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research-article2016
LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X15616119Latin American PerspectivesIs the Brazilian State “Patrimonial”?

Is the Brazilian State “Patrimonial”?

by
Anthony W. Pereira

Patrimonialism is ubiquitous in the analysis of the state in Brazil, a country in which

the concept has its own distinctive genealogy. However, patrimonialism has been subject
to severe conceptual stretching, limiting its usefulness in comparative analysis.
Furthermore, the “commanding heights” of the federal bureaucracy have become more
universalistic and merit-based and less patrimonial over the past few years. Patrimonialism
is therefore best viewed as one logic among many operating in the Brazilian state.

O patrimonialismo permeia a análise do Estado no Brazil, país onde o conceito possui

uma genealogia própria. Contudo, o patrimonialismo tem sido objeto de certa ampliação
conceitual, o que limita sua utilidade numa análise comparativa. Ademais, nos últimos
anos, os altos comandos da burocracia federal se têm tornado mais universalistas e meri-
tocráticos, além de menos patrimonialistas. Nesse contexto, o conceito pode ser visto como
mais uma lógica entre várias que atuam no Estado brasileiro.

Keywords: Patrimonialism, State formation, Public administration, Bureaucracy

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

state. It apparently has much to offer: the notion of an incomplete separation of
the public and private spheres, a theory about the late and uneven develop-
ment of a rational-legal public administration, and an explanation of the ori-
gins and persistence of the personalism, clientelism, patronage, and corruption
that are said to distinguish the Brazilian state. If the success of a concept can be
gauged by its use, then “patrimonialism” is extremely successful.
However, the term is usually used in ways that are very different from
Weber’s (1978) original usage, has a variety of sometimes contradictory mean-
ings, and is often employed as a descriptive (and wholly pejorative) label for
near-universal political practices rather than as an explanatory concept. This
conceptual stretching limits the usefulness of the term. “Patrimonialism” is
often used to create a dichotomy (personalistic, clientelistic practices versus
rational-legal, universalistic ones) that obscures the complexity of the Brazilian
state. Furthermore, it is sometimes used to justify orthodox liberal prescriptions

Anthony W. Pereira is director of the Brazil Institute at King’s College London. He thanks Franz-
Wilhelm Heimer, Andrés Malamud, José Esteves Pereira, Anthony Spanakos, Matthew Taylor,
Corrie Boudreaux, Ludovico Feoli, Chris Fettweis, Xela Korda, Chad Lavin, Celeste Lay, Behrooz
Moazami, Nancy Maveety, Thomas Reese, Jeffrey Stacey, Andrea Talentino, Justin Wolfe, Gustavo
Flores-Macías, Seth Racusen, Wendy Wolford, John French, Sergio Pereira Leite, Margaret Keck,
Bernardo Mançano Fernandes, Kathleen Millar, Chris Gibson, Ronaldo Munck, Marco Gandásegui,
Marjorie Bray, and three anonymous LAP reviewers for comments on earlier drafts of this article
and Fernando Mouron for help with the data.

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 207, Vol. 43 No. 2, March 2016, 135–152
DOI: 10.1177/0094582X15616119
© 2016 Latin American Perspectives

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in which the only solution for personalism and clientelism is the radical down-
sizing of the state and its replacement by the alleged impersonalism of the
market.
This article attempts to gauge the applicability of the patrimonial concept to
the Brazilian state. My focus throughout is on the top levels of the public
administration as a core institution of the state. I follow Bob Jessop (2006: 113)
in defining the state as

the intersection of politically organized coercive and symbolic power, a clearly

demarcated core territory, and a fixed population on which political decisions
are collectively binding. . . . The key feature of the state is the historically vari-
able ensemble of technologies and practices that produce, naturalize and man-
age territorial space as a bounded container within which political power is
exercised to achieve various, more or less well integrated, and changing policy
objectives.

The article first examines the evolution and appeal of the concept of patri-
monialism from Max Weber through Raymundo Faoro to contemporary writ-
ers. It then argues that patrimonialism is increasingly misleading as an
explanation of the workings of the “commanding heights” of the Brazilian
state, the top level of the federal public administration. In conclusion, it sug-
gests that the concept should not be discarded but should be applied in a more
limited way to particular attitudes and practices, being best seen as one of sev-
eral different grammars or logics operating in the Brazilian state (Nunes, 1997). 1
This topic is important because patrimonialism is one of the concepts that
have been used as a key to understanding Brazil. Others are Freyre’s Casa
grande e senzala (Big House and Slave Quarters, 1978), Buarque de Holanda’s
Homen cordial (Cordial Man, 1956), Prado Jr.’s colonial capitalist development
(2012 [1945]), Viana’s organic idealism (1987 [1949], Leal’s coronelismo (1949),
and Da Matta’s personhood (1987 [1979]). Patrimonialism is ubiquitous in pop-
ular discourse, journalism, and scholarly analysis. This makes it especially
important to critically examine its use.

