Fifteen years after it had been established in 1964, most observers believed that the Brazilian “bureaucratic-authoritarian” regime had marginalized economic and political elites. Indeed, in a survey of the literature as of 1979 on post-1964 Brazil, I detected not one mention of the survival of the country's “traditional elites.” Accordingly, when I embarked on this study, I had no reason to doubt that they had fallen; I wondered only if and how they might have protested their fate, and if their presumed opposition, perhaps in alliance with other subaltern forces, to military-technocratic rule may have been consequential for regime instability. I was naturally disconcerted, then, in an interview for a Social Science Research Council dissertation fellowship, when one of the members of the screening committee, a historian familiar with the Brazilian hinterlands, badgered me to defend the usefulness of a study that was bound to uncover what everyone already knew – that traditional elites persisted throughout Brazil.

In struggling to reconcile these two pictures – one of a major, if temporary, revolution at the highest echelons of the national Brazilian state, and one of remarkable continuity at lower levels of the political system – this study became a book about regime change as well as a book about Brazilian politics. More accurately, this book is about two regime changes – one to and one from authoritarian rule. It does not seek to cover old ground on the causes of the breakdown of democracy and transition from authoritarian rule, but rather to explain what regime change ultimately meant for broader political change.