrarian reform, a vital concernof several of the social groups the movement represented. The move-ment formulated its position on agrarian reform to match closely thelanguage of the Land Statute, but its interpretation of the law was aclever distortion of the legislation's intent.58 It re-interpreted the law tocall for wholesale restructuring of the land tenure system on a nationalscale, when in fact this legislation called for localized agrarian reformin areas of high social tension.59

19

Various students of rural politics in Brazil observe that the unionsbecame an important local institution that often disorganized ``pre-existing social relations based on dependence and subordination.''60

The ability to appeal to the labor courts allowed rural workers to by-passthe far more conservative civil courts, which were tied into the localpower structure, and in numerous instances did alter the balance ofpower among landowners/employers and sharecroppers, tenant farmers,and rural wage laborers.61 French points out the logic of such a strategyin his study of urban labor in Brazil: ` For trade unionists, the labor courtsystem, even without the right to strike, still provided a mechanism forcontesting unjust employer actions. . . . In this regard, the worker'sinterests coincided with those of the growing federal bureaucracy, whichsought to centralize e¡ective control in the hands of the state.'' 62

The movement therefore played an important role in building the statefrom below in rural areas. Unions educated members of their rightsunder national law and demanded implementation of legislation throughthe labor courts. As in urban areas, unions provided a social wage inthe form of social security and health care services.63 In these andother ways rural unions helped to breathe life into a new set of struc-tural linkages and draw the state into areas in which it had heretoforebeen largely absent.

The number of unions skyrocketed to 2,254 in the dozen years span-ning 1968 to 1980 (see Table 3). The movement reached into the farcorners of the countryside in a manner few national institutions couldmatch. The state, however, was not an entirely hospitable host and thecorporative wing's rapid growth had a signi¢cant cost. The variousconstraints imposed by corporatist institutions, along with the deliveryof public services on behalf of the state, produced a layer of bureau-cratic and conservative unionists that hemmed in more progressiveelements. Interviews with union leaders and union documents revealthat as the decade wore on many of the unions, and probably a majority,became quasi-state agencies that concentrated primarily on the deliveryof public services.64 When we take into account that the high numberof unions re£ects above all else the legally mandated territorial base ofthe union (the municipio), and that dues paying members were less thanhalf of the total membership, it becomes clear that the movement wasconsiderably more precarious than aggregate numbers imply.65

The political importance of the movement's strategy nonetheless cannotbe overstated. It was through the unions, rather than political parties,

20

that the oligarchies' former clients acquired a new political identity andwere brought into the political system. For many rural groups, corpo-ratism de¢ned their relation to the party system.66 The labor law inBrazil explicitly prohibited unions from engaging in electoral politicsand forging ties with political parties. The split between union andpolitical party activity, central to the corporatist labor legislation,became an important tenet of the movement, which consistently de¢neditself as nonpartisan and studiously avoided establishing close ties toany one party.67 The weak and non-ideological nature of the partysystem reinforced this stance. This would have important consequencesfor both the ability of the movement to exercise in£uence through theparty system in the transition, and for the ability of the party system toaggregate group interests and bring these to decision-making centers.

No alternative movements to the corporative wing emerged during thisperiod. Those rural social groups willing to mobilize around an alter-native set of claims, or a more radical set of claims and strategies, wereeither ignored or opposed by local and national political elites, dependingon the threat perception.

Table 3. Rural unionization in Brazil, 1960^1990

Number ofunionsa

Unionmembership(in thousands)b

Unionization rate

Demographiccensus

Agriculturalcensus

1960 14 ^ ^ ^1970 1,066 1,500 11% 9.4%1980 2,254 6,898 54% 40%1990 2,811 8,314 (1988) 59% 43%

a The number of unions are from IBGE, Sindicatos, and represents a conservativeestimate. The agency took 2,849 existing rural worker unions and ascertained whenthey were founded (38 unions had no founding date). The numbers therefore do notinclude unions that by 1990 had disbanded.b The numbers for 1970 and 1980 are estimates by Maybury-Lewis, The Politics of thePossible, based on CONTAG reports. The 1990 number is from IBGE, Sindicatos.Thereis considerable discrepancy between the two sets of ¢gures. Maybury-Lewis (p. 219)puts union membership in 1986 at 9,929,538.

21

Period II: Rural workers on the national stage, 1975^1984

Elite con£ict over the basic parameters of the political system shiftedand escalated signi¢cantly during the 1975^1985 period. On the onehand, parts of Brazil's agrarian-based oligarchies turned toward thestate and either accepted the highly subsidized form of agriculturalmodernization being promoted or occupied strategic positions withinthe expanding developmental state. As Hagopian has carefully docu-mented, the military itself turned toward these sectors after the mid-1970s to shore up its eroding political support.68 On the other hand, thehardening of authoritarian rule and expansion of the developmentalstate set in motion con£ict between the church and state over whatpattern of political authority should replace the historic form of oligar-chic domination in rural areas. Furthermore, growing parts of theurban professional classes, business sector, and sectors of the militarysupported a return to some form of democracy. The relatively narrowstate-oligarchy con£ict was replaced by a state-church con£ict thatwas part of a much broader contest between supporters of the author-itarian regime and democratic sectors.

This new pattern of elite con£ict had two consequences for rural socialgroups. The church emerged as an institutional host for the move-ment's popular wing, and the con£ict contributed to a gradual politicalopening that widened political linkages and allowed the movement asa whole to mobilize key rural sectors, forge new alliances with urbansectors, and place its demands on the national agenda. Correspondingly,the military-technocratic elites' ability to oppose more radical ruralmovements declined. The state continued to host the corporative wingbut as the political opening advanced the unions acquired a consider-able degree of autonomy. Although the developmentalist state enteredinto crisis in the 1980s, a victim of oil shocks and the debt crisis, nomajor revision of the state's economic and social role would occuruntil late in the 1980s. Structural linkages gradually frayed as statecapacity to act declined but they continued as axes of political organ-izing and con£ict. The issues brought into the state's purview under themilitary therefore remained in the public domain and became politicizedas social movements organized around them and national politicalactors competed for the movement's support in a mutually reinforcingdynamic.

The church as a whole, excepting a small number of radical clergy,initially shared the military's enthusiasm for the state-led moderniza-

22

tion of the agrarian sector, including the expansion of corporatism.When the military hardline asserted control over the state and initiatedthe agrarian project in the late 1960s, along with a new wave of repres-sion, this enthusiasm waned. Support within the church for the moreprogressive aisle grew and the church, as an institution, moved intoopposition to the state.69 In the new state-church cleavage, the churchbecame the principal opposition force to the authoritarian regime inboth rural and urban areas.70 Having lost its longstanding ally, and animportant source of political and ¢nancial support, the church soughtto rede¢ne its relationship to a rapidly changing society, and society'srelationship to the state. In a decisive break from its authoritarian andhierarchical tradition, the Brazilian clergy launched an unprecedentedpopular organizing campaign, creating a host of new pastoral programssuch as the Rural Youth Pastoral and the Pastoral Land Commission(CPT) and an array of community organizations such as the ChristianBase Communities (CEBs). These community groups became an impor-tant new political space that often lay beyond traditional patron-clientrelations and through which local Catholic activists and clergy wereable to mobilize signi¢cant numbers of people.71

The controlled political opening initiated by the military in the late1970s, the rising tide of opposition voices, including that of urbanlabor, created a dramatically di¡erent political environment. In this newcontext, the church was the only progressive force in the countryside ofnational scope. It took on the role of institutional host for rural groupsin communities across the Brazilian countryside, forming the basis forthe popular wing. This part of the movement grew from a few unionopposition slates in the Amazon region into a national movement wingwith roughly 750,000 members by 1989 and a strong presence in theCUTand Workers' Party.72

The church was an ideal institutional host. It is a transnational institu-tion with ¢rm roots in rural communities. It is able, on the one hand, togarner critical resources, information, and political support fromnational and international sources and, on the other, it is a local actorrepresented by the Bishop, the parish priest and local pastoral agents.Progressive clergy and lay activists in Brazil were able to mobilize ruralsocial groups (primarily small farmer and peasant groups) and localresources through the church's impressive associational web, its ownelaborate organizational structure, and a popular religious identity.The church's myriad pastoral programs, the CPT and other churchentities, linked community leaders and activists to each other and to

23

the national movements of the left emerging in the transition. Thechurch's e¡orts to create community leadership to ``bring the Churchto the people'' produced most of the popular wing's leaders. Thereligious content of its organizing initiatives resonated with the pre-vailing belief system in rural communities and allayed the fears ofcommunity members of being labeled communists and agitators bylocal authorities and the military. Religion conferred a degree of legiti-macy and provided protection from repression by local elite groupsand the national state.73 This depth of the church's involvement inorganizing rural social groups and its direct, self-conscious, sponsor-ship of these groups' involvement in a national movement, distin-guishes the church as institutional host from the church as a simpleally.