Some Uses of Patrimonialism

For Max Weber, a patrimonial state is based at least partly on traditional

rather than rational-legal authority and is characterized by a fusion of personal
and public power in the state’s leaders (originally the monarch and his court).
Patrimonial domination “regards all governing powers and the corresponding
economic rights as privately appropriated economic advantages. . . . In particu-
lar, the appropriation of judicial and military powers tends to be treated as a
legal basis for a privileged status position of those appropriating them” (Weber,
1978, Vol. 1: 236). Furthermore, in a patrimonial state “the prince organizes his
political power . . . just like the exercise of his patriarchal power . . . [and] mili-
tary and judicial authority are exercised without any restraint by the master as
components of his patrimonial power” (Vol. 2: 1013).2
Weber considers patrimonial domination an outgrowth of patriarchal rule,
the master’s personal subjugation of the dependents in his household; as larger

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 Pereira / IS THE BRAZILIAN STATE “PATRIMONIAL”?   137

political units evolved out of households, so domination became more com-

plex. Patriarchal domination is based on traditional claims to legitimacy, the
most basic being filial piety, and compliance with norms based on subjects’
strict personal loyalty to the master. Weber (1978, Vol. 2: 1006–1007) contrasts
this type of power to bureaucratic domination, in which norms are based on
rationality and appeals to abstract legality and rules are enforced through
administrators who possess specialized professional knowledge.
Weber refers to three key elements of patrimonial rule. First, in a patrimonial
order, the armed forces are personally loyal to the ruler and are used to quash
other potential rulers. Because the armed forces are loyal not to the state as such
but merely to a particular ruler, patrimonial rule tends to be unstable. A chal-
lenge to or the removal or death of a ruler often provokes the fragmentation of
the military. The second element is that the ruler’s political and economic needs
are met through the obligations of collectivities, such as corps, guilds, or com-
munities. Typically, rulers grant monopoly privileges to these collectivities, in
which membership is compulsory, in return for the collectivities’ regular fulfill-
ment of certain material obligations. Finally, the administration of a patrimonial
state consists primarily of officials who are personally dependent on the ruler.
This administration is not bureaucratic or based on professional specialization;
it responds directly to and represents the personal will of the sovereign.3
Weber’s account of the way administration in patrimonial states works is
complex. He refers to the “estate type of patrimonialism,” the “patrimonial-
military” state, the “patrimonial-bureaucratic state,” “semi-bureaucratic polit-
ical patrimonialism,” and the “stereotyped and arbitrary pattern of [the]
patrimonial state.” He also distinguishes between local and central patrimoni-
alism and uses the term to apply both to states and to countries. These terms
arise because Weber recognized that patrimonial rulers, while desirous of
utterly dependent soldiers and administrators who were personally loyal to
them, often had to sacrifice some degree of control for pragmatic reasons. The
social forces that they were most likely to share power with were the landed
aristocracy or notables rooted in local areas. For example, landed aristocrats
often gained considerable control over armed forces, as can be seen in the case
of Prussia in the nineteenth century, while elite groups often gained consider-
able power in state institutions. This process of “appropriation” of the state
administration by elites took several forms, depending on the type of elite
involved: “proprietary office holding,” where elites gained hereditary rights to
offices in the state administration; “enterprising,” in which commercial elites
engaged in tax farming, the sale of offices, and other activities, managing the
state administration for their own profit; and “local patrimonialism,” in which
local elites, usually landed aristocrats, monopolized state authority in their
regions (Ertman, 1997: 8). Despite his recognition of the ubiquity of “appro-
priation” of offices, however, Weber seems to have regarded patrimonialism in
its purest form as unmediated rule by dependents of the ruler—the macropo-
litical equivalent of the patriarch’s rule over his own household.4
In Weber’s treatment, the patrimonial state is marked by a struggle between
a ruler who desires to rule through dependent subjects who will maximize the
execution of his arbitrary will and local notables with their own claims to aris-
tocratic privilege and position who want to maximize their place within the

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state. Weber refers to the ebb and flow of this struggle, but nowhere does he
suggest that history everywhere resolves itself in one clear direction. Thus the
estate type of patrimonial state is a mixture of arbitrary rule through personal
dependents of the ruler and hereditary offices controlled by local notables. In
the bureaucratic patrimonial state, the ruler has taken away the hereditary
offices from the local notables and professionalized the administration.
Administrative structures consisting of different combinations of hereditary
offices and positions held by the rulers’ dependents—at least in Western
Europe—were eventually replaced by modern bureaucratic states run on the
basis of the precepts of professional public administration (see Ertman, 1997).
Throughout his writings on the subject, Weber consistently sees patrimonial
rule as the opposite of rational-legal bureaucracy. Patrimonial states are marked
by state agencies whose jurisdictions are not rationally or consistently divided,
in which arbitrary rule making and the invocation of tradition are the norm,
and in which the separation of the public and the private is incomplete or non-
existent—the “public” administration serves to aggrandize the personal inter-
ests of the ruler(s) without a commitment to the greater good of some larger
entity. Furthermore, patrimonialism, marked by arbitrariness and personal
loyalty to rulers, may encourage and coexist easily with “political” or mercan-
tile capitalism; state authorities can cartelize production among an oligarchy of
privileged producers. However, patrimonial rule inhibits the development of
modern industrial capitalism, which depends upon rational calculation, a mass
market, and predictable rules.
To summarize Weber’s view of patrimonialism, it is first of all a form of tra-
ditional rule—distinct from charismatic and rational-legal rule—that grew out
of the patriarchal household. Second, it is a historical category that Weber
applied largely to premodern states. Third, it exists across cultures and does
not refer to any particular type of political system (Jary and Jary, 1995: 478–479).
Weber considered the people in his own country, Germany, to have a preference
for a strong leader who could play the role of “father of the nation,” and he saw
this as a legacy of patrimonial rule. He discussed a huge number of variants—
patrimonialism can refer to rule by dependents of a ruler, rule by elites who
have appropriated public offices, or some mixture of the two. Patrimonialism
is an ideal-type whose elements can be found throughout history and all over
the world. It is part of a spectrum with the modern European Rechsstaat on one
end and Oriental “sultanism” (a strictly patriarchal variant of patrimonialism)
on the other (Weber, 1978, Vol. 2: 1091). Fourth, patrimonialism is defined in
contrast to rational-legal public administration marked by meritocratic recruit-
ment, professional training, performance-based promotion, long-term civil ser-
vice careers, competitive salaries, and orientation to “objective” state interests
rather than personal ones—the ideal-type “Weberian” bureaucracy. Finally, the
concept of patrimonialism was part of Weber’s ambitious attempt to develop a
theory of the mutually constitutive development of modern industrial capital-
ism and rational bureaucratic public administration in the West.
If Weber’s ideas about patrimonialism are well known, the use of the term to
describe the Brazilian state is a less familiar story. Perhaps surprisingly, its use is
fairly recent, dating to the late 1950s. Paradoxically, the term appears not to have
been used before the post–World War II period, when the Brazilian state was

