In this study, we explore novel data concerning party affiliations within ministries to characterize political-party appointments in high and mid-level bureaucracy from 1999 to 2018. We argue that party cleavages within these organizations hold significant importance. To scrutinize the variance among ministries, we propose an index of intra-ministerial party fractionalization. By emphasizing the distinction between party politicization and fractionalization as separate dimensions that vary significantly among ministries, our argument underscores the importance of intra-ministerial party cleavages in understanding government dynamics […]

After the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, a new architecture of international climate governance gradually emerged in the Paris Agreement establishing a division of roles for climate governance: states, which are formal members of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), set goals and incentives, while non-party actors’ action conditioned implementation. As the UNFCCC framework remained state-based, less attention has been given to how non-party actors interact with national governments to enable multilevel governance arrangements for implementing climate […]

This paper proposes an analytical and empirical shift to identify the meanings that state actors mobilize regarding social participation. It innovates by focusing on the perceptions of bureaucrats about participatory institutions and by proposing the dialogue between two sets of literature: the approaches of Participatory Institutions (PI) and of the Sociology of Public Action (SPA). From the former, it takes up the debate on the meanings of participation, while from the latter it takes on an understanding of bureaucrats as […]

This study examines the link between policy dismantling and democratic backsliding through a comprehensive analytical framework. This framework not only addresses dismantling strategies but also assesses resilience mechanisms, covering aspects like new policy implementation arrangements, diversification of governance, involvement of non-state actors, and the creation of alternative forums. Applying this framework, the study examines three food and nutritional security programs using qualitative methods such as semi-structured interviews and participant observation. Findings highlight significant impacts of dismantling on initiatives started during […]

The transformations the Middle East has been through since the Arab uprisings of the 2010s, also known as the Arab Spring, have been the subject of intense debate in the literature. In this regard, a relevant issue is the role played by the countries of the Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf (GCC) and Russia in the face of the United States’ regional influence. Is Russia’s involvement in the Gulf determined exclusively by the logic of great […]

This paper addresses two central issues during the 55th legislature (2015-2019). First, the relationship between the instrumental and structural power of agribusiness and different aspects of parliamentary behavior, namely membership in standing committees and the introduction of legislative bills. Second, the level of success achieved by agribusiness in relation to the legislative production of the National Congress. Concerning the first question, we employed binary logistic regression to demonstrate that deputies who received the most campaign financing from agribusiness (an indicator […]

This paper analyzes the incidence of Evangelical groups in contemporary Brazilian foreign policy, in particular in the search for government support for their missionary presence on the African continent. The paper argues that Evangelicals assumed an important part of Brazil’s African policy during the Jair Bolsonaro government and that it is necessary to analyze the profile of their activities in order to understand the trajectory of relations between Brazil and African nations in recent decades and the growing influence of […]

This article analyzes how Nature-based Solutions are integrated into the urban agenda in Brazilian cities. We sought to understand the co-benefits of those strategies, the main facilitators, their potentials and limitations. This article fills in the gaps of the research on Nature-based Solutions through a political science approach, providing more elements to analyze climate governance in the urban context and is based on the experiences in the Brazilian context. We analyzed two cases in depth, namely the cities of Campinas […]

This study delves into the thematic and methodological configuration of Brazilian Political Science. Through the study of the relational dynamics between different research agendas and their specific approaches, we identified the centrality of certain themes and the methodological density within Brazilian Political Science. We conducted an analysis of 1,849 PhD theses and Master dissertations completed between 2013 and 2020 in eleven Postgraduate Programs. Our examination encompassed titles, abstracts, and keywords in these works, with data sourced from the CAPES theses […]

How does the election of far-right populist leaders contribute to the environmental crisis? We delved into this question by conducting an in-depth case study on the impact of Jair Bolsonaro’s government (2019-2022) on the rise of deforestation rates in the Legal Amazon. Our focus was on forest deforestation oversight, the main tool for enforcing Brazilian environmental policy against deforestation, particularly in the short term. Since 2019, deforestation rates in the Amazon have surged to concerning levels, identified as the primary […]

In multiparty presidential regimes, the head of the Executive manages a heterogeneous political base through a series of instruments. Among these tools, the use of patronage in appointments for governmental positions and the deployment of pork barrel to please congressional representatives have been highlighted by the literature as the glue that holds together multiparty coalitions. However, current studies neglect the role of politicians as active actors in multiparty presidential regimes in channeling resources to their constituencies and parties when holding […]

This paper advances our understanding of the Brazilian IR scholarship by exploring the topics addressed and the geographic scope adopted by its authors, tracing their evolution over time. We utilize data from 2417 master’s theses and doctoral dissertations from all IR graduate programs in the country, spanning the years 1987 to 2018. By employing a structural topic model, we identify latent topics present in the abstracts of these documents. This analysis not only allows us to trace a thematic profile […]