For the radical Catholics, rural worker unions were a legally sanctionedspace from which to challenge local elites and the state, and to assertthe political presence of rural workers in the democratic transition.Winning control of rural workers' unions was seen as the ¢rst in aseries of political battles that would help rebuild the left and leada radical transformation of Brazilian society from below. A key partof its struggle was to end the state corporatism. In this it was notsuccessful.

Instead of concentrating on the system of labor relations as the corpo-rative wing did, the popular wing favored direct action against thestate and sought to establish its hegemony within rural communities.Unlike the corporative wing, it was from the earliest stages heavilyinvolved in the party system ^ it helped build theWorkers' Party in thecountryside, and as the 1980s progressed became deeply involved inelectoral politics. Along with other Church-based movements, it joinedthe more sharply de¢ned and militant alliance on the left, which co-alesced behind the labor central CUTand theWorkers' Party. The ruralunionists' demands for radical agrarian reform and agricultural policyfavoring small producers became an integral part of the labor central'sand party's platforms.

The ability of the church to pour new content into pre-existing identi-ties in rural communities was critical to the development of the popularwing. The new radical political-religious identity that emerged wasinclusionary, based on a mix of prophetic Catholicism and popularizedMarxism. It was strongly Catholic, class-based, and yet communityoriented.74 It adopted the legal category rural worker but de¢ned the

24

small farmers as part of the broader workers' movement. Class wasde¢ned not in conventional sociological terms, but as broadly aspossible ^ that is, as the poor, the oppressed, and the working people,(which included ¢shermen, beggars, and industrial workers) who stoodin direct opposition to the rich, the dominant class, or the capitalists.The ideal was the community of small farmers tilling the land eithercollectively or individually. It was faith that led Christians to participatein the struggle for liberation from capitalist exploitation, and thestruggle was the execution of God's plan.75 The process by which thestruggle was carried out was an important part of the identity, becausethe struggle itself was liberating and an expression of one's faith. Therewas consequently a strong emphasis on popular participation andlegitimate (autentico) workers' organizations. Its activities were there-fore largely focused on ` political struggles'': winning control over, anddemocratizing, corporatist unions and participating in the wave ofinstitution building that created the Worker's Party and CUT. Itsmembers did, however, engage in a variety of local community projects,land invasions, and negotiations with local authorities on many of thesame issues as the corporative wing.

The corporative wing followed a very di¡erent path, but it also mobi-lized key rural groups in mass collective action against the state andrural elites. The corporatist labor system continued to provide the wingwith vital resources and a legal-institutional framework within whichto make claims. The movement sought to shift, however, from a strat-egy of defense of individual rights through the courts to collectiveclaim making. Although a majority of unions were engaged primarilyin the distribution of public services (particularly healthcare) and werepolitically conservative, substantial sectors mobilized: in the planta-tion regions of the Northeast and Southeast wage laborers engaged insector-wide strikes and, initially, won higher and better work condi-tions; in the South small farmers challenged various agricultural poli-cies, with varying degrees of success, and fought for parity of socialbene¢ts with urban workers and for equal bene¢ts for women ruralworkers.76 Unlike the popular wing, its demands continued to revolveprimarily around rural livelihood issues.

CONTAG, the national confederation representing the corporativewing, did engage in overt political activity and pursued a pragmaticalliance strategy through which it was able to place core demands onthe national agenda. It joined a broad center-left coalition that in-cluded, among others, the traditional left (the communist parties), the

25

progressive wing of the Partido do Movimento Democratico Brasileiro(PMDB), and civil associations. It succeeded in inserting its demandsinto the transition pact brokered by the Alianc° a Democratico (AD).The movement wing, however, was in a peculiar situation. Even as itdemanded a return to democracy it also sought to draw the military-ledstate into settling labor disputes. It also remained uninterested andunable to build ties to any political party and consequently failed toassert itself in the party system.

The wing's crowning moment came in 1985 when, just after takingo¤ce, the new civilian president announced an ambitious nationalagrarian reform plan at the Fourth Rural Workers Congress. CONTAGhad played an important role in formulating the plan, which promisedto distribute land to 7.1 million families over a 15-year period andincluded expropriation of ``unproductive land'' as its principal meansof redistribution.

Period III: Movement in crisis, 1985^1989

The 1985^1989 period saw both an extraordinary process of institutionbuilding at the level of the democratic regime and the steady erosion ofthe developmental state. Elite con£ict over the pattern of politicalauthority fell in relative terms as diverse politial groups sought tocoalesce behind a new net of democratic political linkages, particularlythose created in 1979 with the reorganized party system and thoseenshrined in the Constitution of 1988. The party system and electoralpolitics more generally acquired political importance with a waveof elections: for Congress in 1986 (which doubled as a ConstitutionalAssembly), municipal elections in 1985 and 1988, and the ¢rst directpresidential elections since the 1960s in 1989. On the other hand, ageneral policy paralysis and severe economic crisis held the countryhostage during most of the 1980s and led to an e¡ective emasculationof the developmental state in the countryside, including the structurallinkages around which rural groups had mobilized. The erosion ofcorporatist institutions was particularly severe in rural areas and wasexacerbated by a wave of challenges to the corporatist framework fromvarious social actors, including the popular wing of the rural workers'movement, as democratization gained momentum. Con£ict over theparameters of the state and public involvement in economic and socialactivity, however, was e¡ectively subordinated to political negotiationsover the political regime.

26

Contrary to the expectations of most political analysts, movementleaders, and scholars, both wings of the movement fell into profoundcrises in the more open democratic regime.What were the immediatecauses? The counter-mobilization by traditional conservative politicalelites, which Hagopian argues persuasively retained a high degree ofpower in both the state and the party system, was undoubtedly animportant factor in several defeats the movement as a whole su¡ered.Allied with modern business sectors with strong agrarian interests, thesetraditional political elites blocked various movement initiatives duringthe 1980s, most visibly the National Campaign for Agrarian Reform.77

Yet countermobilization was not the principal cause of the movement'scrisis. Its origins lie in the realignment of national political alliancesand the changes in the institutional terrain that accompanied the tran-sition and erosion of the developmental state.78 On the one hand, thesefactors combined to rupture the relationship between the two move-ment segments and their respective institutional hosts, complete in thecase of the popular wing and partial in the case of the corporativewing. The impact of this rupture was particularly severe because nei-ther part of the movement had sought to strengthen its social base andreduce its resource dependence on their host. On the other hand, thegrowing importance of the party system posed a signi¢cant challengeto the two wings, albeit of a very di¡erent kind for each.

The corporative wing after 1985 sought to build on its earlier successesand reinvigorate a form of state corporatism that allowed for greaterautonomy, while maintaining state guarantees of its representationalmonopoly and public funds. The movement's identity and organization,constructed under state tutelage in the previous two periods, however,placed important constraints on the political positions, alliances, andorganizational forms the movement wing could adopt. Most notably,notwithstanding its millions of members, it was unable to establish apresence in the party system, which quickly became a critical politicallinkage to the state. It failed to elect a single person to Congress anddid little better in state and local elections. This proved costly asthe legislative bodies became important decision-making centers (par-ticularly the national Congress elected in 1986, which doubled asConstitutional Assembly) and acquired greater power vis-a© -vis theexecutive. The national plan for agrarian reform proposed in 1985,for example, only won passage in Congress after being e¡ectivelyemasculated.When the battle over reform moved to the ConstitutionalAssembly, the movement again su¡ered a major defeat ^ the Constitu-

27

tion of 1988 is more conservative on the questions of land reform thanthe Land Statute of 1964 promulgated by the military.