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 Pereira / IS THE BRAZILIAN STATE “PATRIMONIAL”?   139

unquestionably more “patrimonial” than it has been since. Karl Loewenstein’s

(1942) analysis of the Vargas regime, one of the most serious treatments of
Brazilian politics by a U.S.-based political scientist of the 1940s, for example, does
not mention the word. Similarly, Victor Nunes Leal’s landmark Coronelismo,
enxada e voto (Colonelism, the Hoe and the Vote) (1949) does not use the term.
What was common in this era was to refer to the patriarchalism of Brazilian
society—the unbridled power of the master of the big house over the household,
both slaves and family members. References to this can be found, for example, in
Freyre’s The Masters and the Slaves (1978: xxxii) and Buarque de Holanda’s Raízes
do Brasil (Roots of Brazil) (1956: 102–103).5 Given that Weber saw patriarchalism
as the foundation of the patrimonial state, it might have been logical to make this
connection, but nobody seems to have done so before 1957.
It was the publication of Raymundo Faoro’s (2001 [1957]) Os donos do poder
(The Owners of Power) in that year that seems to have prepared the way for the
subsequent flood. That flood was not immediate, however; Faoro’s book was
admired but not widely imitated. Foreign observers such as Richard Morse
(1973) used the term, but neo-Weberian analysis had few adherents in Brazil
itself. Scholars such as Caio Prado Junior (2001 [1933]; 2012 [1945]) held to the
traditional Marxist view that state forms were ultimately shaped by the forces
of production. As long as Marxism was powerful in Brazilian intellectual life,
the idea that the Brazilian state was “patrimonial” remained a minority view.
The publication of Simon Schwartzman’s (1988 [1975]) Bases do autoritarismo
brasileiro (Bases of Brazilian Authoritarianism) was another important step in
the process. Schwartzman’s book appealed to readers tired of authoritarian
rule. Subsequent developments in global and Brazilian politics, including the
fall of the Berlin Wall and the decline of orthodox Marxism, turned the trickle
into a flood, and the term increasingly came into vogue. What is striking today
is how many social scientists, both within and without Brazil, are willing to
characterize the Brazilian state as patrimonial.
However, these “patrimonialisms” are not equal. The Weberian concept, in
the hands of Faoro, undergoes a fundamental transformation. For Faoro, patri-
monialism is a subtype of state that is peculiar to Luso-Brazilian state forma-
tion. It is medieval in origin but now modern—it does not tend to wither away
with the development of capitalism. It hinders the development of industrial
capitalism and a pluralistic civil society in Brazil. It is defined in contrast to an
ideal-typical modern state characterized by a capitalist rule of law. For Faoro,
patrimonialism explains Brazilian economic and political backwardness and is
the original sin and ultimate destiny of the Brazilian state: “The power—a nom-
inally popular sovereignty—has owners who do not emanate from the nation,
the society, the uneducated and poor people. The leader is not a delegate but a
maker of deals” (Faoro, 2001 [1957]: 837).6
In Faoro, patrimonialism leads to what could be called “Luso-pessimism”
about the prospects of the Brazilian state. No matter how modern the Brazilian
state appears to be, the patrimonial status order within the state apparatus
maintains its archaic practices, holding the country back and resisting every
attempt at extirpation. Faoro (2001 [1957]: 837–838) ends his monumental work
with a Faulknerian rumination on the unchanging nature of the essence of the
Brazilian state, which lies in the medieval Portuguese past:

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The state machine . . . maintained itself Portuguese, hypocritically castelike,

obstinately administrative, aristocratically superior. Instead of renovation, the
Lusitanian embrace produced a “social enormity,” in which old cadres and
anachronistic institutions frustrate the growth of the virgin world. . . . [It] gen-
erated a civilization marked by obscurity . . . an opaque clarity, light covered
by dark glass, a vague and transparent figure covered by fog . . . a shadow that
walks among shadows, being but not being, going but not going, a lack of
definition in its form and its creative will. Covering it, over the skeleton in the
air, is the rigid tunic of the inexhaustible past, heavy and suffocating.

