This article explores the connection between the proportional electoral system (PR) and party organizations as a key institutional determinant of party-group linkages from cross-party and national perspectives. Developing a nuanced framework, we propose an integrated model to address two questions: 01. Do candidate-centred electoral systems affect the development of party-group linkages? 02. In the case that electoral systems do have an impact, is it a direct impact or is it mediated by party organizations? Using V-Party (2020) and V-Dem (2020) […]

This study investigates digital activism and democratic culture among citizens of São Paulo, Brazil. It aims to understand: 01. whether digital participation is becoming a surrogate instance of other forms of participation; and 02. whether digital activists share a specific political culture regarding democratic attitudes and behaviors. Drawing on a representative sample of 2,417 interviews, we apply multivariate analysis techniques to characterize digital activists in terms of political participation and democratic culture. Our findings show that digital participation complements – […]

This paper aims at understanding the governance of public budgeting in large metropolises with the use of comparative analysis. The analysis is focused on budgetary governance in London and São Paulo and uses qualitative and quantitative data from 2008 to 2019 to understand whether analytical categories such as incrementalism of expenditures, complexity of budgetary rules, bureaucratic hierarchy, bargaining, and muddling through are useful to compare two metropolises, especially to determine the discretionary power of mayors in making budget allocation decisions. […]

This article aims to understand how democratization processes have influenced the foreign policy of regional powers in the Global South. Our theoretical model brings together the concepts of ‘regional power’ and ‘graduation dilemma’. It is used for a comparative study of Brazil and South Africa’s foreign policy in two stages: 01. ‘prestige diplomacy’ with a focus on human rights in the 1990s; and 02. global projection in the 2000s. We employ a comparative methodology that uses process tracing to build […]

Participatory Budgeting (PB) is a democratic policy innovation created in Brazil in the early 1990s, recognized worldwide as an effective policy tool for directly involving the population in budget decisions. Its diffusion in Brazil was strongly stimulated by the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores – PT) as a showcase of the ‘Petista Way of Governing’. However, after the party took the presidential office, PB lost its status as a top participatory policy. Without its leading promoter, PB gradually declined in […]

The recognition of issues as public problems and the ways governments prioritize them constitute focal points in the study of policy change and policy dynamics. In Brazil and other Latin American countries, social welfare systems and related policies have undergone transformations throughout the recent democratic period. This article aims to understand changes in the Brazilian social welfare agenda by means of an analysis of the attention given to social welfare policies at the federal level. The main analytical and methodological […]

Recent controversies in the literature on the electoral effects of cash transfer programs reveal the limitations of traditional models associating public policies to voting. Why would beneficiaries reward parties for programmatic policies when the government has no control over the distribution of the benefits? Are they guided by short-term retrospective voting in favor of the incumbent without forming durable links? By studying the Brazilian case, based on the Bolsa Escola-Program, formulated by the PSDB, and the Bolsa-Família Program, formulated by […]

In the current international system, countries have responded in distinct manners to migratory phenomenon, principally in the internal sphere. Using Hermann’s Model, this study intends to verify, using documentary analysis, the level of influence which the international treaties signed by Brazil exercised on the formulation of migration legislation in the country between the Foreigner Statute (Law Nº 6.815/1980) and the 2017 Migration Law (Law Nº 13.445/2017). The results show that the Migration Law was more successful in enshrining terms established […]

An emerging literature finds that legislators frequently suffer a negative incumbency advantage in developing countries but disagrees as to the sources of this anti-incumbent bias. We contribute to this literature by examining the case of Brazil, where the extant literature predicts a large incumbency disadvantage. Building a new methodology for OLPR which leverages both inter- and intraparty thresholds, we find, contrary to expectations, a large ‘positive’ incumbency advantage. We further exploit within-country variation and show that this advantage appears to […]

Voting for a presidential ticket is a common characteristic that is particular to the majority of presidential systems. When a voter chooses a candidate for president, they are actually also voting for the other person on the ticket, in other words, the potential successor if the mandate is interrupted. Therefore, the selection of the candidate who will run for election alongside the presidential candidate represents an opportunity to nominate someone who can increase the ticket’s electorate or increase a possible […]

Although equality of opportunity is a fundamental idea of the egalitarian project, there is a continuing controversy about the effective distributive implications of the notion. This paper focuses on this controversy, and maintains that when equality of opportunity is correctly understood, it entails strong distributive implications. In this way, this paper intends to reject the notion that equality of opportunity is associated with a non-institutional idea of meritocracy: an idea which is often used as an ideological tool to make […]

A longitudinal analysis of the use of televised electoral advertising by the two political parties that have been the central actors in presidential elections in post-democratization Brazil: the Workers’ Party (hereinafter referred to using the Portuguese acronym the ‘PT’) and the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (hereinafter referred to using the Portuguese acronym the ‘PSDB’). Our objective is to identify patterns and changes in Brazilian electoral advertising between 2002 and 2018 with reference to Brazil’s system of free electoral advertising time […]