The Weight of History and the Rebuilding of Brazilian Democracy*

Nation-states, like their citizens, are dependent on their peers for cues about what passes for appropriate behavior. With respect to the evolution of political institutions, the result is the proliferation of political fads among certain clusters of countries, a process which scholars describe in terms of “waves”, “contagion”, “isomorphism”, and “refl ection”. The idea that the adoption of a practice by one actor would infl uence the probability of adoption by another (a useful defi nition of the concept diffusion1) is an intriguing metasubject of inquiry within a variety of disciplines and a variety