In this presentation, Oswaldo Amaral (Political Science, Unicamp) presents his research that seeks to understand how two countries that experienced, at similar times, authoritarian regimes and fluctuations in their economic performance ended up developing consistently different levels of support for democracy from their transition processes in the 1980s.

The central argument is that the different processes of transition to democracy in the two countries produced different institutional arrangements around policies of reparation and memory of authoritarian regimes as well as different possibilities of political interference by the Armed Forces in democratic periods.

The presentation analyses in comparative perspective surveys conducted in the 1960s and 1980s by different projects and research institutes in both countries; the longitudinal series of opinion polls produced by Latinobarómetro as far back as the 1990s; and data relating to the performance of the economy.