The crisis of the developmental state in the 1980s had a particularlydevastating e¡ect on the corporative wing.79 It undermined the state'sextensive role in supporting and regulating the rural union movement,and reduced the e¤cacy of the corporative wing's strategy of workingthrough the state-sanctioned system of labor relations. The movementsu¡ered greatly as the ability of the state to enforce labor legislationand hard won collective bargaining agreements in rural areas declined.Because of the union's high level of resource dependence on the state,it experienced a severe ¢nancial crisis as in£ation, which rose from 416percent a year in 1987 to over 1,000 percent in 1988 and 1989, erodedthe value of the union tax and collection and disbursement grewincreasingly erratic. In addition, contracts for the delivery of publicservices declined precipitously.80

Yet this segment of the movement was so deeply intertwined with thetraditional form of state corporatism that its leadership could notconceive of a strategic alternative and sought to reproduce the identityand organizational structures created during the 1970s. Even when thestate fell into the hands of the AD government in 1985, which includedmembers from the reactionary rural oligarchies fundamentally opposedto the interests of the union movement, and the ¢scal crisis of the statereached unprecedented proportions, it stayed the course set in the late1970s and continued to call for a form of liberalized corporatism.

In the case of the popular wing, things were more complicated. It grewsigni¢cantly in the years immediately following the return to civilianrule, as it successfully challenged the corporatist wing in a growingnumber of regions. It also won prominent positions within the CUT(including the national vice-presidency) and Workers' Party, and in-creasing national recognition. Nonetheless, it entered into a period ofsevere crisis around 1987/88.

The rupture with the church led to a marked decline in resources, analienation from local social networks that had spawned the movement,and great di¤culty in reproducing its leadership and activists as theseassumed positions within the Workers' Party and CUT. On the onehand, the Church shifted to a more conservative position as thetransition progressed and retreated from its role as institutional host.For the church, restoration of civilian rule represented an end to one of

28

the principal elements of dispute between state and church, the natureof the political regime. In addition, the growing conservatism of theinternational church helped shift the balance of power within theBrazilian church toward the conservatives, isolating progressive clergy.As a result, an ever-larger share of the clerical elite ignored the popularwing. On the other hand, the secular left in the Workers' Party andCUTemerged as a viable ally and the movement wing itself asserted itsautonomy. The church-sponsored union oppositions had from theirinception de¢ned themselves as part of a national workers' movementand, as a result of this identity and the extensive organizational networkof the church, participated in the process that led to the creation of theWorkers' Party and CUT (see Table 4). This involvement was a desiredoutcome of the organizing work undertaken by the People's Churchbut in the end contributed to the break between the movement and thechurch.81

This shift in relations from religious host to secular allies led to asigni¢cant shift in the popular wing's identity. It changed from onethat was Catholic-based but broad and inclusionary, to one that wassecular but built on narrow ideological grounds and exclusionary.Although the transformational aspirations of the original radical Catho-lic identity remained, now the transformation of society was conceivedas socialist, the protagonist was the working class (de¢ned in conven-tional sociological, and therefore more exclusionary, terms), and theenemy was the bourgeoisie. This new radical and secular identitycontributed greatly to the popular wing's growing alienation from thedevoutly Catholic rural communities, which were deeply suspicious ofboth theWorkers' Party and its secular radicalism.

Table 4. CUT-a¤liated rural worker unions by region, 1989

Regions Unions Percentage

South 56 23Southeast 28 12Centerwest 16 7Northeast 95 39North 47 19

Total 242 100

Source: CUT-DESEP, `A Organizac° a¬ o Sindical da CUT no Campo, Texto para Discussa¬ ono. 7'' (mimeo, CUT-DESEP, Sa¬ o Paulo, 1994).

29

In the party system the popular wing su¡ered almost the oppositeproblem of the corporative wing. The new unionism's involvement inthe Workers' Party grew dramatically as a series of critical electionswere held. The church-trained activists saw the union and party asdi¡erent fronts in a single popular struggle and in most areas the unionand party were in fact one and the same. The results for the party werehighly positive. Keck observes that in 1988 ``an estimated 40 percent ofthe [party's] municipal council members elected .. . were rural workersor worked with the Catholic land pastoral [CPT].''82 In two stateswhere the popular wing had a strong presence, the Workers' Party didparticularly well in rural areas. In the northern state of Para, it elected39 local council members: two in the state-capital and 37 in predom-inantly rural counties. In the southernmost state of Brazil, Rio Grandedo Sul, rural unions elected 17 of its own as council members. In thesame state, the Party's candidate in the presidential elections of thefollowing year averaged almost 15 percent of the vote in the ¢rst roundin the counties where the popular wing controlled the local union, incontrast to 6 percent in the state capital of Porto Alegre.

The results of this electoral activism for the popular wing were lesspositive. The party in this period lacked the political muscle at eitherthe regional or national level to win substantial gains for movementsupporters and its socialist and secular credentials hurt union leadersin the predominantly Catholic communities. In addition, the rupturewith the church severely undermined the wing's ability to reproduce itsleadership and activists as these migrated to theWorkers' Party.

Conclusion

The approach developed in this article enables us to explain why therural workers' movement in Brazil became a national actor when itdid, took the particular substantive form that it did, and entered intocrisis at a moment when political conditions appeared most favorable.It enables us to solve what, from the vantage point of rational choiceand political process, appear to be major puzzles: the rural movement'speculiar collective identity, its emergence as a political actor underauthoritarian rule, despite a weak social base, and its crisis under thesubsequent civilian regime when the political environment appeared tofavor collective action. These puzzles are di¤cult to resolve without ahistorically grounded approach that incorporates the notion of institu-tional hosts, and a theory of how elite con£ict, state-society linkages,

30

and movements' social bases interact to produce collective actionamong societies' most vulnerable sectors. Institutional hosts and struc-tural linkages, the article argues, in£uence actor formation in particularamong resource poor and politically marginalized groups, because theyhelp overcome various obstacles to collective action such groups com-monly face. Such an approach is beyond the scope of rational choice,as is any explanation of why rural social groups, including many smallfarmers and peasants, came to mobilize around a rural worker identityin Brazil.

The literature on peasant mobilization is one of the few on collectiveaction that has focused primarily on settings of heightened elite con£ictand institutional change discussed in this article. Two types of explan-ations have been particularly important. One is Paige's theory of ruralclass con£ict ^ it suggests that the emergence of di¡erent forms ofagrarian social movements (reformist or revolutionary) can be explainedby the nature of relations between di¡erent classes of cultivators andnoncultivators (who nonetheless draw their income from agriculture).These relations are shaped by the degree of dependence of both classeson land as a primary source of income.83 The other is what I call theagrarian mobilization hypothesis and has become a central componentof analyses of peasant mobilization since the late 1960s. The hypothesishas grown out of moral economy approaches and has a number ofvariants. In general, however, the argument is made that peasantmobilization occurs when either absolute standards of living declineor the village institutions that guarantee peasant subsistence arethreatened by the commercialization of agriculture or the expansionof the nation-state.84

These two approaches, however, address a di¡erent domain of collec-tive action from that theorized in this article. They seek to explainforms of peasant insurgency and revolutionary activity that fundamen-tally challenge the political order, and the state in particular.With thatcaveat in mind, neither approach attempts to address the question ofidentity formation. Paige in fact assumes that structurally derivedmaterial interests drive political behavior. Deriving interests and organ-izational capacity from structure, he suggests that property-less laborersor sharecroppers are most likely to form revolutionary movements,and that peasant farmers are least likely. Once again keeping in mindthat in this article we are looking at non-revolutionary movements,such a theoretical stance makes it impossible to explain why a varietyof di¡erent types of ` cultivators'' coalesced into a single movement,

31

and not many distinct movements.85 Furthermore, within this singlemovement the reverse of Paige's prediction occurred ^ the social baseof the radical popular wing was composed primarily of small farmersand peasants, and that of the corporative wing by wage laborers inexport-oriented agricultural zones.

Because it continues to be widely employed in studies of rural collectiveaction, the mobilization hypothesis deserves further scrutiny. Its pre-dictions do not ¢t the evidence in the Brazilian case. Popular mobiliza-tion in rural Brazil emerged out of a period of increasing rural incomeand declining levels of poverty. Although the rapid modernization ofagriculture during the 1960s and 1970s was a disruptive process duringwhich social inequality grew, overall people in the countryside werebetter o¡ in 1980 than in 1960. Average family income in rural areasdoubled during this period (from 80 to 160 percent of the minimumwage) and income for both wage laborers and small farmers rose in allregions of Brazil. Between 1970 and 1990 the number of poor andindigent rural households fell from 73 and 42 percent of all ruralhouseholds respectively, to 56 and 31 percent.86 Furthermore, bothsocial groups that had gained and those that had lost with moderniza-tion mobilized in the 1964^1989 period. The popular wing, for example,represented both small farmers in the South of Brazil who gained withthe modernization of agriculture and excluded subsistence-level peasantfarmers in the North. The corporative wing encompassed agriculturalwage laborers from both the impoverished Northeast and the relativelyhighly developed areas of Sa¬ o Paulo.

