Reformas na previdência social: processo político de reformas politicamente custosas

Abstract

The thesis points out the reasons that lead governments to propose and approve politically costly reforms, unpopular measures with large immediate and identifiable losses and uncertain future gains, such as reforms in Brazilian social security. Its objective is to discuss and compare the three reforms that have occurred in this statute since the Brazil’s redemocratization. The political process related to the reforms carried out through Constitutional Amendment No. 20 of December 15th, 1998 (EC 20/1998), during the first term of Fernando Henrique Cardoso presidency, of Constitutional Amendment No. 41 of December 19th, 2003 (EC 41/2003), Lula da Silva's first term presidency, and Constitutional Amendment No. 103, of November 12th, 2019 (EC 103/2019), promoted by the management of Jair Bolsonaro, is the subject of the thesis. The conflict between the Executive and the Legislative and within the latter, during the process of assessing the measures in the National Congress is analyzed, in order to demonstrate the role of institutional rules, the strategic interaction between political actors, particularly the Legislative and the Executive, as well as contextual factors of the political costs of the proposed reforms. The results found are opposed to the literature's prediction that reforms that impose concentrated and immediate political costs and scattered and long-term benefits would be doomed to failure or at least a long process of processing. The social security reforms in Brazil, despite their constitutional nature, were approved, to a large extent, quickly and according to the claim of the governments that proposed them, even though they had undergone important changes in the course of their procedure.