The Programmatic Shifts in the PT’s Constitutionalist Agenda (1988–2013)

Delineating Constituent and Constituted Power

The theoretical framework of constituent and constituted power is deployed because the PT’s distinctive origin as an agglomeration of marginalized political subjects offers invaluable glimpses into the determination of all political discourse by the dissonance between rulers and the ruled. In a country marked by a violently imposed and strictly ordered social hierarchy, Brazilian political discourse has always been characterized by a deficit in representation (Singer, 2013). Since its inception, the PT has sought to overcome this deficit by propelling factory workers, leaders of peasant movements, and black activists into elected office (Keck, 2010). The party’s experience can therefore elucidate how the theoretical concepts of constituent and constituted power manifest themselves in political society.

Lefort (1986) identifies constituent power as a concept emanating from the secularization of European society in the eighteenth century. He argues that modern political regimes are derived from the body politic of monarchism, under which the compact between constituted and constituent power was divinely sanctioned. As democratic revolts abolished divine monarchy, the locus of modern power became an empty place that could never be fully reoccupied. Previously united in the body of the monarch, constituent and constituted power became the two poles that define modern political discourse (Lefort, 1986; Schmitt, 2008). Agamben (1998) notes that under modern forms of political power, constituent and constituted power are intertwined in an unresolved dialectic in which the potentiality of a transformative populace ceaselessly opposes the actuality of established authority.

Constituent power is inevitably compelled to grapple with formalized rule. Dussel (2008) acknowledges that it is only through institutions that the mechanisms of governance can take on an organized form. He goes on to claim that constituted power is a “necessary imperfection” because it is both a constricting institutional space and the central reference point for the resolution of political disputes (Dussel, 2008: 45). In seeking to represent popular demands within an institutionalized regime, constitutions attempt to mediate between popular representation and the institutions of authority (Negri, 1999). Schmitt (2008) perceives the constitution as the binding mechanism between constituent and constituted power that makes up the modern state. Without a divine executive, the modern state is an ephemeral entity that relies on the codified legality of the constitution in order to ground itself in society. Constitutions are therefore living texts that seek to give form to disembodied power (Schmitt, 2008).

Formed by historically marginalized political subjects, the PT has been able to shed light on the way the Brazilian state perpetuates unequal and violent living conditions through both direct government policy and extrainstitutional privilege. The exclusionary functions of constituted power—the lack of civil liberties and free-market imperatives of dictatorial rule and the extralegal violence perpetrated by agents of the state—helped to shape the political subjectivity of the constituents who created the PT. In order to transform the unequal power paradigms of the Brazilian state, a diverse array of constituents came together to form the PT.

The PT therefore sought to ensure that the new democratic regime would be influenced by the voices of political subjects that had previously been excluded from the political process. Influenced by the party’s efforts, the 1988 Constitution was able to reestablish the institutional design of the Brazilian state on more egalitarian grounds (Nobre, 2008). In the interplay between transformative potential and authority, between popular mobilization and legality, the PT and the 1988 Constitution became bound to each other.

The PT and The 1987–1988 Constituent Assembly

During its first seven years of existence, the PT was mainly active outside of political institutions (Branford, 2015). As a radical party that rejected corporate financing and avoided alliances with mainstream political operatives, it struggled to achieve electoral relevance during the democratic transition (Keck, 2010). During the first open elections in 1982 and 1985 that initiated the democratic transition, the PT emphasized class struggle and never disguised its objective of achieving democratic socialism (Keck, 2010). The party performed poorly in both elections, electing eight members of Congress and two mayors in 1982 and only one mayor in 1985 (Branford, 2015).

The PT’s distance from formal political power in the 1980s identified its ethos as a radical, novel political experiment (Brandão, 2003). The party assumed an antagonistic position with regard to the controlled democratic transition being led by the military, its allied political party Aliança Renovadora Nacional (National Renewal Alliance—ARENA), and the formal opposition party Movimento da Democracia Brasileira (Brazilian Democracy Movement—MDB) (Brandão, 2003). The ARENA, the MDB, and the military had been the only legal channels of political expression during the dictatorship and agreed to transfer power to civilian government without any transitional justice for the dictatorship’s crimes (Nobre, 2008).

