78Journal of Democracylevels of human development.14 With the exception of the very poor and northeasterners, Brazil as a whole went heavily for Bolsonaro.A Changing Party LandscapeWho were the main casualties of the October 2018 presidential elec-tion? Suffering the greatest setbacks were the PT, the PSDB, and the party system anchored since 1994 by these rival parties, a system that had helped to consolidate Brazilian democracy. Even before the 2018 campaign began, the weaknesses of all three were already evident

Much like Donald Trump (another perennial noncandidate) in the United States two years earlier, Bolsonaro read the public mood well and chose the right year in which to finally throw his hat in the ring. He accepted the nomination of the mi-nuscule PSL, over which he knew he would have full operational control. During the convention season in May and June, no major party nominated a novel or appealing candidate who could challenge Bolsonaro from the center-right. On the left, Lula, far more popular than his wounded PT, continued to lead in all major polls right up until his removal from the race. Under these circumstances, Bolsonaro’s easiest path to the presi

What we refer to as a “perfect storm” in Brazil broke due to at least four simultaneous crises: an economic crisis caused by a prolonged re-cession, a political crisis of rising polarization and falling trust in estab-lished parties, a corruption crisis brought to the fore by the Lava Jato investigation, and the deterioration of an already dismal public-security environment. Taken together, these four crises led to a plunge not only in government legitimacy—with the Temer administration growing

Third and finally, presidents who had succumbed to the first two then faced the “absolutist temptation.” Giving in to it meant mobilizing popular support—if necessary through plebiscitarianism—in order to get rid of checks and balances on the executive. In some cases, absolutism could extend to overturning constitutional limits on reelection. Presidents who gave in to the first two temptations created rentier populism. Once they had done that, the third temptation promised to give them all the ad-vantages that come with plebiscitarian superpresidentialism

The first temptation—call it the “urge to expropriate”—was to maximize the government’s cut of the massive natural-resources windfall. What better path is there to accumulating and preserving power, after all, than a large and expanding government budget?

The most pressing worry about the left turn in Venezuela, and to a lesser extent Ecuador and Bolivia, is that they may be morphing into authoritarian regimes, albeit of the “electoral” sort. (Electoral authoritarianism is a regime type in which competition for power exists but is systematically biased against the opposition by things such as excessive state control of the media.3) O’Donnell’s later work was an effort to craft a conceptual framework for the study of the quality of democracies. By definition, such a framework cannot be applied to cases that have gradually lost the attributes needed to merit that name.

Second, even when observers have moved beyond policy differences, the key distinction that they make between variants of the left turn is one that hinges on populist versus institutional forms of rule.