This is an attractive vision, but critics doubt that they can make it work. On a recent visit to Brazil, I asked one of President Cardoso's advisors where I might go to see the social democratic model in action. He suggested a visit to the impoverished northeastern state of Ceará. The social democrats have had ten years in office in Ceará, since 1987 when Tasso Jereissati was elected governor. And they have accomplished so much that Johns Hopkins University Press has just published a book, Good Government in the Tropics, by Judith Tendler, which uses Ceará as a case study of effective government intervention. Brazil, which has so often provided scholars with case studies of waste and corruption, is now being used as proof that reform can work.

Although European social democracy was based on the labor movement, in Ceará it got its start among a group of young businessmen. Tasso Jereissati, who was 36 at the time of his election, was part of a group of young entrepreneurs who organized to challenge the state's traditional leaders. These young businessmen were active in modern industries such as soft drink distribution, television, retail marketing or services, which depend on the buying power of local residents for their sales. The traditional elites in the Brazilian northeast had exported agricultural products to foreign markets, and were more interested in keeping wages down than in expanding buying power. These traditional leaders maintained old-fashioned political machines with patronage jobs.

Ceará's patronage system was in crisis in 1987, as it is today in many Brazilian states, because payrolls had simply grown too large for the state to pay. Salaries were eating up 87% of the state government's revenue. The social democrats promised to trim down government, and they kept their promise with a startling alacrity. One of the first acts of the Jereissati administration was to cut 40,000 "ghost" workers from the state payroll of 146,000. These were people who never showed up for work, or who had two or more full time state jobs at one time. The administration also slowed down the indexing of state salaries to inflation, cutting real salaries, and put a cap on state salaries. It also insisted that all new hiring be done through competitive exams. As a result of these measures, salaries were down to 41% of state revenues by 1991.

This administrative reform was bitterly resisted by many of the state employees and their supporters in the state legislature, just as Fernando Henrique Cardoso's reform is being resisted by the "maharajas" of the federal civil service, a tiny elite of whom earn as much as $30,000 a month early retirement pensions while working other jobs. Some of the early votes in the Ceará legislature were 90% against the reforms, and for several months party leader Ciro Gomes was booed every time he entered the legislative chamber. All kinds of legal tactics were used in attempts to sabotage the reforms. Ultimately, however, the governor was successful because the fiscal crisis made emergency measures unavoidable. There simply wasn't money to keep paying everyone.

The most innovative part of the Ceará story, however, is not the budget cuts but the steps which were taken to make government work. A key figure in this effort was the Secretary of Labor and Social Action, sociologist José Rosa. Rosa was a native of Ceará who had studied and worked in France, and had moved to Brasília to teach and work in the federal government. When the social democrats took power, Rosa eagerly accepted Jereissati's request that he return to Ceará and put his ideas into action. Rosa is an energetic man, bubbling over with ideas and enthusiasm, who loves Ceará's frontier spirit. He insists that "the Cearense does not have the soul of a slave." Ceará was settled by ranchers and cattlemen, including many blacks who had escaped from slavery on the plantations of neighboring states, and the work required free laborers who could be trusted to work on their own.

When Rosa took office, there was no time for leisurely planning or long-term goals, because Ceará was hit by one of the periodic droughts, which are the bane of the Brazilian northeast. In the past, something of a "drought industry" had developed, as the state and federal governments channeled relief money to big construction projects on the land of wealthy landowners. These projects had large overheads, but provided employment for only a small number of workers. Many farmers and cowhands had to move to the capital city of Fortaleza, or to southern Brazil, in a desperate search for work. The social democrats decided to define the drought as a social problem, not an agricultural one. Aid was channeled through José Rosa's Ministry of Social Action instead of thorough the Agricultural Ministry as it had been in the past.

In keeping with the new spirit of democracy, Rosa used participatory planning techniques to develop a drought relief program. Instead of staying in his office like a traditional bureaucrat, he traveled tirelessly throughout the state, by auto and helicopter, meeting with community organizations which had sprouted up as part of the democratization movement. The people told him that the most important thing was for each family to have at least one income, so they designed projects which were close to home and labor intensive. The families with the greatest need were allocated one minimum wage job per household. The jobs had to be nearby, so the workers could sleep and eat at home.

When there was a man in the house, he usually took the job, but there were many households headed by women with children. Often the men had left to seek work in other parts of the country. These women couldn't do a full day of heavy physical labor and also meet their household and child care responsibilities, so they were trained as home health aides. They went from house to house giving advice on nutrition, vaccination and hygiene. The program was dramatically successful in lowering the infant mortality rate, which had increased during previous droughts.