After José Sarney became president in 1985, the PT made persistent demands to make the democratic transition more inclusive. In a resolution published after the party’s national assembly in January 1985, the party demanded the annulment of the National Security Law and all other emergency decrees set up by the dictatorship (PT, 1985). Additionally, it called for the establishment of a sovereign constituent assembly to consolidate the democratic transition (PT, 1985). The Sarney government passed a law in November 1985 making the Congress responsible for writing the new constitution (Power, 2000). Critically, it was going to be written not by an independent body but by the agents of constituted power, which meant many of the senators and congressmen who were in place during the military dictatorship (Avritzer, 2016). Additionally, the structure of Brazil’s electoral regime ensured that the Congress that wrote the constitution would be dominated by conservative representatives from rural areas and that the electorate located in urban centers would be underrepresented (Avritzer, 2016).

In June 1986, PT delegates at the party’s fourth national assembly debated whether it should field candidates for the constituent assembly in light of the way the MDB had constricted the democratic transition (PT, 1986). With considerable experience as a union negotiator, Lula persuaded a majority of the delegates to participate in the constituent assembly. At the same time, the party issued a resolution affirming its commitment to democratic socialism and continued resistance to Sarney’s market-oriented economic policies (PT, 1986).

With its electoral support concentrated in urban centers, the PT elected 16 candidates to Congress, 3 percent of the chamber (Keck, 2010). Despite the difficulties that it faced with an unfair electoral system, the nature of the PT’s appeal was evident when Lula was elected to the constituent assembly with the most votes in the country (Keck, 2010). Voters also elected other prominent PT delegates, including the union leader Djalma Bom, the sociologist Florestan Fernandes, and the former guerrilla fighter José Genoino (Keck, 2010). The constitutive process was fundamentally determined by the MDB. The party controlled the presidency and all of the state governments except Sergipe’s (Avritzer, 2016). More important, 303 MDB delegates were elected to the assembly, making up 54 percent of its members and thereby ensuring the party’s absolute majority (Power, 2000). The MDB’s status as the only legal opposition during the dictatorship had enabled the party to build unrivaled electoral alliances on a national scale. It appointed its delegates and partisan allies to head all of the assembly’s commissions and ultimately held veto power over any constitutional proposal (Power, 2000).

The assembly’s first session took place on February 1, 1987. Under pressure from the PT, the regimental commission that was responsible for determining how the assembly was going to function approved various motions for popular participatory mechanisms. Commission sessions were open to the public, and citizens were able to submit their own amendments if they contained more than 30,000 signatures (Avritzer, 2017). Citizens submitted 122 amendments backed by more than 12 million signatures (Keck, 2010). In an effort to resist the MDB’s supremacy over the deliberative process, the PT became the only party in the assembly to write a full constitutional text. The PT’s version of the constitution was written by the jurist Fabio Konder Comparato (Lima, 2013). It sought to limit property rights, granted the state a full monopoly in companies important for national security, prohibited presidential reelection, maintained the presidentialist form of government, and abolished the Senate (Garcia, 1987). In proposing a unicameral Congress, the PT sought to strengthen the legislature’s policy-making powers.

The PT constitution was written as a direct repudiation of the assembly’s power dynamics. The party claimed that dividing the assembly into thematic commissions failed to address the fundamental problems of the distribution of political power (Garcia, 1987). The military dictatorship had established an overbearing executive power that none of the leading parties sought to dismantle (Limongi, 2008). The PT’s constitution was submitted on May 6, 1987, and immediately rejected by the systemization commission (Lima, 2013).

