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Brazil under Lula offers a test case of how politicians and societal interests in developing countries react when economic growth and new possibilities change the name of the game from shock and scarcity to boom and prosperity. Contrary to what a reader of the dominant theoretical work on democratization might expect, Brazil’s experience of political democratization and economic liberalization under the adverse economic conditions of the 1980s and 1990s did not bring about a neoliberal “assault on the state.”