On Friday, October 7th, we were kindly welcomed into the office of Associate Research Fellow Benjamin Bradlow, a progressive faculty member in the Sociology Department who Jimmy Tarlau connected us to following his visit to campus a week prior. With the conclusion of the first-round of the Brazilian Election and the imminence of the second round on October 30th, 2022, we were eager to get Mr. Bradlow’s input on the political atmosphere of Brazil.
“The PT is a really interesting case for people on the left to understand about the role of political parties in pursuing redistributive change,” Bradlow began, going on to explain the background of the PT as an organization and the many tendencies that came together to form the coalition. “The PT is a multi-tendency party because there was this idea when they formed the party that it should be a party of the workers and not just a party that speaks on the behalf of workers that doesn’t come from the workers.”
“Traditionally, organized labor was very integrated into a very hierarchical relationship with political parties in Brazil that really removed a lot of the independent organizing and political voice of unions themselves. During the military dictatorship in Brazil from the mid-60s to the mid-80s, a new kind of labor leadership emerged in São Paulo and some of the suburban municipalities around São Paulo, particularly among metal workers mainly working in auto factories. Lula was the key, the main leader, who emerged from there.”
“There was also in much of South America and, including in Brazil, in urban peripheral slums of São Paulo, an ideological tendency of the Catholic Church known as liberation theology, which linked poor people’s struggles to religious life in a way that was very powerful. There was an organizational unit that emerged there that was called ecclesiastical base communities. At the same time, there were new intellectual currents in the universities and cultural groups that formed. These were the three key parts of the left, forming the basis of organizing for democracy.”
Fascinated by this multi-tendency approach to organizing, we asked how these diverse groups were brought together into a single party. “Lula is a very unique figure in world history, because he, as a person, expresses a charisma that itself, …has integrated a lot of these different tendencies that went into the formation of the PT,” Bradlow responded.
“Charisma is always very important in politics,” Bradlow added, “particularly electoral politics, but has some bad aspects because individual charisma can often end up stifling organizational growth and change which is necessary for persisting over time.”
With this history in mind, Bradlow gave us his analysis of Brazil’s current electoral situation. Although Lula was in first place, there was a larger gap in the polls between Lula and Bolsonaro than expected, leading to a planned run off to take place on October 30th, 2022.
“Lula missed winning the first round by about 1.5%. In that sense he did quite well. It’s the closest that any presidential candidate has come to winning the first round in a Brazilian election since democratization.”
“But,” Bradlow added, “it’s absolutely true that Bolsonaro did better than people were expecting based on the polls. Not only that, but all of his allies did very well in congressional and gubernatorial races across the country, much better than people were expecting.”
“This does bring up the polling issue, which is familiar to people in the US as well, that there is clearly something about the contemporary right wing and polls. Pollsters don’t understand how to capture it. One seemingly viable explanation is that people on the right just don’t want to participate in polls…”
“One thing that was curious about Bolsonaro’s election in 2018, was that a key swing group that supported him and put him over the top was the urban peripheries. The same urban peripheries in the large cities of the southeast that had been the key for the formation of the PT, the rise of the PT in its early electoral wins, weren’t voting overwhelmingly for Bolsonaro but was a key swing area. This means that the margins are shifting.”
However, Bradlow wasn’t sure how the urban peripheries would vote in the upcoming runoff. “It’s unclear how to read the urban peripheries in this election,” Bradlow explained. “There’s some evidence from the first round that maybe in some of the key cities, the urban peripheries are returning to the PT, but we’ll have to see, as it’s a bit hard to compare with the previous election. We also know that Bolsonaro is increasing his margins in big agricultural areas of the interior of Brazil, in some of the very rich areas of the south and southeast.”
“To me, it’s 50/50 whether Lula wins in the next round. He has obviously a shorter margin than Bolsonaro to make up. However, the congressional gubernatorial results show that there’s a massive, increasingly institutionalized support for the new right in Brazil.”
We were also interested to know more about how Bradlow came to academia and the research for his latest book, Urban Power.
“I had worked in urban organizing and housing politics for a number of years primarily in South Africa. Before I started my PhD, I was working with a network of organization-based informal settlements primarily in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America called Slum Dwellers International.”
Bradlow’s experience in this organization is what initially attracted him to completing a master’s in City Planning at MIT: “[Urban planners] seem[ed] like they [were] an important part of the picture to building more equal cities,” he explained.
Bradlow continued, “I went back to South Africa after doing the masters, and then when I decided to do a PhD, I knew I wanted to compare South Africa with somewhere, but I didn’t really know where. And in the early days of my doctorate, I started reading about Brazil and realized that there were a lot of interesting similarities with South Africa.”
“In particular,” he noted, “there were similarities in terms of how unequal the countries and the cities are. And what sociologists would call the social basis for democratization in both countries, had a lot of similarities. In both countries, you had new independent trade unions, urban movements, basically neighborhood movements and, in some cases, citywide movements that were oriented around what I call urban public goods, things like housing sanitation, affordable rent, basic services transportation.