The political culture of Brazil’s new democracy was influenced by the confrontation in the assembly between the dominant conservative faction of the MDB and the left-leaning delegates. Nobre (2013) argues that the constituent assembly gave rise to a new political culture that he termed peemedebismo. The term arose from the alliance that the Sarney government and Ulysses Guimarães, the president of the constituent assembly and MBD leader, had formed with smaller conservative parties. The conservative alliance, which became known as the Centrão, clashed with the progressive wing of the MDB and the leftist parties in the assembly, including the PT. The progressive alliance tried and failed to pass constitutional provisions related to substantial land reform, parliamentarianism, and term limits (Nobre, 2013). Land reform was one of the PT’s top demands throughout the assembly, but the party’s attempt to authorize the expropriation of unproductive plots was easily defeated by the conservative coalition (PT, 1988b). Peemedebismo was thereafter firmly ingrained in the policy-making process and governance predicated on acquiescing to the conservative congressional contingent (Nobre, 2013). Crucially, it was not limited to the MDB itself but used by the numerous political parties vying for power (Nobre, 2013). It provided the opportunity for political parties to increase their electoral funds by taking over key government ministries and appointing political allies to state-owned companies (Nobre, 2013).

With the Centrão’s victory over the progressive contingent in the assembly, the final constitutional text was approved on October 5, 1988 (Avritzer, 2016). Despite conservative dominance, there was still consensus among the delegates on deepening democratic frameworks. The constitution made states responsible for the military police, gave municipalities greater authority over tax collection, created a national health service, enhanced the independence of the judiciary and of the Federal Prosecutor’s Office, and established participatory councils in the areas of health, urban reform, and social security (Avritzer, 2016; Gargarella, 2013; Nobre, 2008). The PT had unsuccessfully proposed constitutional provisions to reduce working hours, reform the education system, abolish obligatory military service, and curb the overrepresentation of rural communities in the electoral system (PT, 1988b). The codification of participatory councils was the only significant policy platform advocated by the PT to make it into the final text (PT, 1988b). Crucially, the 1988 Constitution reinforced the presidential supremacy put in place by the dictatorship (Gargarella, 2013; Limongi, 2008). The leading delegates of the constituent assembly were obsessed with the question of governability (Avritzer, 2017) and intent on empowering the legislative branch. However, with the hyperinflation crisis assailing the country at the time, they were also intent on maintaining a powerful executive branch that could respond quickly to crises (Abranches, 1988).

The combination of an executive empowered with legislative initiative and a multiparty Congress gave rise to coalitional presidentialism (Abranches, 1988). It is only in such a system that a political culture like peemedebismo can arise (Nobre, 2013). Coalitional presidentialism incentivizes a patronage-based system in which reaching the presidency becomes a means of distributing the spoils of government among partisan allies (Abranches, 1988). Consequently, the parties in Congress are constantly vying to ally themselves with the executive to increase their assets (Nobre, 2013). Governance becomes explicitly transactional as legislative actors demand material goods in exchange for support for the executive’s initiatives (Mello and Spektor, 2018). The constant transactions required to maintain coalitions in the Brazilian political system facilitate rampant corruption at the hands of political operatives who appropriate government funds for private ends (Mello and Spektor, 2018). Thus the centralization of authority in the presidency and the enhanced social rights codified in the constitution produced a paradoxical political environment in which egalitarian policies aiming to improve the lives of marginalized political subjects are enacted through patronage and graft.

The PT’s initial resistance to the operational logic produced by the 1988 Constitution exposed the contradictions of the new democratic regime. In July 1987, PT delegates voted in favor of the draft constitutional text in order to ensure that the new democratic framework could continue to be developed during a second round of assembly deliberations (PT, 1988a). Nonetheless, its delegates warned in a press release that the preliminary version of the constitution would maintain a system heavily centralized in the executive, which would in turn perpetuate injustice, impunity, and socioeconomic inequalities (PT, 1988a). Since the final text failed to change the presidentialist system, the PT decided to vote against the constitution. Even as it did so, however, it signed the final document as proof of the party’s participation in the constituent assembly (Keck, 2010). This decision lent credibility to the new democratic regime. The party’s critical posture toward dominant political actors did not stop it from supporting that regime. The PT and its constituents were fundamentally opposed to the conservative and centralized consensus of constituted power, but the party never relinquished its willingness to work alongside its adversaries in the new democratic order.