For Faoro in contrast to Weber, patrimonialism is compatible with rational-

legal public administration. Behind a façade of meritocracy and professional-
ism, the personalism and clientelism of patrimonial practices will persist. Those
practices create a permanent divide between leaders and subjects, as well as
state and nation. The managers of the patrimonial state will not respect the
Brazilian people’s demands for rights; under the patrimonial state, the devel-
opment of a liberal civil society will continually be suffocated. This is a very
different vision from the Weberian one.
Contemporary scholars who use “patrimonialism,” however, do not neces-
sarily reproduce all the elements of Faoro’s analysis. For Reid (2014: 275), for
example, patrimonialism is merely the elision of “private and public interests.”
For Schwartzman (1988 [1975]: 14, 23), the patrimonial state is marked by
“bureaucratic despotism” in which “heavy” bureaucratic administration dom-
inates a weak and poorly articulated civil society and citizens are generally
“dependent and alienated . . . dependent on public power and guidance for the
obtainment of its favors.” According to Uricoechea (1980: 2), the patrimonial
state is not based purely on traditional and personal authority, nor is it uniform.
The patrimonial state “is a synthetic construction that accentuates the coexis-
tence, within one pattern of political rule, of the universalistic and legal-ratio-
nal elements at the center of the power structure and the particularistic and
traditional elements at the periphery of the power structure.”
For others, patrimonialism is an authoritative federal bureaucracy controlled
by political elites who limit popular participation and influence and use the
bureaucracy’s resources to benefit themselves and their coteries of supporters
(Roett, 1999: 21–26).7 A more comprehensive definition of patrimonialism is
Mainwaring’s (1999: 179):

a situation in which political rulers treat the state as if it were their own prop-
erty. . . . Rather than allocate public resources according to universalistic crite-
ria, politicians do so on the basis of personal connections, bestowing favors on
their friends, family and parentela. They use public monies as though they came
from their personal bank accounts; they require that supposedly public ser-
vants work to further their personal political projects; they hire their relatives
and friends for public jobs, regardless of their qualifications and job perfor-
mance; they award public contracts to friends and relatives. There is a weak
sense of public consciousness and the res publica.

Eakin (1998: 167–168) adds in a similar vein that the patrimonial state

controlled and dispensed resources (patrimony) to allies and friends and

denied patronage to enemies. The state bureaucracy took on a life of its own,

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 Pereira / IS THE BRAZILIAN STATE “PATRIMONIAL”?   141

certifying, verifying, and acting as the buffer between the powerful and the
powerless. The patrimonial system, with its corporatist ethos of hierarchy, sta-
bility, and concentration of power . . . was pluralistic, but not representative. It
compartmentalized privilege rather than promoting equality before the law.
The components of society interacted with each other through the paternalistic
state rather than relating directly to each other.

For Chilcote (1990: 122–123), patrimonialism “is a natural outgrowth of the

rural society that historically has profoundly influenced the Brazilian political
economy, and it provides support for the nation’s ruling class—‘the plantation
owners and cattle ranchers of the Northeast, the coffee entrepreneurs of São
Paulo, and the cattle ranchers of Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul.’”
Other social scientists use patrimonialism in a less comprehensive fashion to
allude to specific practices within or features of the Brazilian state. For the
political scientist Leonardo Avritzer, patrimonialism is a series of exchanges
between patrons and clients in which representatives in Congress receive fed-
eral patronage in return for support for the executive’s bills; this patronage is
then passed on to representatives’ clients in their home state. This is “pork-
barrel” politics, in U.S. parlance (Avelino Filho, 1994; Avritzer, 2002: 119–122).
For the sociologist Francisco de Oliveira, it appears to be something quite dif-
ferent—what Weber called “political capitalism,” in which capitalists receive
monopolies from the state (Oliveira, 2003: 44). In the writings of the philoso-
pher Marilena Chaui (2000: 15, 83–91), patrimonialism appears in its classic
sense as a politics based on obedience to the father’s personal will within his
dominion. This produces a state in which the governors “reign,” exercising
power personalistically, conflating their person with the office they hold and
dispensing favors to dependent subjects. This form of power thwarts the
achievement of genuine republican democracy based on equality of citizen-
ship, the temporary holding of offices by representatives beholden to the peo-
ple, and the recognition of rights.
At first glance, these definitions seem to reflect a common, core understand-
ing. As applied to Brazil, the patrimonial state contains several elements: a
combination of rational-legal and personal, traditional authority, the use of
force and the law as instruments of personal domination of the ruler, the appro-
priation of public resources by privileged private actors, the existence of clien-
telistic networks attached to those privileged actors, and a weak sense of a
public good and universalistic citizenship. Patrimonialist state policies are also
highly inegalitarian, frequently following a pattern well summarized by Sorj
(1998: 28): “The state takes responsibility for the onus, the bonus is distributed
among the dominant classes, and the crumbs left over are for the subaltern
groups.”
In a country such as Brazil, with its slave-owning past, small, fabulously
wealthy elites, insecure middle class, and impoverished masses, “patrimonial-
ism” offers a powerful label that resonates on a deep level. The word is also
pejorative, connoting disgust with parasitic elites and the politics of the status
quo. Patrimonialism is not modern; it impedes a fuller and more equitable
development of capitalism in Brazil; it fosters corruption; for Faoro, it even
inhibits the development of a truly national culture. Furthermore, it generates
a distinctive pattern of state-society relations marked by a great social distance

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between political elites and the poor and mutual incomprehension between the
rationalist, technocratic, theoretical discourse of the former and the mystical,
miracle-seeking desperation of the latter. The patrimonial state, it seems, cre-
ates what another analyst calls a “dangerous legitimacy gap” in the political
system (Lamounier, 1999: 149). This seems to capture some important aspects
of Brazilian political realities.
The concept of the patrimonial state also seems to capture elements of
Brazil’s agrarian past. Traditionally, land was not merely a factor of production
but a reward for service and proximity to power, as well as a foundation for the
accumulation and maintenance of more power and privilege. This power
included the ability to direct the legal and coercive apparatus of the state in
one’s region. It also entailed control over and obligations to subaltern popula-
tions. The original division of the colonial capitanias among a handful of amigos
do rei (friends of the king) reflects this reality (Gonçalo, 2001: 23). It is argued
that in Brazil, in contrast to the United States, the state’s patrimonial tendencies
were not substantially mitigated in later stages of development by a frontier in
which settlers could gain easy access to public lands, thus democratizing and
deconcentrating landownership. Brazil’s 1850 Land Law prohibited the acqui-
sition of public land by any means other than purchase, thus putting an end to
previous rights to gain land through occupancy (Viotti da Costa, 2000 [1985]:
78–79).8

Is the Brazilian State Patrimonial?

