How democratic police reform fails: case studies on obstacles to institutional change in Brazil’s Military Police forces
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2025
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Machado, Marta Rodriguez de Assis
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This dissertation examines obstacles to institutional change in police organizations, addressing why and how democratic police reform (DPR) tends to fail. Drawing on the Brazilian experience of repeated efforts to reform the Military Police forces since the country’s redemocratization in 1988, it aims to shed light on the complex causal processes that lead to failed DPR. It also seeks to contribute to law and development, interest group research, and institutional change theory by emphasizing public security as a critical domain for understanding how resistance to reform unfolds. This study develops an analytical framework to investigate DPR failure as a dynamic process shaped by the interplay between reform strategies, sociopolitical circumstances, and police organizational interests, the latter of which assumes different configurations depending on the political-institutional arenas mobilized by the reform effort. Through a comparative case study approach, this study analyzes two contrasting examples considered representative of their respective reform types: the Proposal for Constitutional Amendment (Proposta de Emenda à Constituição, PEC) 51/2013, a structural federal-level reform bill that never progressed beyond congressional debates, and the Pacifying Police Units (Unidades de Polícia Pacificadora, UPPs), an incremental state-level public security program that advanced to implementation but ultimately did not achieve its democratic policing goals. By examining both cases, this study seeks to illuminate the common factors that lead to failed outcomes in both structural and incremental DPRs in Brazil. The analysis revealed how internal divisions within the police give rise to various groups that leverage partial control over the state’s coercive resources to create “armed vetoes” against institutional reform. This study introduces the concept of “police pluralism” to describe this fragmentation of police into competing interest groups that act primarily by blocking change. In the case of PEC 51/2013, this dynamic resulted in a legislative deadlock and, simultaneously, internal pressure within the executive that hindered government support for the bill. In the case of the UPPs, reformers used executive autonomy to craft flexible provisions that could be adapted to multiple interest groups. However, this flexibility ultimately allowed resistant actors to undermine the reform, underscoring the limitations of incremental approaches in contexts of police pluralism.