The debate about governance in Brazil has been one of the most productive in the study of comparative political institutions. The central question in this debate is whether a presidential democracy with a multiparty system could generate stable and effective governments. On one side, following Juan Linz's thesis on the “perils of presidentialism,” scholars like Scott Mainwaring and Barry Ames have argued that since Brazil's political system exhibited the “difficult combination” of multipartism and presidentialism, the country's nascent democracy was likely to soon find itself mired in legislative deadlock, ideological polarization, and political instability. On the other side, scholars like Octavio Amorim Neto, Argelina Figueiredo, Fernando Limongi, and Fabiano Santos have contended that presidents were able to form stable and fairly disciplined pro-government coalitions in Congress and had decree, veto, and agenda powers strong enough to make and sustain unilateral decisions when needed. In the course of this debate, new concepts have been created and new topics generated. Ames coined the “reverse coattails effect” to describe how local political machines drove outcomes in presidential elections and thus strengthened the power of municipal bosses over legislators and decision-making in the national arena. Sergio Abranches introduced the term “coalitional presidentialism” to define Brazil's political regime as a presidential democracy in which coalition governments were the only game in town. Amorim Neto, Figueiredo, Limongi, Carlos Pereira, and Timothy Power showed how government by decree could be efficiently combined with cabinet politics to form stable and effective legislative coalitions. Fernando Abrucio, Ames, Marcus Melo, and David Samuels demonstrated how the open list proportional representation electoral system enabled the influence of local elites on national arenas and simultaneously shaped their political ambitions in ways that facilitated the use of budgetary politics by presidents as tools to build both Congressional and electoral coalitions.

Making Brazil Work pulls together all the threads of this protracted debate and produces new and important contributions that confirm the relevance of the Brazilian case as a laboratory for the advancement of comparative politics. Carlos Pereira and Marcus André Melo sink their teeth into the discussion by recounting the evidence from both sides and arguing that the pessimistic view inspired by Linz's critique of presidentialism has proved to be unfounded. After the demise of Fernando Collor in 1992, Brazilian presidents have not only survived in office but were reelected and managed to pass important policy reforms through Congress that helped them stabilize and govern the economy, as well as significantly change social policy and social structure. The authors show how the interdependence of central features of constitutional design and legal capacity helped presidents achieve these outcomes: Forming cabinets with high coalescence, that proportionally rewarded parties for the share of seats they brought to the legislative majority, typically paid off in terms of support for the president and the government's agenda; but when no such cabinets could be assembled, or discipline within coalition members failed, the strong decree, veto, and budgetary powers enabled presidents to obtain the votes they needed from other parties—if not to simply drive their own coalition members back into cooperation. This allows them to explain not only the successful cases of governance, but also the failures and—even more crucially—the learning process that may lead from failure to success, as their detailed critique of Lula's first disproportionate cabinet points out. Thus building both on previous scholarship and on their own empirical contributions, Melo and Pereira strengthen the case for the optimistic view of Brazilian governance: Presidential democracy can work in Brazil because the political system gives the president tools not only to counterbalance the effects of multipartism but also to profit from it.

But this book is not a mere recount of the debate on Brazil; it makes a new, substantial contribution. It shows how the success of coalitional presidentialism is grounded on the strength and effectiveness of checks and balances. The authors make a straightforward theoretical point: Checks on presidential power need to be as strong as that power for coalitional presidentialism to produce stable and effective governments; otherwise, the tools with which presidents build and maintain their coalitions could be easily employed to undermine the democratic regime by concentrating power on the presidency. Melo and Pereira then proceed to identify those checks and balances, and to measure their effectiveness. In this they profit from the fact that Brazil's federalism constitutes a laboratory of coalitional presidentialism—insofar as the same regime type exists throughout its 27 states—and from cutting-edge statistical techniques to capture the nuances of subnational variation. Focusing on the work of audit courts and independent regulatory agencies at the state level, the authors show that the higher the electoral competition and the smaller the size of gubernatorial majorities, the more likely that regulatory agencies are insulated from political influence, and that audit courts hold governors accountable for budgetary deviations. Based on these original findings, the authors propose a thesis that radicalizes their view of Brazilian governance: that the very strong competition and fragmentation that characterizes Brazilian party politics—the same factor on which the pessimistic view of Brazilian democracy was predicated—is the driver of the effective checks and balances that prevent presidents from becoming elective dictators.

This thesis, compelling as its supporting evidence may be, suffers though from two important weaknesses: It dwells only on state level data, and it pays no attention to the timing of legislative action on audit reports. Budgetary and regulatory audits at the national level are also frequent and technically consistent, but legislative action on them is not: The Federal Congress only considered audit reports on budgetary execution after the terms of the presidents (Cardoso, Lula) who had executed those budgets had ended, and invariably validated their budgetary execution practices despite auditory objections. Checks and balances at the federal level thus seem to stop before looking into how the wheels of decision-making are greased. And conversely, the authors provide no evidence at the state level of correlation, let alone causation, between effective checks and effective governments in terms of policy activism and survival. Future research will tell whether these diverse patterns invalidate this book's thesis, or the number of cases of deviant cases is simply not enough to counter the strength of its findings. In any event, this critique should not shy readers from acknowledging that Melo and Pereira convincingly make the case for closing the debate on Brazil's governance: Their work empirically demonstrates that stable and effective governments do exist in multiparty presidential democracies not in spite of their defining features, but because of them.