Accountability and State Pluralism in Brazil: Public Ministry and Federal Police

Abstract

Brazilian recent trajectory of State agencies (re)development, has strongly affected government accountability. It shows how State actors have vested interests in strengthening agencies, seeking to achieve legally and politically new functions and prerogatives in Brazilian democracy. They have professed values and engaged in the building-up of institutional aims in order to unify agency members and justify agencies’ relevance vis-à-vis other agencies. Brazilian institutional innovation experience seems to follow civil servants group ambitions within the State. They have broadening political representation and fostering accountability discourses into theories of their own institutional development. The main consequence of this institutional non-planned trajectory is the pluralization of the State underpinned by the strengthening of State agencies and State career ladders.