Social scientists emphasize Lula’s second-place finish in the 1989 presidential election as the definitive moment at which the PT became a national political force (Brandão, 2003; Keck, 2010). Despite having achieved poor electoral results in executive-level elections, defending a radical political platform, and lacking any financial support to run a national campaign, Lula almost reached the presidency (Keck, 2010). Nonetheless, prior to the 1989 election the PT’s actions in the constituent assembly were integral to making the party an influential political actor on the national level. It was during the constitutive process that the party had its foundational experience in national politics. Lula and his supporters learned how to build interparty coalitions and how to engage with their conservative adversaries (Keck, 2010). Additionally, it was during the assembly that the PT was able to bring its massive constituent strength into the formal political process.

Thus, the constituent assembly marked the moment at which the PT began to occupy positions within both constituted and constituent power. The party’s refusal to compromise on its radical positions further legitimized it in the eyes of its militant base. Simultaneously, its willingness to abide by the assembly’s procedures convinced its adversaries that the party was not a hostile extrainstitutional actor. Rather than an inscrutable adversary, the PT became a potential partner in the institutions of government. After its actions during the assembly, the PT was conclusively positioned within the formal paradigm of political power in Brazil.

June 2013 and Constituent Revolt

Throughout the 1990s, the PT became the leading opposition party by emphasizing transparency and ethics in government (Ribeiro, 2003). The party shifted from voting against the constitution in 1988 to defending it ardently during successive center-right Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (Social Democratic Party—PSDB) administrations (Nobre, 2008). At the time, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso issued 35 executive orders to alter constitutional amendments aimed at facilitating privatization (Gargarella, 2013). The PT unsuccessfully fought against the executive orders in Congress, but its willingness to protect the constitutional text signaled that it and many of its constituents had embraced the new democratic order (Nobre, 2008).

Since any significant political change under the 1988 Constitution is made by the president, the PT’s foundational imperative to combat Brazil’s socioeconomic inequality could only be fulfilled by gaining control of the executive branch (Limongi, 2008). This was accomplished with Lula’s election as president in 2002, his reelection in 2006, and Dilma Rousseff’s election in 2010 and 2014. The first 10 years of PT federal administrations saw an increase in the independence of the judiciary, greater utilization of participatory councils, and the elevation of marginalized demands in the federal policy-making process (Power, 2014). It was during that period that approximately 25 million people propelled themselves out of poverty with the help of the PT’s conditional cash transfer programs such as Bolsa Familia (de Castro, Koonings, and Wiesebron, 2014). The PT also created Fome Zero, a hunger alleviation program that eradicated starvation nationwide for the first time in Brazilian history (Abers, Serafim, and Tatagiba, 2014).

Nonetheless, dissecting the way these social welfare programs were passed into law sheds light on the PT’s problematic position within both constituent and constituted power. During Lula’s first two years as president, the PT governed through a minority coalition in Congress. Despite holding only 18 percent of congressional seats, the PT controlled 60 percent of Lula’s cabinet seats (Avritzer, 2016). Its control of such a large proportion of key government positions went against the rules of peemedebismo, wherein the executive is expected to reward its congressional allies with prominent ministries (Nobre, 2013). Instead, the PT orchestrated a vote-buying scheme known as the Mensalão in which the party would issue monthly bribes to members of Congress in order to pass its landmark proposals (Avritzer, 2016). When the Mensalão scandal broke in 2005, the PT was forced to reassess the composition of its government. Lula brought the MDB into his coalition in order to avoid the risk of impeachment and to boost his reelection chances in 2006 (Nobre, 2013). Thereafter, the MDB became increasingly prominent within the PT government, eventually being granted the vice presidency on the joint ticket with Rousseff in 2010 (Avritzer, 2016).

The PT’s advancement of social welfare policies increased its legitimacy within constituent power. Furthermore, its massive expansion of federal participatory councils continued its earlier efforts in municipal government to give constituents firsthand exposure to the policy-making process (Abers, Serafim, and Tatagiba, 2014). Simultaneously, the party perpetuated the transactional imperatives of coalitional presidentialism for the sake of governability. It is therefore impossible to assess the PT’s advancement of historic social welfare programs without acknowledging the political logic that made it possible. The party improved the material conditions of Brazil’s poorest and opened direct access to popular participation in government while bolstering the transactional political culture of peemedebismo.

