Collective action and political authority: Rural workers, church, and state in Brazil

Abstract

This article explores how new political actors form and reproduce themselves within societies’ most vulnerable sectors, those marginalized from the state’s authoritative decision-making centers. It explores this question in national settings that characterize much of the contemporary world ^ that is, settings marked by high levels of political con£ict over basic parameters of the political system and hence by signi¢cant institutional change. Dominant theories of collective action, such as those rooted in rational choice, political process, and ‘‘new social movements’’ literatures, are based on the experience of relatively stable Western democracies. 1 This article suggests that such theories may not travel well to regions where key background conditions, such as the stability of institutional arrangements that link state and society, do not hold. It develops an approach to collective action that theorizes the impact of high levels of con£ict over national patterns of political authority ^ that is, over the boundaries and nature of the state and national political regime ^ on the formation and reproduction of new political actors.This‘‘authority-centered’’approach understands the interaction between political elites and politically marginalized groups to be central to actor formation. It suggests that this interaction is shaped by historically contingent con¢gurations of three sets of factors: (a) the level of intra-elite con£ict over the pattern of political authority, (b) the relative strength of a group’s social base, and (c) the nature of the structural and political linkages that bind state and society. The analytic value of this approach is nicely illustrated by the formation and reproduction of the Rural Workers’ Union Movement (Movimento Sindical dos Trabalhadores Rurais), the principal political representative of peasants, small farmers, and rural wage laborers in Brazil, during the 1964^1989 period.The rural workers’ movement claimed to