The impact of changes in land tenure during the 1960^1980 period isambiguous. Two strongholds of the corporative wing ^ the states ofPernambuco and Sa¬ o Paulo ^ experienced a decrease in land concen-tration as the number of small and large properties fell in both. Twoimportant poles of popular movement activity ^ the states of RioGrande do Sul and Para ^ both experienced land concentration, butin very di¡erent forms. The former has one of Brazil's most equaldistributions of land and the sub-division of medium-size propertiesled to a rise in small holdings and thereby an increase in the concen-tration of land. In the latter state, an increase in the average size oflarge holdings produced a concentration of land-holdings, as newterritory was incorporated by the agricultural frontier.87

This suggests that disruptive socioeconomic change or a decliningstandard of living is neither a su¤cient nor a necessary condition for

32

rural mobilization. It supports Popkin's argument that ``many [peasant]movements are an expression of `green power,' a re£ection of thepeasants' growing ability to organize and struggle for rights and privi-leges previously denied them. Peasant struggles are frequently battlesto tame markets and bureaucracies, not movements to restore `tradi-tional' systems.''88 It also coincides with the ¢ndings of studies ofurban labor that suggests that strikes generally increase when theeconomy is strong, workers' bargaining power is at its height, and thechances for success are greatest.89

This study aims to open a discussion on how well theories developed toexplain collective action in western democratic settings travel to nationalcontexts where key background variables are not present. It suggests thatwhile approaches derived from rational choice and political processcan explain many features of actor formation and reproduction in therelatively stable democratic settings, they can explain far less in contextswhere heightened elite con£ict over the pattern of political authoritycontributes to signi¢cant institutional change. In such contexts, a focuson how structural and political linkages, intra-elite con£ict, and socialbases shape relations between marginalized social groups and politicalelites provides greater analytic leverage. The idea that political elites insuch settings will take on the role of institutional host for new actorsunder particular conditions has especially interesting implications forhow we understand state-society relations. It highlights the role of thestate and other elite actors in the construction of associational networksamong marginalized sectors, and points to the mutually reinforcingnature of certain types of state-society relations.

Notes

1. See, for example, Mancur Olsen Jr., The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goodsand the Theory of Groups (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); John D.McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, ` Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: AParticular Theory,'' American Journal of Sociology 82 (1977): 1212^1241; andAnthony Oberschall, Social Con£ict and Social Movements (Englewood Cli¡s,N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1973); Doug McAdam, Political Process and the Developmentof Black Insurgency, 1930^1970, 2nd edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1999); Alain Touraine, `An Introduction to the Study of Social Movements,'' SocialResearch 52 (1985): 749^789; and Alberto Melucci, Nomads of the Present: SocialMovements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (Philadelphia: TempleUniversity Press, 1989). The literature on peasant collective action is an importantexception and is addressed in the conclusion of the article. McAdam, Tarrow, and

33

Tilly are addressing some of these issues in their current work on dynamics ofcontention. Rather than explain particular social movement outcomes, these schol-ars identify a variety of causal mechanisms that appear in a wide variety of nationalcontexts and in such di¡erent forms of contention as democratic transitions, socialmovements, and revolutions. This promising research agenda, however, is di¡erentfrom the one pursued in this article, which focuses on explaining a particular set ofoutcomes ^ that is, actor formation and reproduction. Furthermore, these scholarsself-consciously avoid specifying initial conditions and theorizing how these con-ditions set causal mechanisms in motion in di¡erent contexts, a core concern of thisarticle. Doug McAdam, Sidney Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, Dynamics of Contention(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

2. The unionization rate was calculated based on data from IBGE, Censo Agropecuarioand IBGE, Sindicatos: Indicadores Sociais ^ Volume 4 (Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 1990).

3. An accurate reading of the meaning of the movement's size is di¤cult because upuntil the 1988 Constitution corporatist labor law guaranteed rural unions monopolyof representation by municipio (the unit of local government roughly similar to theU.S. county) and revenue from a mandatory union tax. The large number of unions(2,811 in 1989) and members is therefore almost certainly a poor indicator of themovement's active membership. IBGE, Sindicatos.

4. See, for example, McAdam, Political Process, and Charles Tilly, From Mobilizationto Revolution (NewYork: McGraw Hill, 1978).

5. Among recent works that are pursuing this agenda, that of McAdam, Tarrow, andTilly, Dynamics of Contention, stands out. The work on cognitive framing, deploy-ing a concept distinct from that of identities, has been in£uential over the pastdecade. See David E. Snow and Robert Benford, ` Ideology, Frame Resonance andParticipant Mobilization,'' in Bert Klandermans, Hanspeter Kriesi, and SidneyTarrow, From Structure to Action: Comparing Social Movement Research AcrossCultures (International Social Movement Research, Vol. 1, Greenwich: JAI Press,1988) and the essays in Doug McAdam, John D. McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald,editors, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996).

6. Its most sophisticated proponents argue that movements emerge when people whoare embedded in dense social networks respond to changes in political opportuni-ties, which lowers the cost of collective action, and they ` draw on consensual andaction-oriented cultural frames.'' Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Move-ments, Collective Action and Politics (2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1998), 10. See also McAdam, Political Process, 38^39; McAdam, McCarthy,and Zald, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements; Lee Ann Banaszak,WhyMovements Succeed or Fail: Opportunity, Culture, and the Struggle for WomanSu¡rage (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); J. Craig Jenkins and BertKlandermans, editors, The Politics of Social Protest: Comparative Perspectives onStates and Social Movements (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).Resource mobilization theorists (see note 1) similarly argue that strong local net-works are critical to sustained collective action.

7. These two concepts were ¢rst developed in, respectively, Peter P. Houtzager,` Social Movements amidst Democratic Transitions: Lessons from the BrazilianCountryside,'' Journal of Development Studies 36 (2000): 59^88; and Peter P. Hout-zager and Marcus Kurtz, ` The Institutional Roots of Popular Mobilization: StateTransformation and Rural Politics in Brazil and Chile, 1960^1995,'' ComparativeStudies in Society and History 42 (2000): 394^424.

34

8. These include the systems of labor relations, social welfare, and land tenure. Suchlinkages re£ect the state's role in economic and social spheres.

9. Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of SocialPolicy in the United States (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,1992), 41^60; Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution, and McAdam, Tarrow, andTilly, Dynamics of Contention, chapter 2. Skocpol's polity-centered framework, forexample, focuses on the development of the state and party systems, the e¡ects ofthese on the ` identities, goals, and capacities of social groups that become involvedin .. . policymaking,'' the ``¢t'' between these and the changing points of accessinstitutions a¡ord, and ` the ways in which previously established social policiesa¡ect subsequent politics'' (41).

10. The early state-centered focus of this work has given way to what Migdal, Evans,and others call the ` mutually constitutive nature'' of state and society, suggestingthe need for a more dialectic approach to understanding how state institutions andsocial actors engage in mutually transformative sets of interactions. Joel S. Migdal,` The State in Society: An Approach to Struggles for Domination,'' in Joel S.Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivian Shue, editors, State Power and Social Forces:Domination and Transformation in the Third World (NewYork: Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 1994); Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations andState Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988);Peter Evans, Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1995), and ` Government Action, Social Capital andDevelopment: Reviewing the Evidence on Synergy,''World Development 24 (1996):1119^1132; Francis Hagopian, Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Jonathan Fox, The Politics ofFood in Mexico: State Power and Social Mobilization (Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1992) and ` How Does Civil Society Thicken? The Political Construction ofSocial Capital in Rural Mexico,''World Development 24 (1996): 1089^1103; StephenD. Krasner, `Approaches to the State: Alternative Conceptions and HistoricalDynamics,'' Comparative Politics 16 (1984), 223^246; Peter Hall, Governing theEconomy: The Politics of State Intervention in Britain and France (New York,Oxford University Press, 1986). On state corporatism, see Ruth B. Collier andDavid Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the LaborMovement,and Regime Dynamics in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1991); David Collier, ` Trajectory of a Concept: `Corporatism' in the Study of LatinAmerican Politics,'' in Peter H. Smith, editor, Latin America in Comparative Per-spective: New Approaches to Method and Analyses (Boulder, Col.: Westview, 1995);Alfred Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1978); Philippe Schmitter, ``Still the Century of Corpo-ratism?'' The Review of Politics 36 (1974): 85^105.