Bradlow also highlighted the importance of the strong leftwing political parties in both nations, the African National Congress in South Africa, and the Worker’s Party (PT) in Brazil. “As I dug deeper into the comparison,” Bradlow continued, “I realized that the largest city in each country which was kind of like the hotbed of social organizing for democracy, Johannesburg and South Paulo, started at very similar positions. I was looking particularly at housing, sanitation, and transportation.” Despite their similar starting points, Bradlow found that São Paulo experienced a better outcome in the distribution of public goods since its democratization when compared to Johannesburg.
Dr. Bradlow wrote his PhD dissertation based around this concept, and his first book further dives into this topic along with the relationship between local bureaucrats and local political movements: “I look at the way that movements not only influence the political will or desire of local government to make a change,” Bradlow elaborated, “but these are contexts where you actually have to build a lot of new capacity within local government to actually deliver changes in the distribution of these kinds of public goods on the ground. So, I look at not just the state-society relationship, that is the relationship between movements and local government, but how local government itself actually changes internally to deliver on the kinds of demands that movements are making.”
We then asked Dr. Bradlow to sketch out the framework of his theory on the conditions within a city that are best for delivering public goods based on the comparison between South Africa and Brazil: “In urban politics and urban sociology, there’s a sun around which all of the other actors are revolving, which is the power of real estate. We know that real estate in the large modern metropolis can command a great deal of attention and resources from local government. The question is, to what degree can other kinds of forces generate a countervailing power within the city?”
Bradlow found that strong citywide social movements are what presented such a force. “These are movements that aren’t just existing in a single neighborhood, but they’re federated and connected across the city that make demands for new kinds of policies that are going to distribute more housing and regularized land, so that you can deliver public services like sanitation.”
“In São Paulo,” Bradlow continued, “you actually have cases where many of the movements end up inside the government. It’s not just that they’re demanding from the outside but they say, ‘we actually need some of our people in [government] to make sure that these new programs that we’ve been demanding really do what we want them to do.’”
Bradlow contrasts this situation with Johannesburg, explaining that “even though you had a strong alliance between movements and a key political party in the struggle against apartheid after democratization, the ANC government basically said to movements, it’s time to stand down and demobilize. The state is going to deliver on everything that we promise.”
According to Bradlow’s theory, low participation of such social movements in government has been very detrimental to such movements. “[T]he consequence of that is that you have very weak movements that are only organized… in a particular neighborhood or even a particular street and the kinds of things that they demand are just securing specific benefits for their neighborhood. There’s not a kind of programmatic policy generation that emerges from the interaction between movements in the local state, like we see in São Paulo.”
From these conditions Bradlow finds in São Paulo and Johannesburg, he concludes that “movements are not only about generating political will, but they’re about building new state capacities and in building new state capacities that also produces a context in which movements can continue to organize at a large enough scale that they can continue making new programmatic demands.”
Maryam and I were interested to know why Bradlow chose to focus on cities as opposed to the state or national level, to which he replied, “[O]ne thing I try to be very careful about is not studying a city in isolation from these larger scales. Cities are a just context where there’s a very specific set of administrative tools.”
“In a lot of the world,” Bradlow continued, “cities are a unique bureaucratic administrative context. There’s a lot of variation between them. From a social scientific perspective, I think there’s a lot to be gained by looking at that variation particularly in highly unequal contexts which are kind of like the most difficult cases for thinking about how you might generate more equal distribution of resources, that we all think, or we all know are extremely important.”
Lastly, we wanted to know how Bradlow felt about his research as an avenue for providing research to advance progressive causes, to which he replied,
“If you find your work at odds or supporting your beliefs, this is always a really fraught question for social science researchers… The kind of work that I am pursuing is a mode of inquiry which is certainly along the lines of what we would commonly call comparative positivist social science. There’s a research question, there’s a set of hypotheses for explaining the answer to that question, and there’s a way of testing which is the right answer.
However, the kinds of questions that we ask in social science always have a lot of political implications, no matter what,” Bradlow explained, “particularly for those of us who are concerned with anything that has to do with the distribution of resources in society. By that, I mean if we’re asking about the kinds of social groups that impact changes in inequality, this kind of work will inevitably have implications for political strategy.
The fact of the matter is for those of us who study the role of movements, in order to do that, you end up in relationships with people who are in movements, but you certainly do not as a researcher have to merely regurgitate whatever somebody in a movement is telling you is the truth.
There’s certainly a scientific endeavor about sociological work, but I don’t think you can ever say that this is separate from questions of political strategy for inequality. I think many sociologists would say that various forms of inequality are at the heart of what sociology is all about.”
Benjamin Bradlow is an Associate Research Scholar in Princeton University’s Department of Sociology and a Lecturer for the School of Public and International Affairs. In Spring 2023, Dr. Bradlow is set to teach the courses Sociology of Climate Change and Global Urban Political Economy at Princeton. He may be reached at bhbradlow@princeton.edu.
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