Critically, during the first decade of PT federal administrations, the transactional nature of Brazilian political culture increasingly came into conflict with popular demands for greater transparency and an end to the impunity of public officials. The implementation of innovative egalitarian policies by the PT was incapable of curbing the political system’s dependency on graft and patronage (Mello and Spektor, 2018). As a consequence, the constituted regime became increasingly unable to fulfill constituent expectations.

Rousseff was inaugurated in January 2011 with no prior experience in elected office (Power, 2014). She also lacked internal support within the PT, having joined the party only in 2000. She inherited the MDB coalition from Lula and came to rely on that coalition to make up for her lack of negotiating ability (Power, 2014). Lula’s modus operandi since his union days was centered on mediating opposing forces (Keck, 2010). In contrast, Rousseff did not negotiate; she either won or lost (Avritzer, 2016). While she depended on the MDB to ensure governability, she positioned herself as an anti-peemedebismo figure seeking alternative pathways to efficient governance that did not involve rampant corruption (Nobre, 2013).

During the first two years of the Rousseff government, her public approval ratings remained high and Congress was willing to comply with her agenda (Nobre, 2013). In 2013, however, her government failed to appease public discontent over deficient public services (Santos, 2014). Simultaneously, the social movements that had previously provided unconditional support to the PT were increasingly disillusioned by the party’s market-oriented policy platform (Alonso, 2017). Furthermore, the end of a long commodities boom caused the economy to contract and unemployment to rise (Saad-Filho, 2013). Entrenched in constituted power, the PT became increasingly isolated, unable to tap into its constituency to deal with the challenges it was facing as the ruling party. Meanwhile, the rampant corruption perpetuated by peemedebismo became an increasing source of public discontent (Nobre, 2013).

The first public expressions of discontent with the political order occurred in São Paulo on June 6 with the Movimento Passe Livre (Free Transport Movement—MPL), a nonpartisan organization mobilizing against a 20-cent increase in public transport fares (Saad-Filho, 2013). The military police responded violently to the peaceful rally, which provoked thousands to join MPL rallies over the course of the following week (Santos, 2014). Protests broke out throughout the country amid intensified media coverage of the MPL rallies and continued police repression (Alonso, 2017). Over the following days, constituent demands were no longer centered on the increase in transport fares. While the protests quickly incorporated a wide array of political agendas, the central demand was political reform (Alonso, 2017). Constituents from both the left and the right of the political spectrum decried a crisis of representation (Alonso, 2017; Taylor, 2016). In contrast to previous popular mobilizations that had either been led or supported by the PT and its allied social movements, the June 2013 protests were dominated by members of the middle class who had never voted for the PT and were ready to turn the party into the principal target of public disgust (Singer, 2013). The fact that a party that had been dedicated to transparent, participatory governance had embraced the patronage-based political system helped to galvanize the millions who marched in June 2013.

The protests reached their peak on June 20, when 1.4 million people marched in 130 cities, forcing Rousseff to cancel a trip to Japan (G1.com, 2013). Since the protests lacked a central organizing authority, no one knew what would come next. Speaking to the nation on live TV on June 21 (Portal do Planalto, 2013), she attempted to sympathize with the public dissatisfaction and insisted that her government was going to maintain public order. During the climactic days of the June demonstrations, she recognized the need to mediate between incipient constituent power and increasingly illegitimate constituted power. After her public address failed to stop the demonstrations, Rousseff called a meeting of her cabinet, all 27 state governors, and the mayors of the country’s largest cities on June 24 (Agencia Brasil, 2013). With the media filming the meeting, the first point brought forward by the president was a proposal to hold a constituent assembly (Nogueira, 2013). The proposal consisted of a plebiscite to be held in September 2013 in which voters would choose whether to establish a sovereign body to write a new constitution (Singer, 2013). This proposal came in response to a petition submitted by social movements allied with the PT during the June protests that gathered 7.4 million signatures demanding a constituent assembly (Locatelli, 2014).