11. See, for example, Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 47, 54, and ` Bringingthe State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,'' in Peter B. Evans,Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, editors, Bringing the State Back In(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Kathleen Thelen and Sven Stein-mo, ` Historical Institutionalism in Comparative Politics,'' in Sven Steinmo,Kathleen Thelen, and F. Longstreth, editors, Structuring Politics: Historical Insti-tutionalism in Comparative Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1992); Anthony W. Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the UnitedStates, South Africa, and Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).For a partial analysis of this literature, see Ira Katznelson, ` Structure and Con-

35

¢guration in Comparative Politics,'' in Mark I. Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman,editors, Comparative Politics: Rationality, Culture, and Structure (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Paul Pierson and Theda Skocpol, ` HistoricalInstitutionalism in Contemporary Political Science'' (paper presented at theAmerican Political Science Association Meetings, Washington, D.C., 30 August^2 September, 2000).

12. Regional diversity within Brazil makes gross generalizations di¤cult but exceptingthe three southern states, rural social networks that facilitate collective action havebeen far weaker than in other countries of Latin America, and indeed elsewhere.See Bernardo Sorj, `Agroindustry, State, and Class Formation in BrazilianAgriculture,'' in R. P. Misra and Nguyen Tri Dung, editors,Third World Peasantry:AContinuing Saga of Deprivations (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 1986).

13. Charles Tilly, The Contentious French (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1986); ``Social Movements and National Politics,'' in Charles Bright and SusanHarding, editors, Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History andTheory(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984); and Popular Contention in GreatBritain (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).

14. The Fundo de Assisteª ncia ao Trabalhador Rural (FUNRURAL) was a programwithin the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.

15. James Mahoney, ` Nominal, Ordinal, and Narrative Appraisal in MacrocausalAnalysis,''American Journal of Sociology (1999): 1545^1196.

16. Data on the two movement wings, and their relationship to agents of the state,church, and political parties, were collected for three regions of Brazil: the south-ern-most state of Rio Grande do Sul, the northern (Amazon) state of Para; and thecoastal sugar zone of the northeastern state of Pernambuco.

17. Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution; Skocpol, Soldiers and Mothers, 41^60;Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, chapter 1. Concerned with a di¡erentset of questions, Evans argues that a state's transformative capacity is contingenton the nature of its ties to social groups vital to its project, rather than to itsautonomy from those groups as early state-centered approaches suggested. Evans,Embedded Autonomy.

18. See Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, and Stepan, State and Society.19. Tarrow suggests an additional possibility: certain institutions may be ` economical

sites'' for movement leaders. These institutional sites are de¢ned as neutral, in thatthe institutions themselves (as actors) do not seek to in£uence the movements norhave an interest in the outcome of mobilization. The important role religiousgroups have played in various movements has often been conceived in this manner.Zald and McCarthy, for example, suggest that religious organizations have beenthe ` infrastructural bases'' for a number of U.S. movements. Mainwaring arguesthat the Church in Brazil ` provided a basically democratic, participatory space in agenerally elitist society'' out of which popular movements could emerge. Tarrow,Power in Movement, 21^22; Meyer N. Zald and John D. McCarthy, ``ReligiousGroups as Crucibles of Social Movements,'' in Meyer N. Zald and John D. Mc-Carthy, editors, Social Movements in an Organizational Society (New Brunswick:Transaction Books, 1987), 69^70; Scott Mainwaring, ` Brazil: The Catholic Churchand the Popular Movement in Nova Iguac° u, 1974^1985,'' in Daniel H. Levine,editor, Religion and Political Con£ict in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University ofNorth Carolina Press, 1986), 127, 130.

20. The causes of rising or falling contestation are exogenous to the approach,although various scholars have suggested that defeat in war, severe economic crisis,

36

gradual structural transformation of society, and other factors can produce highlevels.

21. Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord andPeasant in the Making of the ModernWorld (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966): 475^479;Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France,Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979): 115^116;McAdam, Political Process; 43^48. See also Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution,81^84; and from a resource mobilization perspective, Oberschall, Social Con£ictand Social Movements.

22. For critique of these early approaches to popular mobilization and revolution seeMcAdam, Political Process, chapter 1.

23. Ibid., 43^48.24. Melucci adds that ` the existence of social barriers renders identi¢cation of the

adversary much more immediate, and polarizes con£icting groups with greaterrapidity.''Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the InformationAge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 292; Skocpol, States andSocial Revolutions, 112^117; Rick Fantasia and Eric L. Hirsch, ` Culture in Rebellion:The Appropriation and Transformation of the Veil in the Algerian Revolution,'' inHank Johnston and Bert Klandermans, editors, Social Movements and Culture(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 145^147; Aldon D. Morris,The Origins of the Civil Rights Movement: Black Communities Organizing forChange (NewYork: Free Press, 1984).

25. For a brief statement, seeTilly, ` Social Movements and National Politics,'' 304. Theconception of state used here is that of Skocpol and many others: ` any set ofrelatively di¡erentiated organizations that claims sovereignty and coercive controlover a territory and its population, defending and perhaps extending that claim incompetition with other states.'' Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 43.

26. Tarrow, Power in Movement, 62 and quote on 66.27. Migdal notes for example that ` what distinguishes the modern state from most

other large-scale political organizations in history . . . has been its insinuation intothe core identities of its subjects (thus the emphasis on the nation-state). . . [S]tates gobeyond trying to establish people's personal identities; they aim to shape people'sentire moral order ^ the content of the symbols and codes determining whatmatters most to them.'' Migdal, ` The State in Society,'' 13.

28. Within the ¢eld of Latin American politics, Cardoso's de¢nition of political regimehas been particularly in£uential. He suggests that the regime consists of ` formalrules that link the main political institutions (legislature to the executive, executiveto the judiciary, and party system to them all), as well as the issue of the politicalnature of the ties between citizens and rulers (democratic, oligarchic, totalitarian,or whatever).'' Fernando Henrique Cardoso, ` On the Characterization of Author-itarian Regimes in Latin America,'' in David Collier, editor, The New Authoritari-anism in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 38. See alsoHagopian,Traditional Politics and Regime Change in Brazil, 24^25.

29. Diniz and Boschi, for example, observe that ``the creation of parties [in Brazil] . . .was characterized by a complete disassociation from speci¢c social groups, re£ect-ing the decisions by political elites . . . one practically does not see the emergence ofparties created from below, as in the European experience. Marked by their parlia-mentary origins and the strong in£uence of state power, and submitted to constantinstrumental use by politicians, the parties su¡er congenital fragility.'' Eli Diniz andRenato Boschi, ` A Consolidac° a¬ o Democratica no Brasil: Atores Pol|ticos, Proces-

37

sos Sociais e Intermediac° a¬ o,'' in Eli Diniz, Renato Boschi, and Renato Lessa,editors, Modernizac° a¬ o e Consolidac° a¬ o Democratica no Brasil (Sa¬ o Paulo: Vertice,1989), 46^47. See also Scott Mainwaring, ` Brazil: Weak Parties, Feckless Democ-racy'' in Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, editors, Building DemocraticInstitutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1995), and Rethinking Party Systems in the Third Wave of Democratization: TheCase of Brazil (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Francis Hagopian, ` TheCompromised Consolidation: The Political Class in the Brazilian Transition,'' inScott Mainwaring, Guillermo O'Donnell, and J. Samuel Valenzuela, editors, Issuesin Democratic Consolidation: The New South American Democracies in Compara-tive Perspective (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 271^272;Bol|var Lamounier, `Antecedentes, Riscos, e Possibilidades do Governo Collor,'' inBol|var Lamounier, editor, De Geisel a Collor: O Balanc° o (Sa¬ o Paulo: Sumare,1990), 105.

30. Over the course of the 1980s, as the party system as a whole acquired greaterpolitical importance, the Workers' Party did in£uence the identity of the popularwing and became a signi¢cant channel for making public claims.