All of this may be taken as very powerful evidence that the Brazilian state
is patrimonial. The category is used by scholars with a Weberian theoretical
perspective (Faoro, 2001 [1957]; Schwartzman, 1988 [1975]) as well as those
with a Marxist one (Chilcote, 1990; Oliveira, 2003). It is used by historians of
different generations (Eakin, 1998; Morse, 1973) and by a centrist journalist
(Reid, 2014), a neoliberal political scientist (Roett, 1999) and a more leftist one
(Avritzer, 2002), and a radical philosopher (Chaui, 2000). However, patrimo-
nialism is what Reinhard Bendix (quoted in Sartori, 1970: 1040) called a “gen-
eralization in disguise”—not just a label but also an explanation for the
peculiarities of the Brazilian state—and a closer reading of the theorists men-
tioned above reveals that their explanations are quite contradictory. For
example, for Chaui, neoliberal economic reform reinforces Brazil’s patrimo-
nial tendencies. This is because it is associated with personalism, political
marketing, and autocratic power—neoliberal reformers appeal to a popular
desire for a “father of the nation” (Chaui, 2000: 87). For Roett, on the other
hand, neoliberal reform holds the promise of diminishing patrimonialism by
streamlining the state and displacing the traditional elites who rely on state
patronage to buy support. Roett (1999: 65) writes enthusiastically, “For the
first time in Brazilian history, the economic reform process is going to reduce
the size of the central bureaucracy. State companies have been sold; public
employees have been dismissed; and all new capital flows and technology
will help modernize Brazilian industry and commerce. These are significant
changes.”

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 Pereira / IS THE BRAZILIAN STATE “PATRIMONIAL”?   143

Roett creates a dichotomy familiar to neoliberals of a dynamic, efficient, cre-

ative private sector and a constraining, suffocating, bureaucratic public sector
(2013: 4):

It is obvious that the private sector in Brazil is severely constrained by the inef-
ficiency and intervention of the public sector. The two Brazils coexist together.
The productive Brazil must deal with the burden and incompetence of govern-
ment on a daily basis; the inefficient Brazil does not appear to understand that
it must do its part to encourage and support the private sector. Until that
anomaly is resolved, Brazil will be a big economy, but not a particularly effi-
cient or productive one.

What this dichotomy ignores is the mutuality in the embrace of the private sec-
tor by the public. In many instances, private sector lobbies ask for state inter-
vention to help them with subsidized credit, tax breaks, and various forms of
protection, from tariffs to quotas. This Manichean view is a distortion of reality,
a papering over of the many complex ways in which the private sector has
pulled the state into markets in order to shore up monopoly and oligopoly.
Roett’s position is far more common than Chaui’s. A large literature uses the
concept of patrimonialism (or related categories such as populism, clientelism,
and patronage) to recommend orthodox antistate liberalism as a panacea for
the problems of the state in Brazil and other Latin American states. Almeida
(2012: 18, 24), for example, decries the interventionism and size of the Brazilian
state, arguing that they benefit only state managers themselves, and calls for a
“virtuous revolution” that breaks down state power to extract taxation and
concentrate power in the executive and ushers in the “free competition of mar-
kets.” Similarly, Gordon (2001) worries that deviation from orthodox,
Washington Consensus neoliberalism will derail Brazil’s trajectory toward
“First World” status. Edwards (2010) prescribes the same medicine for Latin
America, arguing that only Chile has undergone the full sequence of market-
oriented reforms and that states that do not emulate Chile are likely to fail to
reach their developmental potential.
These analyses, however, play down research on the complexity of state
management of capitalism under contemporary globalization, a task that argu-
ably involves not the replacement of states by markets but increasingly intri-
cate forms of state regulation and public-private partnership. As Evans’s (1995)
study of the information technology sector in Brazil, India, and South Korea
shows, high-tech industrialization owes less to laissez-faire than to “embedded
autonomy,” or a combination of insulation from and linkages with business on
the part of key state economic bureaucracies. It is at the intersection of state
agencies and producer groups that an understanding of the capacity and limi-
tations of public administration becomes crucial.
However, many of the writers cited above use the “patrimonial” label with-
out reference to either concrete characteristics of public administration such as
the extent of meritocratic recruitment, patterns of internal promotion and
career stability, and the competitiveness of salaries or the connections between
the state bureaucracy and the world market. (This observation does not apply
to Chilcote [1990], whose study of Juazeiro and Petrolina in the Brazilian
Northeast is based on years of careful fieldwork and empirical analysis.) An

