Clientelist systems vary, and this variation influences the adoption and evolution of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programmes. We find that vertically integrated, corporatist clientelism in Mexico and more locally oriented, bossist clientelism in Brazil differentially shape the choices of governments to turn piecemeal, discretionary CCTs into more expansive and secure benefits.

A B S T R A C TPeople enact democracy when they undermine their customary speech forms. This is evident in a small municipality in rural northeastern Brazil, where village-dwelling cultivators and town activists are abandoning the practice of displaying electoral propaganda on their private homes because it evokes the shrill voices of domineering politicians and haranguing neighbors. An analysis of local associations among propaganda images, unpleasant voices, and broader genres of political communication finds that the widespread abandonment of propaganda images dramatizes the tension between liberal and illiberal imaginings of democracy in contemporary Brazil. [democracy, discourse, Brazil, liberalism, clientelism, patronage]

In this article, I explain the unfolding of a participatory development project in northeast Brazil by exploring how local genres of public speech articulate with categories of wealth. Although development resources cannot be easily categorized into local classes of wealth, they nonetheless evoke some of the anxieties cultivators feel when dealing with wealth forms susceptible to the evil eye. Beliefs surrounding the evil eye shape cultivators' relations to material objects, and they also define the contours of safe and acceptable speech within the village development association. As a result, during association meetings, the villagers speak in ways that frustrate development agents seeking to generate “open” and “transparent” managerial discourse felicitous to project success—at least, external notions of project success. Appreciating the link between wealth and speech forms sheds light on both the local implementation challenges that participants in such projects face and the reason development agents frequently blame ostensive project failures on beneficiary backwardness. [wealth, Brazil, development, evil eye, peasant society]

This essay analyses the 2016 congressional impeachment of Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff, for alleged budgetary misconduct, as well as the related right-wing, 'anti-corruption' demonstrations calling for her ouster. I argue that Rousseff's impeachment was facilitated by a conflation of two models of 'corruption' operating in Brazil, one legal-behavioural and the other religious-ontological. What happened in 2016 was a tacit conflation of these two models, along with their associated regimes for construing evidence of guilt. More specifically, congressional deliberations on Rousseff's guilt allowed jurisprudential standards of evidence to be influenced by the evidential regime of the right-wing Fora Dilma ('Out Dilma') demonstrators. The demonstrators evinced Rousseff's corruption through a semiotic process I term 'cross-domain homology', a process that I claim is intrinsically dangerous for democracy because it invites a state of exception to the norms girding representative institutions. The concept of corruption leads a double life, both a secular, jurisprudential existence and a religious existence. In both realms, its life is abstract, but only in its legal sense can corruption, defined as the 'abuse of entrusted power for private gain', be operationalised as discrete misdeeds. 1 Such jurisprudential accusations of corruption lead to fact-finding procedures for assessing actions in violation of specific statutes. Alternatively, accusations of corruption that assume a quasi-religious (a non-denominational though vaguely Christian) valence, cannot be proven or disproven by facts concerning behaviour. This quasi-religious form of corruption inheres in what people are, rather than what they do, and so one is accused not so much of violating a law but rather of being a fallen person, one whose soul is in a reprehensible state. What I hope to show is that these two models of corruption, and their associated evidential regimes, can get mixed up in practice as the de jure legal model of corruption becomes a de facto 'secular avatar' of the religious model of corruption guiding institutional action (Anders and Nuitjen

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