Pandemia e erosão da democracia constitucional: uma análise dos ataques à transparência no brasil

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic sparked debates about the abuse of emergency powers to sub‑ vert democracy, especially in places such as Brazil, where there’s already a history of dismantling the constitutional order by the autocratic enlargement of the executive. The present work raises the hypothesis that the attacks on transparency by the federal government during the helth crisis deepen the process of democratic erosion underway in the country. Cumulated with abuse of power, they facilitate inertia, which is an aspect that will be explored under the lens of executive underreach, a term coined by Pozen and Scheppele to understand the willful omission of the executive in solving public problems. The methodology mixes normative analysis of transparency, its intersection with the right to health and bibliographic research on the erosion of constitutional democracy. It also proposes a critical institutional analysis of public policies during the pandemic. It concludes that there are important institutional obstacles to the anti-democratic attacks, but they were not enough to prevent the erosion from intensifying during the health crisis.