Brazilian parties plan to overhaul the political system. For the worse

Brazilians nowadays agree on very few things when it comes to politics. One of them seems to be that the current political system gives birth to multiple dysfunctions — notably allowing roughly 30 parties to occupy House seats, a configuration that forces any government to compromise its agenda in order to obtain a minimally-functioning — and always unstable — coalition.

Despite its many flaws, the current Brazilian system for congressional races was created so as to democratize legislative representation, a goal it achieves better than systems adopted in the U.S. and the United Kingdom (first-past-the-post) or the French model (majoritarian, two-round district-level races). As political scientist Rogério Schmitt, who wrote possibly the book on Brazil’s party system, has it “the Brazilian Congress is fragmented because Brazilian society is fragmented.”

Still, political reform has been something that politicians from across the spectrum demand and sell as a sort of magical solution that should fix Brazil’s representation issues — ones that are far more linked to the obscene levels of inequality in the...