Project on Autocratic Legalism (PAL Project)  

V-Dem and Freedom House, the two main indexes for measuring democracy around the world, have shown consistent declines in recent years. Several emerging and consolidated authoritarian governments use legal institutions to undermine the democratic rule of law. At the same time, law continues to be the tool of choice for resisting authoritarianism and protecting democracy. The Project on Autocratic Legalism (PAL Project), created in 2020, explores this ambiguity of law in the contemporary world.    

The project has two main goals. Firstly, we are interested in understanding how anti-democratic leaders or movements employ the law to erode democracy, identifying variables for comparison. Then, in a double movement, the law can be a source of resistance to anti-democratic policies, involving a variety of political and societal actors. Resistance through the mobilization of legal institutions can halt authoritarian projects, or be unsuccessful. We are therefore interested in mapping these manifestations and understanding how and under what circumstances or conditions they exist, as well as their impact.    

The project adopts a broad view on the meaning of legal institutions in the erosion of democracy and resistance to anti-democratic forces. The project maps formal legal changes as well as changes in informal practices that uphold or undermine law and enable or subvert legal interpretations, as well as different forms of social mobilization. We are also interested in historical continuities and path dependencies as explanatory factors for understanding how anti-democratic leaders or movements and those who resist them resort to legalistic tactics.    

The PAL Project is divided into three fronts: the first, called PAL-Brasil, locates Brazil in the global context. From an inductive perspective, Brazilian researchers have conducted case studies on past and present authoritarianisms and their complex interaction with the country's legal order. The role of the Legislative Branch, the Judiciary, the Supreme Courts, the media and regulatory agencies were investigated, addressing issues such as political participation and freedom of expression and association, legal professions, police violence, corruption, environmental policy and economic development. The first stage of the project was completed with the publication of the book Rule of Law and Authoritarian Populism: Erosion and Institutional Resistance in Brazil (2018-22) in 2023, by Editora FGV, and the book Law and Authoritarianism in Democracies Under Construction (Brazil 2018-2022), to be published in 2024 by the Acadêmica Livre label.   

In 2022, the second work front was launched with an emphasis on the topic of domestic and transnational resistance to processes of democratic decline, in their institutional and non-institutional dimensions. This led to the creation of the Consortium on Global Resistance to Authoritarian Diffusion (GRAD Consortium), a consortium made up of FGV Direito SP, the Transnational Law Institute at King's College London and the University of Wisconsin, which was launched at an event at King's College London. The work of the GRAD Consortium will be compiled into a book on resistance to authoritarianism in eight countries: Brazil, the United States, India, China, South Africa, Hungary, Russia and Israel. In 2023, GRAD organized a research workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to discuss and improve ongoing studies.    

The third front, called Comparative Autocratic Legalism (CAL-PAL), seeks to investigate how autocratic legalism and its forms of resistance have manifested themselves in the Global South, through comparative research centered on specific themes such as corruption, courts, gender and others. On this research front, a thematic dossier was produced in the journal Verfassung und Recht in Übersee/World Comparative Law (VRÜ/WCL), published in 2022, with articles written by PAL-CAL researchers reflecting on the dynamics of the advance of authoritarianism in different countries. PAL-CAL is currently producing a series of books on autocratic legalism from a comparative perspective, based on thematic groups. To this end, the project has expanded its geographical scope and has a group of researchers specializing in the Argentinian, Colombian, Venezuelan, Hungarian, Turkish, Polish, Chinese, Nigerian and US contexts, among others.