Compulsory deliberation: Variations in stability between South African and Brazilian economic councils

Why do some public-private deliberation bodies survive multiple antagonistic governments while others dissolve at the slightest hint of reticence? The current doctoral dissertation tackles this question by comparing the trajectories of South African and Brazilian economic councils to explain why, despite similar conditions, the latter have been much more stable than the former. Economic councils are deliberative bodies where the government engages with other social segments, such as labor and business, in talks over policy. Brazil has displayed a persistent pattern of serial replacement, where each council lasts for only a few years, a period after which a new one is created. On the other hand, South Africa broke out of a similar pattern with the creation of the National Economic Development and Labour Council (NEDLAC) in 1994, whose structure has remained largely unaltered despite governmental pressures. This variation is interesting because the cases do not differ in theoretically acknowledged conditions. Merging comparative law and historical analysis approaches, I propose that the variation depends on what I call compulsory deliberation institutions i.e., legal institutions that limit governments capacity to unilaterally dictate the terms of engagement within deliberative bodies. Uniquely, they empower non-State actors to block change to parts of the Executives structure against governmental preferences. The creation or not of these institutions diverged due to differences in the timing of union mobilization for securing policy influence. Whereas South African unions seized the window of opportunity provided by the democratic transition to compel the government to create a council resistant to unilateral action, Brazilian unions missed the corresponding chance by turning to councils only after political and macroeconomic stabilization. In turn, the presence or absence of compulsory deliberation institutions has generated self-reinforcing sequences of opposing directions. While the NEDLAC became an increasingly routinized feature of South African politics as governments accepted that they could not reform the council unilaterally, the repeated replacement of Brazilian councils periodically reinforces shared negative expectations about the bodies, locking actors in an instability trap. (AU)