Relief money was also used to fund day care centers, with local women trained to work in them. At first the women were volunteers, but they found that few of them could afford to put in the hours without pay. So they were given half a minimum wage, later increased to a full minimum wage. The jobs were temporary, however, in order to give the opportunity to as many women as possible, and encourage them to find other employment.

The key to the success of this program was the fact that these day care centers were not government agencies staffed by state employees. They were organized and run by voluntary community groups, under contract to the state. This cut down on bureaucracy, and gave the residents experience in developing and administering their own programs. They learned to prepare budgets, supervise staff and be accountable to clients and funding sources. One of the few resources which poor communities have in quantity is the energy and creativity of their citizens. Mobilizing this underutilized resource enabled them to put the maximum into services and the minimum into administrative costs. The number of day care centers in the state mushroomed from 9 under the previous administration to over 470, and is expected to reach 1800.

This new philosophy of helping people to help themselves is being promoted throughout the Brazil by first lady Ruth Cardoso who directs an organization called Comunidade Solidária. Comunidade Solidária does not control programs, like a traditional bureaucracy. Nor does it just give out help to the needy, like traditional charities. Instead, it encourages neighborhood and community organizations to organize to define and meet their own problems. This philosophy has worked well in Ceará, often on a very small scale. A neighborhood group may, for example, lend a woman money to buy a sewing machine so she can earn a living on her own. She repays the money, with small interest payments so that she learns about paying interest. The repaid money can then be loaned out again. When someone comes with an emergency, such as an illness or a death in the family, they are asked what they can do themselves and what help they need in doing it. Last year, Ceará was able to loan out about $70,000 of money which had been repaid from previous loans.

Another program in which Ceará has been remarkably successful is in dealing with the problems of street children, many of whom are drawn into prostitution and drug dealing. Social workers from community agencies gain the confidence of these children, and make contact with their families. They then work on improving the family's situation, helping the parents find a job or get help with health or addiction problems, for example, so that they can help the children. The program, which has won funding from international agencies, has dramatically reduced the number of children on the streets.

Social democracy in Ceará has been good for business as well as for social welfare. In the years between 1987 and 1994, Ceará's economy grew at an average annual rate of 4%, which contrasted to 1.3% for Brazil as a whole. This growth was funded with the state's own resources, using money which had previously gone into salaries. State government is funding a number of economic development projects, including irrigation projects and an improved port facility which will be next to an oil refinery. They are also promoting tourism in the state, which has a long string of tropical beaches. The heavy reliance on state investment is not due to an ideological bias in favor of the government enterprise. Indeed, the main thrust of Fernando Henrique Cardoso's federal government has been on privatizing state industries. In Ceará, however, the social democrats have found that private investment is simply not available for many key projects, so they have used state money. At the same time, they eagerly court domestic and foreign private investment. Small business is also encouraged, with neighborhood centers that help people with the maze of bureaucratic paperwork needed to legalize a business.

Planning director Cláudio Ferreira, like many of the young technocrats leading Ceará's development, was a leftist activist when Brazil was ruled by a military government. Today, however, his vision for the future of Ceará is not Cuba or any other socialist state, but the state of California. He believes that, with irrigation, the interior of Ceará can bloom like the San Joaquin valley. Cláudio Ferreira is applying American ideas about "reinventing government" to the state's planning process. All programs are integrated by teams of working groups which coordinate the activities of the state agencies which formerly functioned independently within bureaucratic limits.

Perhaps the main disadvantage of the social democratic model is the number of meetings people must attend. As every social program jumps on the bandwagon of participatory management, citizens find themselves overwhelmed with requests to volunteer their time. It is easy to mobilize energy during a crisis, such as a drought, but it is harder to find volunteers to work on more routine matters. Government officials sometimes find it hard to get their work done when they spend so much time on coordination meetings.

Another problem, as Alfredo Lopes Neto, a young planning official and another former leftist activist, explained, is that much of the new participatory infrastructure duplicates the old structure of government. The mayors, city council members and state legislators sometimes feel that the community organizations are usurping their rights to represent the people. The officials, after all, have been democratically elected while the community groups are self-appointed. If funds are distributed through the community organizations, they may become new sources of political patronage.

These are issues which will be fought out in the democratic process. If political leaders from other parties want to compete successfully with the social democrats, however, they will have to offer much more than they did before 1987. The traditional culture of dependence on political bosses has been broken. As the taxi driver told me on the drive into town from the airport, the history of Ceará must now be divided into epochs: before Jereissati and after Jereissati.
 

Ted Goertzel is a Sociology professor at the Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey. He is the author of five books, the latest two being Linus Pauling: A Life in Science and Politics and Turncoats and True Believers: The Dynamics of Political Belief and Disillusionment. You can contact him through his E-mail: goertzel@crab.rutgers.edu