The constituent assembly proposed by Rousseff was aimed specifically at reforming laws relating to campaign finance, the electoral system, senatorial surrogates, interparty coalitions, and secret votes in Congress (Nobre, 2013). It therefore sought to dismantle the entire transactional structure of coalitional presidentialism. The proposal was instantly criticized by preeminent jurists, who claimed that a constituent assembly would have to rewrite the entire constitution and not just focus on particular policy areas (Oliveira, 2013). More important, members of the Rousseff government, including Vice President Michel Temer, immediately rejected the proposal and made it clear that the MDB contingent in Congress would never approve a plebiscite on holding a constituent assembly (Avritzer, 2016). The party that had dominated the constitution-making process in 1988 had no intention of relinquishing its influence over the policy-making process.

On the following day, Rousseff sent her minister of justice, José Eduardo Cardozo, to declare that the administration was not advocating a constituent assembly but merely wanted to gauge public sentiment toward political reform (Locatelli, 2014). Unlike other new left parties throughout Latin America that had effectively turned public disgust with the state into a transformational constitutional project, the PT was afraid of hinging its future electoral prospects on a project of substantial political reform. The government failed to recognize that the June revolt was a decisive expression of the crisis of legitimacy of the political system (Nogueira, 2013).

Rousseff’s attempt to create a constituent assembly magnified the PT’s conflicting positions within constituted and constituent power. The fact that her proposal was so quickly and so emphatically rejected by her coalition demonstrated that the PT’s origins as a radical transformational party remained an element to be feared. In the eyes of the white upper-class members of the Centrão, the PT remained a party with the potential to radically mobilize against the status quo. Despite having led the national government for over a decade, the PT was still seen as an anomaly within the partisan system (Nogueira, 2013; Singer, 2013). In order to prevent the PT from recovering its radical constitutive strength, Rousseff’s congressional coalition refused to comply with her plebiscite proposal.

Dismayed at the institutional failure to initiate political reform, members of over 400 social movements led by several groups tied to the PT came together in September 2014 for an informal plebiscite on whether to hold a constituent assembly (Silva Júnior and Sousa Júnior, 2017). These social movements still supported the PT in elections but were highly critical of the party’s inability to lead a process of constitutional change (Silva Junior and Sousa Junior, 2017). By holding the informal plebiscite, the PT’s constituents openly repudiated Rousseff’s failure to formally explore institutional pathways toward writing a new constitution. Approximately 5 percent of the electorate (7.7 million) voted in the informal plebiscite, with 97 percent voting in favor of a constituent assembly (Maretti, 2014).

Meanwhile, within formal constituted power, the impetus for political reform was quickly undermined by the Centrão. All attempts to codify significant reform, including a curb on the creation of political parties and attempts to make all congressional votes public, were shelved by Congress (Silva Junior and Souza Junior, 2017). With her failure to institute political reform, Rousseff’s approval ratings plummeted. At 80 percent at the beginning of the year, after the June protests they collapsed to less than 30 percent (Saad-Filho, 2013). She was able to win reelection in an extremely close contest against the PSDB’s Aecio Neves in 2014, but the PT’s failure to act on the demands of its constituent base and Rousseff’s repudiation of peemedibismo damaged her ability to govern (Taylor, 2016).

Thus the June 2013 protests and the failed plebiscite proposal marked the point at which the PT could no longer maintain the uneasy consensus that had allowed it to become the leading national political force. The advancement of inclusive social welfare policies within a political system centered on distributing spoils was no longer a viable mode of governance for the party. From 2013 on, the PT’s relationship to the Centrão gradually deteriorated. Frustrated at the MDB’s rejection of her reform proposals and with growing calls for her impeachment in Congress, Rousseff sidelined Temer and his allies from all decision making in government (Santos and Guarnieri, 2016). Having previously distanced herself from Lula, Rousseff increasingly relied on the former president to attempt to rescue the PT’s floundering alliances.