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example of the disastrous results of such lack of attention can be seen in Budd’s
(2004) “patrimonialist index,” which asks a series of questions about the basis
of rule, the importance of personal connections, and the separation of the pub-
lic and private in the political life of a large group of developing countries. The
questions allow for a large degree of discretion in coding, and they include no
concrete reference to the quality of public administration. Budd’s highly ques-
tionable conclusion is that the Brazilian state is as patrimonial as those of
Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire), the Philippines,
Nigeria, Kenya, Indonesia, and Gabon. His index also ranks the states of
Bangladesh, Malaysia, Peru, Mexico, Pakistan, Tanzania, Thailand, Venezuela,
Bolivia, Ecuador, and Paraguay as considerably less patrimonial than Brazil’s
(Budd, 2004: 8–10).
Many comparative political scientists would find Budd’s findings odd and
inconsistent with the specialized literature on the Brazilian state (see, for exam-
ple, Bersch, Praça, and Taylor, 2016; Costa, 1999; Evans, 1979; 1995; Loureiro,
Abrucio, and Pacheco, 2010; Loureiro, Oliveiri, and Martes, 2011; Santos, 2006;
and Schneider, 1991). It is hard to imagine, for example, that the state of a coun-
try with the seventh-largest economy in the world that was also the fourth-
largest recipient of foreign direct investment in 2012 (receiving US $65 billion
[Exame, 2013: 14, 16]) was as patrimonial in its procedures as the states of
resource-rich but impoverished Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of the
Congo. In Zimbabwe, President Robert Mugabe has been in power for 35 years.
He became prime minister in 1980 and president in 1987 and is still in that post
at the time of writing (September 2015). Joseph Kabila has been president of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo since 2001 (Lewis and Slater, 2013: 236–238,
246–247). Before that, his father, Laurent Désiré Kabila, was president from
1997 to 2001. This kind of personalized and (in the case of Kabila) dynastic
power is far closer to the Weberian ideal-type of patrimonialism than is the
Brazilian case.
While much of the work on patrimonialism in comparative politics repre-
sents a valuable contribution on many levels, most of it obscures the increas-
ingly rational-legal character of the state and the development of capitalism in
Brazil. These processes are related, because the state plays a key role in capital
accumulation and its technocratic capacity develops in tandem with capitalist
markets. I follow the Weberian tradition here in conceiving of meritocratic
selection and advancement, formal education and technical skills, and bureau-
cratic autonomy as the opposite of patrimonialism in public administration. I
also examine the top levels of the civilian executive branch rather than other
parts of the state apparatus because of its centrality to the relationship between
political leaders and the enactment of state policies.
The rationalization of the Brazilian state is a process that has a long lineage,
with many advances and reversals, and dates back at least to the 1938 creation
of the Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Público (Public Service
Administrative Department—DASP) under the Vargas regime of 1930–1945
(Abreu et al., 2001: 1827–1830). In the DASP’s first phase a law on civil federal
public functionaries was created, training programs for federal civil servants
were inaugurated, “scientific” methods of public administration were adopted,
and semipublic agencies such as the Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, a mining

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 Pereira / IS THE BRAZILIAN STATE “PATRIMONIAL”?   145

company, the Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional, the national steel company,

and the Instituto de Reseguros do Brasil (Brazilian Reinsurance Institute) were
established. For Nunes (1997: 76), the DASP represented an attempt by the
Vargas regime to reform the civil service by creating universal procedures and
a system of hiring and promotion based on merit. The attempt was partial and
coexisted with traditional clientelism in other parts of the state, but it was sig-
nificant nonetheless.
Despite the DASP, for many years Brazil’s public administration, even at the
federal level, did not come close to Weber’s ideal-type of a rational-legal
bureaucracy. Graham (1968: 129) estimates that in 1960–1962 only approxi-
mately 17.8 percent of the 500,000 civil servants at the federal level had gained
admission through a public examination. Mainwaring (1999: 182) asserts that
as recently as 1985 only 125,000 of 1,825,000 federal public employees (less than
7 percent) had been hired through public service examinations, the rest having
been chosen according to political criteria. Brazilian presidents have enormous
power to appoint politically loyal subordinates to the highest echelons of the
federal bureaucracy. President Luís Inácio “Lula” da Silva (2003–2010) made
roughly 20,000 appointments at the federal level on first taking office (Flynn,
2005: 1252), compared with the U.S. president’s 4,000 (Jornal de Commercio, July
21, 2005). Similarly, Brazilian welfare spending has historically been strikingly
skewed to the better-off segments of the population. Schwartzman (2000: 54)
noted at the end of the 1990s that 21 percent of Brazil’s public expenditure on
health, education, and housing went to sectors in the upper quintile of the
income distribution. The corresponding figure for Chile was only 4 percent.
Nevertheless, in the post-1985 period, the federal bureaucracy was reshaped
to emphasize universal procedures and merit-based recruitment. In 1988 a new
constitution was adopted that, in the words of two observers, “extended fairly
rigid Weberian reforms, such as entrance only by examination and tenure for
all civil servants,” to the federal public administration (Heredia and Schneider,
2003: 11). In the mid- and late 1990s a major reform of public administration
took place. While described by its chief architect as a post-Weberian managerial
reform (Bresser Pereira, 2003: 90), it largely preserved and expanded the
Weberian constitutional modifications of 1988 by, for example, regularly sched-
uling civil service exams that had formerly been irregular and ad hoc (Bresser
Pereira, 2003: 103-104; see also Rezende, 2004). Melo (2002: 169) notes that in
1995, at the beginning of the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–
2002), the federal government announced the immediate hiring of 240 civil
servants in areas such as budgeting, finance, and public policy in the name of
greater efficiency. Rezende (2004: 89) shows that the reforms of the late 1990s
were closely monitored and encouraged by international financial institutions.
In 1999, for example, the International Monetary Fund applauded Brazilian
efforts to reduce overall spending on public employees while at the same time
making civil service salaries, especially at the top levels, commensurate with
salaries in the private sector.
In Brazil today, below the level of the 20,000 presidential appointments men-
tioned earlier, employment at the federal level is now virtually impossible with-
out a competitive exam (concurso) except in the case of consultants hired on a
short-term basis. Key federal agencies such as the Treasury, the Central Bank,