31. Among the scholars to explore the impact of such linkages on group formation andpolitical behavior, Anthony Marx's study of race relations in the United States,South Africa, and Brazil is particularly compelling. Marx shows how even legalcategories and public policies meant to exclude particular groups, on a racial basisin this case, can become axes of political con£ict, suggesting that ` where author-ities legally reinforced discrimination, the unintended result was major social con-£ict'' around racial cleavages. This occurred, he suggests, because even though` state-sanctioned racial categories impose real costs on their subjects,'' they also` o¡er oppressed populations both legal grounds for redress and bases for politicalmobilization,'' including by legitimizing subordinate racial identities as a basis forcollective action. Marx, Making Race and Nation, on 2 and 6 (italics added).

32. Perhaps the most nuanced interpretation of corporatism is o¡ered in Collier andCollier, Shaping the Political Arena, chapter 1.

33. The state, for example, regulates the leadership selection process, demand making,¢nance, and internal governance. Collier, ` Trajectory of a Concept,'' 137^138;Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, chapter 2.

34. Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena.35. Some students of Chilean politics have made a similar point. See, for example,

Marcus Kurtz, ``Free Markets and Democratic Consolidation in Chile: TheNational Politics of Rural Transformation,'' Politics and Society 27 (1999): 275^301; and Cristobal Kay, ` Political Economy, Class Alliances, and Agrarian Changein Chile,'' Journal of Peasant Studies 8 (1981): 485^513.

36. Melucci, Challenging Codes, chapter 4. Marx similarly suggests that ` identityformation is a prerequisite for mobilization. In the absence of a self-consciousgroup, there is no collectivity that can interpret and act upon its situation.'' Marx,Making Race and Nation, 19.

37. Charles Tilly, ` Political Identities,'' in Michael P. Hanagan, Leslie P. Moch, andWayne te Brake, editors, Challenging Authority: The Historical Study of Conten-tious Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

38. James Scott,Weapons of theWeak (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 319^338.39. Ibid., 337^338. The current widespread organizing around citizenship rights in the

Third Wave democracies o¡ers a compelling example. See J. Foweraker andT. Landman, Citizenship Rights and Social Movements: A Comparative and

38

Statistical Analysis (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1997). McCann traces asimilar process in Michael W. McCann, Rights at Work: Pay Equity Reform andthe Politics of Legal Mobilization (Chicago: Unversity of Chicago Press, 1994).

40. Snow and Benford, ` Ideology, Frame Resonance and Participant Mobilization,''198.

41. The impact of allies on movement identities is explored by Banaszak,Why Move-ments Succeed or Fail; and, Margaret Keck, ` Social Equity and EnvironmentalPolitics in Brazil: Lessons from the Rubber Tappers of Acre,'' Comparative Politics27 (1995): 409^424.

42. Samuel Popkin, The Rational Peasant (Berkeley: University of California Press,1979); McCarthy and Zald, ` Resource Mobilization and Social Movements.'' For arecent rational choice account of peasant mobilization, see Mark Lichbach, ``WhatMakes Rational Peasants Revolutionary?''World Politics 46 (1994): 383^417.

43. Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro, The Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory: ACritique of Applications in Political Science (New Haven: Yale University Press,1994), 14^17; Mark I. Lichbach, ``Social Theory and Comparative Politics,'' in MarkI. Lichbach and Alan S. Zuckerman, editors, Comparative Politics: Rationality,Culture, and Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 242, 257.Some authors, including Bates (1989), assume real material interests. RobertH. Bates, Beyond the Miracle of the Market: The Political Economy of AgrarianDevelopment in Kenya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

44. Italics added. Melucci, Challenging Codes, 66^67.45. In recent years these have included a combination of initial structural conditions

(demographic, economic, etc.); political opportunities (such as level of repression,elite divisions, and availability of in£uential allies); mobilizing structures (formaland informal organization), and cognitive framing of grievances and opportunitiesfor action. See for example the essays in McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, ComparativePerspectives on Social Movements. Also, Herbert Kitschelt, ` Political OpportunityStructures and Political Process: Anti-Nuclear Movements in Four Democracies,''British Journal of Political Science 16 (1986): 57^85; J. Craig Jenkins and CharlesPerrow, ``Insurgency of the Powerless: Farm Worker Movements 1946^1972,American Sociological Review 42 (1977): 249^268; Hanspeter Kriesi, RuudKoopmans, Jan Willem Dyvendak, and Marco G. Giugni, editors, New SocialMovements inWestern Europe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995):McAdam, Political Process; Tarrow, Power in Movement.

46. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly are addressing these limitations by signi¢cantly re-de¢ning their research agenda beyond social movements (to episodes of ` conten-tion'') and away from explaining particular outcomes such as movement emergence toidentifying causal mechanisms, which appear in such di¡erent forms of contentionas democratic transitions, movements, and revolutions. See note 1. McAdam,Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, quotation on 11^13, see also chapter 2;and McAdam, Political Process, Introduction to the second edition.

47. Authors de¢ne POS in di¡erent ways, but most include three variables: increasingopenness of the political system to new demands, the emergence of cleavages withinand among elites, and the availability of in£uential allies. No causal thread bindsthese diverse components together, however, and we are left with, in e¡ect, a listof static institutional, political, and policy variables. For a review, see DougMcAdam, ` Political Opportunities: Conceptual Origins, Current Problems, FutureDirections,'' in McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald, editors, Comparative Perspectiveson Social Movements. For an application of POS in the literature on peasant

39

mobilization, see Charles D. Brockett, ` The Structure of Political Opportunities andPeasant Mobilization in Central America,'' Comparative Politics 23 (1991): 253^274.

48. Collier and Collier, Shaping the Political Arena; Peter Evans, Dependent Develop-ment: The Alliance of Multinational, State, and Local Capital in Brazil (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1979).

49. The ` Programma de Ac° a¬ o Ecoª nomica do Governo'' (PAEG) of 1964, for example,stated that the ``archaic'' and ` feudal'' agrarian sector would block rapid industrialgrowth. Quoted in David Goodman, ``Rural Economy and Society,'' in Edmar L.Bacha and Herbert S. Klein, editors, Social Change in Brazil, 1945^1985: TheIncompleteTransition (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 52.

50. Employer unions were headed at the national level by the National Confederationof Agriculture (CNA). By 1988, the government counted 1,676 rural employerunions. IBGE, Sindicatos: Indicadores Sociais (Rio de Janeiro: IBGE, 1988).

51. See Jose de Souza Martins, Os Camponeses e a Pol|tica no Brasil (Petropolis: Vozes,1980); Joseph A. Page, The Revolution that NeverWas (New York: Grossman, 1972);John W. F. Dulles, Unrest in Brazil: Political-Military Crises, 1955^1964 (Austin:University of Texas Press, 1970); Cynthia Hewitt, ` Brazil: The Peasant Movementof Pernambuco, 1961^1964,'' in Henry A. Landsberger, editor, Latin AmericanPeasant Movements (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969); and Clodomir Moreas,` Peasant Leagues in Brazil,'' in R. Stavenhagen, editor, Agrarian Problems andPeasant Movements in Latin America (NewYork: Anchor Books, 1970).

52. Cardoso, ` On the Characterization of Authoritarian Regimes''; Bernardo Sorj,Estado e Classes Sociais na Agricultura (Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1980).

53. Increases in agricultural production would be obtained by stimulating the forma-tion of an agro-industrial sector and exploitation of the Amazon region. For amore detailed analysis, see Peter P. Houtzager, ` State and Unions in the Trans-formation of the Brazilian Countryside, 1964^1979,'' Latin American Research Review33 (1998): 103^142.

54. These state reforms were part of a broader e¡ort by the military to rationalize thestate and centralize policy making. For an analysis and evaluation of this largere¡ort, see Francis Hagopian, ` Traditional Politics Against State Transformation inBrazil,'' in Migdal, Kohli, and Shue, editors, State Power and Social Forces and,from di¡erent perspectives, Ben Ross Schneider, Politics Within the State: EliteBureaucrats and Industrial Policy in Authoritarian Brazil (Pittsburgh: University ofPittsburgh Press, 1991); Stephen Bunker, Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction,Unequal Exchange, and the Failure of the Modern State (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1985); Kurt Weyland, DemocracyWithout Equity: Failures of Reformin Brazil (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1996).

55. By 1980, for example, unions held half of all government contracts to delivermedical care in rural areas and the number of dental contracts exceeded the totalnumber of unions. One study estimates that 50 percent of all rural medical care and83 percent of all dental care provided in the 1980s were delivered through ruralunions. Elizabeth Balbachevsky, ``O FUNRURAL e a Expansa¬ o do SindicalismoRural Brasileiro'' (mimeo, IDESP, Sa¬ o Paulo, 1983), cited in Ruda Ricci, ` CONTAGe a Crise de Representac° a¬ o no Campo (1979^1985)'' (Masters thesis, UNICAMP,Sa¬ o Paulo, 1993), 84.