The breakdown in the PT’s adherence to peemedebismo was highlighted in the party’s vote against Eduardo Cunha in a congressional ethics committee in 2015. Cunha was the president of the lower house of Congress at the time and the ethics committee was determining whether he should lose his congressional seat after he was found to hold an offshore bank account in which bribes were deposited (Santos and Guarnieri, 2016). Cunha had offered to shelve all impeachment proceedings against Rousseff in exchange for PT votes in his favor in the ethics committee. However, the party refused to comply (Santos and Guarnieri, 2016). In contrast to the situation in 2009, when Lula ordered PT senators to reject corruption charges against the Senate president José Sarney, abiding by Centrão politicking was no longer an imperative for the party (Avritzer, 2016; Hunter, 2010). Cunha responded to the PT’s vote against him in the ethics committee by leading the lower chamber in impeaching Rousseff (Alonso, 2017).

While the June 2013 plebiscite proposal attempted to resurrect the PT’s innovative initiatives in the 1987–1988 constituent assembly, the party lacked its previous programmatic vision. The PT had submitted a constitutional text of its own in 1987, which displayed an ambitious and comprehensive political agenda (Keck, 2010). When the June 2013 protests erupted, the Rousseff government proposed a constituent assembly without an ample policy agenda for constitutional change (Nogueira, 2013). Even with over 7 million people formally calling for constitutional change, the party was unable to reignite its mass appeal. Ensconced in constituted power, the PT was unable to replicate its transformative vision of 1987–1988.

Conclusion

In examining the PT’s actions during the 1987–1988 constitutional assembly and the June 2013 protests, I have sought to examine the dual movement of constituent and constituted power, the conflicting political forces that have determined the party’s historical trajectory. The PT’s advocacy of subaltern demands during the 1987–1988 constituent assembly and its gradual acceptance of the constitution helped to consolidate the new democratic regime (Nobre, 2008). While in government, the PT’s implementation of poverty alleviation programs and its establishment of participatory councils helped to solidify the compact between constituents and the state. The PT initially navigated the institutional tensions of Brazilian constitutionalism to maintain political stability and provide material improvements to the lives of millions of citizens.

Nevertheless, constituent demands for institutional transparency and entrenched constituted impunity manifested themselves on an unprecedented scale in June 2013 (Tatagiba, 2014). In proposing a plebiscite on a new constituent assembly, the Rousseff government unearthed the transformative potential of the PT. However, the government’s failure to lead a process of constitutional change confirmed that the PT had become dependent on its congressional coalition and could no longer mobilize its radical constituent origins. In failing to lead a process of political reform, the PT distanced itself from its voter base and helped to exacerbate the crisis of legitimacy of the political system.

The PT’s history is marked by sharp fluctuations in its electoral performances and in its governance agenda (Singer, 2013). Simultaneously, the party has constantly had to reassess its policies regarding the constituted distribution of political power in Brazil. While scholars have neglected the PT’s policies regarding Brazilian constitutionalism, I have argued that the party has been shaped by the formative moments of 1987–1988 and June 2013. It has helped to strengthen novel pathways toward constituent participation in political life and contributed to the corrupt, exclusionary political culture of institutionalized rule. Just as the party has never been fully representative of constituent power, it has also never been able to control all the mechanisms of the state. Its dual positionality as a product of constituent power immersed in constituted power makes it a unique and essential object of study for understanding Brazil’s political institutions since the democratic transition.

Since June 2013, the constitution has become the central battleground of the conflict between constituent and constituted power in Brazil. From intensified public discontent against political representatives to the ongoing disputes between the three branches of government to elected officials’ openly repudiating democratic norms, all the contemporary political struggles in the country are influenced by the distribution of power enshrined in 1988. Brazilian constitutionalism has faced unprecedented challenges at the same time as the PT’s electoral power has eroded. As the PT stumbles from one political setback to the next, its actions in 1988 and 2013 continue to reverberate.

Ultimately, the distribution of political power is currently being challenged both by institutional actors and by a dissatisfied populace. For the PT, its initial resistance, gradual adherence, and eventual inability to reform the 1988 Constitution have weakened the party’s position within both constituent and constituted power. In the process, the dissonance between constituent and constituted power has expanded, engulfing both the PT and the viability of the democratic order.