This paper aims to demonstrate how the responses of public health officials to judicial decisions have shaped drug distribution policies in the state of São Paulo. Data was collected and structured interviews were conducted at the state of São Paulo Department for Health in order to show how different strategies of response to judicial decisions affected the policy of medication distribution by the public sector. We also analysed recent Supreme Federal Court jurisprudence to show how the Court reformed its […]

This article reviews the case of the often claimed “crisis of parties” in Portugal, and argues that such controversy rests at least in part on “ambiguous” evidence. We will try to answer two fundamental research questions: 1) What motivates popular support for political parties (or lack thereof)? 2) Why does anti-party rhetoric resonate with some citizens, but not with others? The empirical data and statistical regression models used allow the following conclusion: in the eyes of Portuguese citizens, parties have […]

Generally, party programmes are neglected in Brazil owing to their alleged (and assumed) irrelevance. It is argued that given that such documents are designed on order and with propaganda purposes, they could hardly be accepted as depictions of the parties’ true political positions. However, such an assessment lacks empirical verification. This article tests the hypothesis that Brazilian parties emphasise distinct questions in their manifestos. This hypothesis is based on saliency theory, according to which parties can be distinguished from one […]

The aim of this article is to analyse the process of expansion of the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Area, created in 1973 with 14 municipalities, which today comprises 34 municipalities, making it the second largest MA in Brazil. After the redemocratization, more specifically after the promulgation of the State Constitutions in the late 1980s, several new metropolitan areas were created in the country, and all nine MAs instituted in the early 1970s increased their number of member municipalities, in a context […]

Is there Executive interference in the regulatory agencies after its formal establishment as independent bodies? Under what conditions the Executive chooses to interfere in the agencies? This paper analyses the degree of interference in Brazilian national regulatory agencies and provide a tentative explanation for the variation in the degree of interference. The basic hypotheses is that credibility costs, the degree of formal independence and the preferences of presidents are crucial factors affecting the extent to which presidents interfere in the […]

This article analyzes Poupatempo, a recent bureaucratic reform in Brazil. We argue that it offers insight into a potentially successful strategy to promote institutional reforms. After analyzing the design of the project and the obstacles to its implementation, we conclude that Poupatempo’s most innovative feature was the fact that it did not try to reform existing institutions. Instead it created a new pathway around an inefficient bureaucracy. This type of reform — the institutional bypass — has not been considered […]

A first wave of theories on globalization suggested that because of new competitive pressures, national economies would converge into a single market economy model. Economic rationale would overcome politics, and political choices would be restricted to the implementation of a set of policy prescriptions aimed at favoring private investment, so-called “market-oriented reforms”. More recently, research based on economic sociology and historical institutionalism has shown that the implementation of market-oriented reforms at national, regional and industry-level has been characterized by a […]

Abstract Approaches to diplomacy tend to be restrictive because of an exclusively interstate insight. Indeed, historically, the state monopoly over diplomacy has always been challenged by private actors. Today, it is defied both from the inside because of growing public fragmentation (every ministry tends to lead its own foreign policy; subnational authorities develop their diplomatic relations) and from the outside (the business sector and civil society play a growing role on the international scene). This proliferation of actors has transformed […]

Abstract The article distinguishes federal states from bicameralism and mechanisms of territorial representation in order to examine the association of each with institutional change in 32 countries by using constitutional amendments as a proxy. It reveals that bicameralism tends to be a better predictor of constitutional stability than federalism. All of the bicameral cases that are associated with high rates of constitutional amendment are also federal states, including Brazil, India, Austria, and Malaysia. In order to explore the mechanisms explaining […]

Abstract The conventional perspective in Political Science expects a strong association between education and political behaviour favourable for democratic coexistence. This approach also infers that increases in a nation’s educational attainment levels will be accompanied by sustained gains in attitudes such as political engagement and democratic support. These hypotheses have been reviewed and tested for Brazil, with analyses of surveys conducted between 1989 and 2006. The evidence confirms the conventional perspective when a single point in time is observed and […]

Abstract Studies on the relation between decentralization reforms and the performance of governments and their policies have presented a myriad of theoretical developments but inconclusive results on the empirically verifiable effects of these propositions. Many of the reviews carried out thus far in this field merely criticize these propositions without proposing alternatives for analysis. This article presents a review of this debate in a very specific way: it selects the propositions that points towards the causal factors explaining government’s responsiveness […]

Abstract The aim of this paper is to present the results of research on the structures of social, political and academic capital that are able to demonstrate and explain the existence of power structures of the Brazilian juridical field, especially with regard to the administration of the State judicial system. With this objective in mind, the research analyzed the personal, professional and academic trajectories of members of the institutional, associative and academic elites linked to the administration of the State […]