56. The classic text on this subject is Victor Nunes Leal, Coronelismo, Enxada e Voto:OMunicipio e o Regime Representativo no Brasil (Sa¬ o Paulo: Editora Alfa Omega,1976).

40

57. Ricardo Tavares, ` CONTAG: Da Ditadura a© Transic° a¬ o'' (Masters thesis, IUPRJ,Rio de Janeiro, 1992), 48, 54, and 62.

58. The Costa e Silva government (1967^1969) reopened the debate on agrarian reformand Institutional Act^9 (1969) facilitated the expropriation of land for agrarianreform. Sectors of the government, including the Ministry of Labor, advocatedagrarian reform during much of the 1970s.

59. Regina R. Novaes, ` CONTAG e CUT: Continuidades e Rupturas da Organizac° a¬ oSindical no Campo,'' in Armando Boito Jr., editor, O Sindicalismo Brasileiro nosAnos 80 (Sa¬ o Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1991); Tavares, ` CONTAG.''

60. Regina R. Novaes, De Corpo e Alma: Catolicismo, Classes Sociais e Con£itos noCampo (Rio de Janeiro: Graphia, 1997), 114^116; Lygia Sigaud, Os Clandestinos eos Direitos: Estudos Sobre Trabalhadores da Cana de Ac° ucar de Pernambuco (Sa¬ oPaulo: Duas Cidade, 1979), chapter 1.

61. Margarida M. Moura, Os Deserdados da Terra (Rio de Janeiro: Bertran Brasil,1986); Moacyr Palmeira, `A Diversidade da Luta,'' inVanilda Paiva, editor, Igreja eQuesta¬ o Agraria (Sa¬ o Paulo: Loyola, 1985), 48.

62. John D. French,The BrazilianWorkers'ABC (Chapel Hill, NC: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1992), 87.

63. See Elisa P. Reis, ` Brazil: Cem Anos de Questa¬ o Agraria,'' Dados 32 (1989): 218^301.

64. Interview with Vidor Faita, 20 Oct 1994; Biorn Maybury-Lewis, The Politics ofthe Possible: The Brazilian Rural Workers Trade Union Movement, 1964^1985(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Anthony Pereira, ` Regime ChangeWithout Democratization: Sugar Workers' Unions in Pernambuco, NortheastBrazil, 1961^1989'' (dissertation, Harvard, 1991): 283^290; Luzia A. C. GuedesPinto, ` A CONTAG: Uma Organizac° a¬ o Contraditoria'' (masters thesis, Universityof Brasilia, 1978), 84; Ricci, ` CONTAG e a Crise.''

65. A better proxy for movement size than the absolute number of members andunions, is the number of dues-paying members. Movement documents from 1979show that the share of dues-paying members may have been less than half theo¤cial ¢gure of 6.2 million ^ that is, between 2 and 3 million. A decade later agovernment survey found that in 1990 in three-quarters of unions less than 40percent of the membership paid union dues. (In urban areas 66 percent of unionshad between 80 and 100 percent of members paying their union dues.) IBGE,Sindicatos.

66. In this regard not all state corporatisms are the same. Corporatist institutions incountries such as Mexico and Venezuela linked peasants, workers, and othergroups to the state through political parties, whereas in Brazil and Chile theylinked these groups directly to the state, prohibiting their organizations fromestablishing ties to political parties and engaging in electoral activity. See Collierand Collier, Shaping the Political Arena, chapter 1.

67. Novaes, ` CONTAG e CUT,'' 178; Tavares, ``CONTAG.''68. Hagopian, ` Traditional Politics,'' and Traditional Politics and Regime Change.69. The causes behind the change in the church's position, and the emergence of the

progressive ` People's Church,'' are the subject of much debate but a combination ofthree factors appear to have been of central importance: the shift of the interna-tional church enunciated by Vatican II (1962^1965) and Medell|n (1968), the pro-found institutional crisis of the Brazilian church, and the increasing repressivenature of military rule. See Daniel H. Levine, ` Religion, the Poor, and Politics inLatin America Today,'' in Daniel H. Levine, editor, Religion and Political Con£ict in

41

Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1986); Scott Mainwaringand Alexander Wilde, ` The Progressive Church in Latin America: An Interpreta-tion,'' in Scott Mainwaring and Alexander Wilde, editors, The Progressive Churchin Latin America (Notre Dame: University of Norte Dame Press, 1989); Ralphdella Cava, ` The `People's Church,' the Vatican, and Abertura,'' in Alfred Stepan,editor, Democratizing Brazil (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); ThomasC. Bruneau, ``Church and Politics in Brazil: The Genesis of Change,'' Journal ofLatin American Studies 17 (1985): 271^293; Kenneth P. Serbin, ` Priests, Celibacy,and Social Con£ict: A History of Brazil's Clergy and Seminaries'' (dissertation,History, University of California, San Diego, 1993).

70. Scott Mainwaring,The Catholic Church and Politics in Brazil, 1916^1985 (Stanford:Stanford University Press, 1986), 105; della Cava, ` The `People's Church,' '' 148;Thomas Bruneau, The Political Transformation of the Brazilian Catholic Church(NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1974).

71. The number of CEBs in Brazil remains a topic of debate, but estimates for the1980s usually place the number around 80,000, involving around two millionpeople. The proportion located in rural areas, however, has not been researched.Novaes,De Corpo e Alma, 156^164; Candido Grybowski, Caminhos e Descaminhosdos Movimentos Sociais no Campo (Petropolis: Vozes, 1987), 265^267;W. E. Hewitt,Base Christian Communities and Social Change in Brazil (Lincoln: University ofNebraska Press, 1991), 6^10. In the Amazon state of Para, for example, the CatechismPastoral built an impressive network of catechism groups (de facto CEBs) that by1979 had 3,356 catechists working in 617 rural communities. Diocese de Santarem,Anuario 1980 (1980), 36. In the Diocese of Passo Fundo (located in Rio Grande doSul) the church had approximately 680 chapels and local churches and over 500Youth Pastoral groups. The latter would train 700 youth community, union, andparty activists over a ¢ve-year period (1982^1987).

72. Estimate based on data in IBGE, Sindicatos: Indicadores Sociais ^ Volume 2.73. The form of church involvement in popular movements outlined in this section was

not unique to the new unionism or to rural areas. Diomo ¢nds CEBs, archdioceses,and Catholic NGOs played a broadly similar role in a number of urban movements.Ana Maria Diomo, A Vez e Voz do Popular: Movimentos Sociais e Participac° a¬ oPol|tica no Brasil Pos-70 (Rio de Janeiro: ANPOCS/Relume Dumara, 1995), 95^97and chapter 4. On the church's role in other rural movements, see Zander Navarro,` Democracy, Citizenship and Representation: Rural Social Movements in SouthernBrazil, 1978^1990,''Bulletin of Latin American Research 13 (1994): 129^154; FranklinD. Rothman, ` Political Process and Peasant Opposition to Large HydroelectricDams: The Case of the Rio Uruguai Movement in Southern Brazil, 1979 to 1992''(dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1993), 145^180.

74. See Regina Novaes, `A questa¬ o agraria e o papel da Igreja na Para|ba,'' in Paiva,Igreja e Questa¬ o Agraria, 243^246, and De Corpo e Alma, chapter 10. See alsoGrzybowski, Caminhos e Descaminhos dos Movimentos Sociais, 67^68.

75. Socialism was generally understood as a form of communitarianism. See CNBBRegional Norte II, ``Encontro Sobre Fe e Pol|tica: Orientc° a¬ o [sic] aos Crista¬ os emvista das elec° o¬ es de 1988'' (mimeo, Belem, Para); Ivo Poletto, `As contradic° o¬ esSociais e a Pastoral daTerra,'' in Paiva, Igreja e Questa¬ o Agraria.

76. See, for example, Anthony Pereira, The End of the Peasantry: The Rural LaborMovement in Northeast Brazil, 1961^1988 (Pittsburgh: University of PittsburghPress, 1997); Leonilde S. de Medeiros, A Historia dos Movimentos Sociais no Campo(Rio de Janeiro: FASE, 1989); Grzybowski, Caminhos e Descaminhos.

