This chapter presents a novel electoral strategy by which landowners have successfully influenced policymaking in democratic Brazil: a multiparty congressional caucus known as the Bancada Ruralista. It shows how agrarian elites finance the campaigns, encourage other producers to support, and subsidize the work of like-minded legislators independently of their partisan affiliation, as well as how legislators of agrarian origin collaborate across partisan lines. The chapter argues that Brazil’s Agrarian Caucus is the product of agrarian elites’ collective efforts to build a channel of electoral representation to protect their interests under democracy in a context of high political fragmentation. The threat of radical land reform during the democratic transition prompted landowners to engage in electoral politics. However, high political fragmentation among the agrarian elite rendered party-building unfeasible. The chapter discusses the advantages of an electoral, candidate-centered, multipartisan strategy over other strategies available to economic elites in democracies such as lobbying or party-building, and illustrates these advantages through the analysis of the Forest Code reform of 2012.

This chapter first describes the dependent variable – agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence – and its three categories (nonelectoral, party-building, and candidate-centered) in terms of their reliability and costs. Then, it introduces a new theory to explain the variation in agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence under democracy. It highlights the role of two independent variables – perception of an existential threat and intragroup fragmentation – to explain when and how agrarian elites will organize in the electoral arena. It argues that agrarian elites will enter the electoral arena only when they perceive an existential threat. In turn, landowners’ level of intragroup fragmentation conditions the way they organize their electoral representation. Where landed elites are cohesive, they will engage in party-building. In contrast, highly fragmented elites will prefer a nonpartisan, candidate-centered strategy of representation, supporting individual like-minded politicians across partisan lines. Lastly, the chapter assesses three main alternative explanations, previous history of electoral organization, electoral rules, and the relevance of congress as a policymaking arena.