This article focuses on the appropriation of the subject of Internet and Politics by Brazilian Social Sciences. To this end, we analysed 299 papers presented at 11 conferences in the areas of Sociology, Political Science and Social Communication from 2000 to 2011 in Brazil. The methodology was based on content analysis in order to map the main authors, research centres, political and technological objects, theoretical approaches, methods, techniques and coverage areas of the papers presented in each of these conferences. […]

Public policies are produced by connections between several actors, within institutional environments and crossing organizational boundaries, but detailed analyses of the environments in which politics occur are relatively rare in Brazil. I believe the concept of governance could help to bridge this gap. However, this concept has different meanings and has been circulated in Latin America with quite confusing and cacophonic meanings. In this analytical essay, I build a definition of governance based both on local debates and the recent […]

In this article I shall analyze the content of Wanderley Guilherme dos Santos’ research, carried out between the decades of 1960 and 1970, and in the end perform an assessment of his contribution to the studies of Brazilian political thought. In summary, from his research there emerged a thesis for the existence of a national political culture; that Brazilian political thought was its intellectual product par excellence and that it would not be possible to comprehend the rugged Brazilian political […]

This study is about mapping and explaining the use of the Left-Right divide across 14 countries from 5 Continents and relies on the richness of the post electoral mass surveys from the Comparative National Election Project: 14 countries and 18 elections spread over 5 continents. The paper shows not only how extensively the LR divide is used in these 14 countries, but also explains variation across both individuals and countries in terms of the factors determining LR recognition and use. […]

This article analyses the security practices of the anti-nuclear movement in the post-Cold War period through the prism of securitisation theory. By exploring Buzan and Wæver’s conceptual developments on macrosecuritisations, the practices involved in the struggle against the Bomb are interpreted as securitising moves, in which the anti-nuclear movement is the leading securitiser. In the capacity of securitising actors, nuclear abolition activists argue that nuclear disarmament, under a Nuclear Weapons Convention (NWC), would be the only way to protect humankind […]

In this article, I intended to develop an analytical schema to analyze moments of redirection in Brazilian Foreign Policy. The schema encompasses the following logic: sources from national and international contexts may influence the domestic political arena, leading to the opening of a policy window and the rupture of stabilizers, which together may form a scenario prone to reform in terms of foreign guidelines. In this context, the decision makers may opt to promote a foreign policy change (FPC). To […]

The decrease in insecurity in the North Caucasus during the first eight years of the 21st century was achieved with the help of federal money used to amnesty soldiers and to pacify ethnic leaders’ ambitions. But circumstances changed after Dmitry Kozak’s announcement that the federal budget for the entire region would decrease significantly. As all the republics in the North Caucasus are dependent on federal aid of no less than 50% (in Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan dependence is superior to […]

The main goal of this article is to provide a good basis to assess the way media frames are embedded in a wider social scenario, and how public and political preferences can be researched through media debate. The methodology adopted allows for an analysis of newspaper articles that can show broader trends of the debate and serve as a thermometer to measure public debate. It can further highlight details and enable in-depth analyses of media discourse. The article explores the […]

This article is dedicated to recounting the main initiative of Nelson Mandela’s government to manage the social resentment inherited from the segregationist regime. I conducted interviews with South African intellectuals committed to the theme of transitional justice and with key personalities who played a critical role in this process. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is presented as the primary institutional mechanism envisioned for the delicate exercise of redefining social relations inherited from the apartheid regime in South Africa. Its founders […]

The article provides a non-technical introduction to the p value statistics. Its main purpose is to help researchers make sense of the appropriate role of the p value statistics in empirical political science research. On methodological grounds, we use replication, simulations and observational data to show when statistical significance is not significant. We argue that: (1) scholars must always graphically analyze their data before interpreting the p value; (2) it is pointless to estimate the p value for non-random samples; […]

This paper explores recent advances in experimental methodology to analyze elite behavior. Using an email experiment conducted in the context of the Brazilian 2008 municipal elections, we studied whether candidates target “swing” or “core” voters during campaigns. Candidates from all parties – 1,000 candidates in all – were contacted by randomly generated citizens who identified themselves as either core or swing voters. Additionally, we randomized senders’ past voting behavior and their gender. To identify the baseline answer rate, we employed […]

This paper is concerned with two things: finding an objective and easily quantifiable measure of government efficiency and testing possible determinants of government quality. As measures of government efficiency, we used ratios of infant mortality rate to health expenditures as a percentage of GDP, and ratios of drop out and illiteracy rates to education expenditures as a percentage of GDP. We assume that government efficiency in providing health and education services depends on economic, political and cultural factors.