42

77. Hagopian, ` Traditional Politics,'' and Traditional Politics and Regime Change; JoseMartins de Souza, OPoder do Atraso: Ensaios de Sociologia da Historia Lenta (Sa¬ oPaulo: Hucitec, 1994), chapter 2.

78. The literature on social movements suggests a number of explanations of move-ment decline. Voss argues that in the case of the Knights of Labor in the UnitedStates, the counter-mobilization of strong business associations, combined withneutrality of the state, was the principal reason for the movement's decline. Move-ment decline in low- and middle-income countries is often attributed to someaspect of the (re-)institutionalization of democratic politics. These explanations,however, do not ¢t the Brazilian case. I explore this question in more detailin Houtzager, ` Social Movements amidst Transitions.'' Kim Voss, The Making ofAmerican Exceptionalism: The Knights of Labor and Class (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-versity Press, 1993), and ` The Collapse of a Social Movement,'' in McAdam,McCarthy, and Zald, editors, Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements. Forexplanations of movement decline in Latin America, see Scott Mainwaring, ` Tran-sition to Democracy and Democratic Consolidation: Theoretical and ComparativeIssues,'' in Mainwaring et al., editors, Issues in Democratic Consolidation; JoeFoweraker, Theorizing Social Movements (London: Pluto Press, 1995), 104^105;Cathy Schneider, ` Radical Opposition Parties and Squatter Movements in Pino-chet's Chile,'' in Arturo Escobar and Sonia Alvarez, editors, The Making of SocialMovements in Latin America (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1992); GuillermoO'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: TentativeConclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1986), 58^59; Parzticia L. Hipsher, ``Democratization and the Decline ofUrban Social Movements in Chile and Spain,'' Comparative Politics 28 (April1996): 273^297; Kenneth M. Roberts, ` From the Barricades to the Ballot Box:Redemocratization and Political Realignment in the Chilean Left,'' Politics andSociety 23 (December 1995): 495^519.

79. See Bol|var Lamounier, ` Antecedentes, Riscos, e Possibilidades do GovernoCollor,'' in Lamounier, editor, De Geisel a Collor: O Balanc° o da Transic° a¬ o (Sa¬ oPaulo: Sumare, 1990), 19^20; Maria Herm|nia Tavares de Almeida, ` O Corporati-vismo em Decl|nio?'' in Evelina Dagnino, editor, Os Anos 90: Pol|tica e Sociedadeno Brasil (Sa¬ o Paulo: Brasiliense, 1994), 55, and ` O Def|cil Caminho: Sindicalismoe Pol|tica na Construc° a¬ o da Democracia,'' in FabioWanderley Reis and GuillermoO'Donnell, editors, A Democracia no Brasil: Dilemas e Perspectiva (Sa¬ o Paulo:Vertice, 1988). On the declining role of the state in agriculture, see GuilhermeCosta Delgado, `Agricultura Familiar e Pol|tica Agricola: Um Estudo de Atores,Demandas e Mecanismos de Decisa¬ o (Documento de Trabalho, Estudos de Pol|ticaAgr|cola No. 9, IPEA, Rio de Janeiro, 1994); Ian Goldin and Gervasio de Rezende,A Agricultura Brasileira na Decada de 80: Crescimento numa Economia em Crise(IPEA series No. 138, Rio de Janeiro: IPEA, 1993).

80. The crisis was excerbated by the legally mandated union structure ^ each municipio,however small, was entitled to form its own rural union. As a result, 47 percent ofunions had less than 2,000 members, and 84 percent had less than 5,000. In the late1980s, a substantial number of new municipioswere created, and along with them afurther subdivision of rural unions. IBGE, Sindicatos (1988): 55.

81. TheWorkers' Party was founded in 1979 and made the creation of CUTa part of itsplatform. CUTwas founded in 1983 and established itself as the predominant labororganization in 1985, in the wake of a series of impressive strikes in Brazil'sindustrial heartland, the ABC region of Sa¬ o Paulo. On the Workers' Party, see

43

Margaret Keck, The Workers' Party and Democratization in Brazil (New York:Oxford University Press, 1992); Michael Lowy, `A NewType of Party: The BrazilianPT,'' Latin American Perspectives 14 (1987): 453^465. On the CUT, see Leoª ncioMartins Rodrigues, CUT: Os Militantes e a Ideologia (Sa¬ o Paulo: Paz e Terra,1990); Margaret Keck, ` The New Unionism in the Brazilian Transition,'' in AlfredStephan, editor, Democratizing Brazil (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989);Antunes, O Novo Sindicalismo (1995); Vito Giannotti and Sebastia¬ o Neto, CUT:Por Dentro e Por Fora (Petropolis: Vozes, 1990);Wilma Mangabeira, Os Dilemas doNovo Sindicalismo: Democracia e Pol|tica em Volta Redonda (Rio de Janeiro:Relume-Dumara/ANPOCS, 1993).

82. Keck, The Workers' Party, 154, 157^160, quote on 157, and 58^59, 62; Emir Saderand Ken Silverstein,Without Fear of Being Happy: Lula, the Workers' Party andBrazil (London: Verso, 1991), 126; Martins, OPoder do Atraso (1994).

83. Je¡ery M. Paige, Agrarian Revolution: Social Movements and Export Agriculture inthe Underdeveloped World (New York: Free Press, 1975) and ` Social Theory andPeasant Revolution in Vietnam and Guatemala,'' Theory and Society 12 (1983):699^737. See also, Theda Skocpol, ``What Makes Peasants Revolutionary?'' Compa-rative Politics 14 (1982): 351^376.

84. Eric Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York: Harper and Row,1969); James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1976) and ``Hegemony and the Peasantry,'' Politics and Society 7(1977): 267^296. Pereira is one of few scholars to suggest that agrarian moderniza-tion may create favorable conditions for the class compromise entailed by havinga rural labor movement. Pereira, The End of the Peasantry. Another exception isBrockett, ` The Structure of Political Opportunities.'' In his study of revolutionarystruggles in Latin America, Wickham-Crowley, for example, identi¢es change inagrarian structure, and threats to peasants' access to land in particular, as one offour factors that stoke peasants revolutionary spirit. Timothy P.Wickham-Crowley,Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: AComparative Study of Insurgents andRegimes since 1956 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), chapter 6 andp. 231. Foley, in a survey of research on peasant mobilization in Mexico andCentral America, concludes that agricultural modernization ` has generated power-ful speci¢c grievances among large numbers of campesinos, who are thereforeincreasingly (and sometimes immediately) susceptible to organization; and it hasproduced a general decline in rural living standards, which may contribute todiscontent and fuel con£ict.'' Michael W. Foley, `Agrarian Con£ict Reconsidered:Popular Mobilization and Peasant Politics in Mexico and Central America,'' LatinAmerican Research Review 26/1 (1991), 216^238. See also Cynthia McClintock,''Peru's Sendero Luminoso Rebellion: Origins and Trajectory,'' in Susan Eckstein,editors, Power and Popular Protest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).An important exception to this focus on socioeconomic factors is Zamosc's workon Colombia, which highlights the role of the state and various urban groups inorganizing rural movements. Leon Zamosc,The Agrarian Question and the PeasantMovement in Columbia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

85. Paige's model also provides no bases on which to predict when movements willemerge and what kinds of trajectories they may follow, only what kinds of peasantgroups are likely to engage in particular forms of political mobilization.

86. Rodolfo Ho¡mann, ` Vinte Anos de Desigualdade e Probreza na AgriculturaBrasileira,'' Revista de Economia e Sociologia Rural 30/2 (April/June 1992),97^114, on 98; and ` Distribuic° a¬ o de Renda na Agricultura,'' in Antonio Salazar

44

P. Branda¬ o, editor, Os Principais Problemas da Agricultural Brasileira: Analise eSugesto¬ es (Rio de Janeiro: IPEA, 1992), 8, 22, 108; ECLAC, Social Panorama ofLatin America, 1994 edition (Santiago: ECLAC, November 1994), 140; Goldin andRezende, AAgricultura Brasileira na Decada de 80, 8.

87. The share of medium-sized farms actually increased in Para and that of smallproperties fell, but at a slower rate than the expansion of the large estates. IBGE,Censo Agropecuario, 1960 and 1980.

88. Popkin,The Rational Peasant, 35.89. See Roberto Francozi, The Puzzle of Strikes: Class and State Strategies in Postwar

Italy (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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