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146   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

Table 1
Brazilian Federal Employees Hired since 1995
by Year and Method of Recruitment
Hired by Civil Service Hired without Civil Service
Exam (Concursados) Exam (Não Concursados)
Year [Cumulative] [Cumulative]
1995 19,675 –
1996 29,602 30,049
1997 38,657 14,459
1998 46,472 −13,524
1999 49,399 28,132
2000 50,923 29,207
2001 51,583 27,301
2002 51,613 −12,223
2003 58,833 47,356
2004 74,954 77,644
2005 87,407 55,377
2006 109,519 54,645
2007 121,458 54,100
2008 140,818 57,400
2009 170,546 20,162
2010 207,146 37,759
2011 227,205 44,945
2012 247,376 33,477
2013 273,191 34,637
2014 306,668 50,443
Source: Ministério do Planejamento, Orçamento e Gestão, Secretaria de Recursos Humanos (2015).
Note: The figures for não concursados in 1998 and 2002 are negative because these employees typically
do not have the job security that concursados enjoy and in any given year those whose contracts are not
renewed may outnumber the não concursados hired.

and the Planning, Development, Industry, and Commerce, and Foreign minis-
tries, as well as the Brazilian Development Bank, whatever else their failings
might be, are widely seen as high on the “Weberianness” scale (see Arbix and
Martin, 2011; Hochstetler and Montero, 2013; and Raposo, 2011).9 Data from the
Planning Ministry’s Boletin estatístico de pessoal (Personnel Statistical Bulletin)
show that the ratio of concursados to non-concursados entering the federal bureau-
cracy has swung in recent years in favor of the former (Ministério do
Desenvolvimento, Indústria e Comércio Exterior, 2013). While in 1996 a majority
of new federal employees had not been hired on the basis of a civil service exam,
by 2014 the number of new employees who had entered on the basis of an exam
was six times greater than the number who had entered without one (Table 1).
This trend was especially pronounced in the 2006–2014 period (Ministério do
Planejamento, Orçamento e Gestão, 2015). A recent study claimed that servidores
comissionados (hired without an exam) represented only 14.5 percent of all the
civilian functionaries registered in the federal government and only 7.6 percent
of all 1,011,065 federal employees (Correio Braziliense, July 30, 2009). A large pro-
portion of those hired by the federal administration have university degrees.
The second process that a loose application of the patrimonialist label
obscures is the development of capitalism. This has changed Brazilian society

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 Pereira / IS THE BRAZILIAN STATE “PATRIMONIAL”?   147

in a number of ways, some of them predicted by Weber. Historians recognize

that the nineteenth-century Brazilian state was highly attuned to the needs of
agrarian exporters, with “one eye on the interior and one on the City of London”
(Topik, 2002: 130). While agriculture is still important for Brazil and despite the
recent commodity boom, its manufactured exports represent almost 40 percent
of the value of its exports (Ministério do Desenvolvimento, Indústria e Comércio
Exterior, 2013: 14).10 Industrialization and its concomitant urbanization have
contributed to a level of intergenerational social mobility in Brazil that is higher
than that of Western Europe and only slightly lower than that of the United
States (Gordon, 2001: 95; see also Skidmore, 2004).
Brazil’s changing export profile, coupled with shifts in the global economy,
has also led to demands (both domestic and international) for a more sophisti-
cated state apparatus that can facilitate capital accumulation and capitalist cal-
culations about the market. Several measures suggest that the federal
bureaucracy has become increasingly professionalized. For example, Decree
Law 5,497 of July 21, 2005, established a minimum number of top-level appoint-
ments by the president and her staff that must be filled by civil servants. In 2008
more than 71 percent of those appointees were civil servants.
On the “commanding heights” of the federal bureaucracy, the Brazilian state
does not look very patrimonial. The bureaucracy is highly institutionalized,
governed by impersonal rules, making the Brazilian state look very different
from states under more widely recognized patrimonial political regimes such as
Nicaragua under Anastasio Somoza (1974–1979), the Dominican Republic under
Rafael Trujillo (1930–1961), Cuba under Fulgencio Batista (1940–1944, 1952–
1959), Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko (1965–1997), and Iran under Muhammad
Reza Pahlavi (1953–1979) (Chehabi and Linz, 1998). Conventional measures that
could reveal a distinctively patrimonial pattern in Brazil seem to find a state that
looks remarkably similar to others in societies with similar and higher levels of
economic development. Similarly, the corruption at this level, often ascribed to
patrimonialism, does not necessarily have patrimonial roots. This is not to deny
that corruption is common but merely to suggest that patrimonialism may not
be the best explanation for it. For example, one of the best-known cases, the
mensalão, was not a “traditional” instance of political power holders’ using the
benefits of public office for private gain. Instead, members of a relatively new
political party of outsiders were convicted of using public funds both to finance
the party’s electoral campaigns and to shore up support for the government
amongst allied politicians. This is corruption but not patrimonial corruption.11
A loose application of the patrimonial label to Brazil’s state obscures the
rationalization of public administration (at least at the federal level) and the
integration of the economy, supervised by key federal agencies, into world
markets. This is not to say that patrimonialism may not be a valid explanatory
variable at lower levels of the state apparatus or with regard to nonstate atti-
tudes and behaviors. There is much evidence that clientelistic relations are
common at the municipal level, in the management of public services, and in
the ways in which Brazilians perceive power. A good example of the latter can
be seen in an article by the social scientist and critic of the PT government
Francisco de Oliveira (2011: 34): “Eight years of government led by the PT
devoted R$14 billion reais to the poor [via the Bolsa Família] and more than

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148   LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

R$200 billion reais to the holders of the internal public debt.” In this formula-
tion, power is personalized. The fact that the issuance of internal public debt is
a structural feature of the Brazilian state is ignored in favor of an interpretation
that sees interest on the debt as a favor personally bestowed by the government
on rich people. This is a patrimonial view of power, but its ubiquity should not
lead us to conclude that the state is patrimonial.

Conclusion

Conceptual stretching does not require the elimination of the patrimonialist

label, but it does point to the urgent need to reexamine the concept and disag-
gregate it into measurable characteristics of public administration such as the
balance between recruitment on merit-based measures as opposed to political
loyalty, the career path and prospects of promotion of civil servants, the relative
attractiveness of salaries, and the relationship between key agencies of the state
and world markets.
Oligarchy, cronyism, personalism, corruption, “bossism,” and the use of pub-
lic resources for private ends are not in and of themselves evidence of “patrimo-
nialism” in the classic understanding of that term. A too-casual and one-sided
application of the patrimonial label obscures the very real similarities between
practices in the “developed” world (where it appears to be almost never used)
and those in “developing” countries (where it is employed frequently). In the
Brazilian case, the term has been increasingly applied to the state at precisely the
period in which industrialization and urbanization have weakened the power
of traditional agrarian elites and reforms have made the federal civil service far
more “Weberian” than it was before. It therefore makes more sense to see “pat-
rimonialism” as one of several logics operating in the Brazilian state.
In the study of the Brazilian state, the important Marxist insight that state
forms are powerfully influenced by changes in patterns of economic organiza-
tion has been lost. Analyses of patrimonialism have often lent themselves to
orthodox liberal prescriptions for the downsizing of the state and its replace-
ment by markets. Too little attention has been paid to information about how the
Brazilian state actually works. Better measurement and standardized compari-
sons of the practices that patrimonialism is supposed to subsume would mini-
mize the kind of confusion found in the Brazilian case. Further research on the
functioning of public administration in the developing and developed world of
the kind carried out by Evans and Rausch (1999) and Bersch, Praça, and Taylor
(2016) would do much to rescue the concept from imprecision and inconsis-
tency. This article therefore ends with the hope for “creative rejuvenation” in the
theoretical realm—the rebuilding of an important concept with a distinguished
intellectual lineage on a foundation of empirical work that captures the complex
and changing nature of the state in Brazil and the rest of Latin America.

Notes

  1. Nunes argues that the Brazilian state and society contain four logics or grammars (clien-
telism, corporatism, bureaucratic insulation, and universal procedures) and that attempts to
reduce these to dichotomies based on the idea of “two Brazils” are simplistic.

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 Pereira / IS THE BRAZILIAN STATE “PATRIMONIAL”?   149

  2. Elsewhere Weber writes that in patrimonial domains “the political realm as a whole is
approximately identical with a huge princely manor.” He adds: “We shall speak of a patrimonial
state when the prince organizes his political power over extrapatrimonial areas and political sub-
jects—which is not discretionary and not enforced by physical coercion—just like the exercise of
his patriarchal power” (Weber, 1978, Vol. 2: 1013).
  3. This last factor is the main element of the standard definition of patrimonialism in socio-
logical dictionaries; see Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner (1994: 309), Jary and Jary (1995: 478–479),
Marshall (1998: 485), and Johnson (2000: 224).
  4. Weber (1978, Vol. 2: 1090–1091) writes that “the [Imperial] Chinese state of officials, which
in its own way is the most consistent political form of patrimonialism, is not based on landed
estates, but, as we have seen, is so uniformly patrimonial because of their absence.”
  5. For more contemporary references, see Viotti da Costa (2000 [1985]: Chapter 10) and Stein
(1976: 147–149).
  6. All translations from the Portuguese are mine.
  7. Roett draws heavily on Faoro (2001 [1957]).
  8. Viotti da Costa contrasts the 1850 Brazilian law with the Homestead Act of 1862 in the
United States, which granted frontier land to anyone willing to settle it.
  9. These were some of the agencies evaluated by the country experts canvassed by Evans and
Rausch (1999; Rausch and Evans, 2000), producing a score of 7.60 for the Brazilian state. Evans
(1995) characterizes the Brazilian state as intermediate in this regard between some of the East
Asian developmental states and “predatory” states such as Zaire (now the Democratic Republic
of the Congo).
10. The data are from January–June 2013. Manufactured goods amounted to 37.4 percent of
total exports by value; semimanufactured goods represented 12.8 percent of the total value of
exports and primary products 47.5 percent.
11. Ertman (1997: 154) makes a similar point when he compares absolutist states of medieval
Europe with ancient Rome: He writes, “The Roman state, like many states today, may have been
corrupt, meaning that private interests may have subverted the prescribed operation of public
institutions. However, such corruption must be sharply distinguished from a set of practices
which converted public or proto-public offices into permanently private property, thereby sub-
verting not the norms of behavior thought proper for a public official, but the very notion of a
public official itself.”

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University of California Press.

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