It is a commonplace among political scientists to assume that economy matters! Different theoretical perspectives of the discipline have committed themselves to finding the links between the economic and the political phenomena. One way of investigating this relationship is through systematic empirical studies that seek to control the effects of different economic factors on the explanation of political phenomena. It is this what the work organized by André Freire, Marco Lisi, Ioannis Andreadis and José Manuel Leite Viegas proposes to […]

(Heine,Jorge and Weiffen,Brigitte. 21st Century Democracy Promotion in the Americas: standing up for the Polity. Routledge, 2014) Since the creation and successful development of the European regional integration, a debate has existed on how regional institutions can contribute to the promotion and defense of democracy. Thus, a link between regionalism and democracy has been established. The extent to which regionalism and democracy are related and how regional institutions promote and defend democracy have been issues also discussed in the Americas. […]

(Angrist, Joshua D. and Pischke, Jörn-Steffen. Mastering ‘Metrics: The Path From Cause to Effect. Princeton University Press, 2014) The field of causal inference has seen a remarkable development in the last few years. While social scientists have always devoted considerable effort to understand causal effects, their quest for the perfect identification strategy received a new impulse after the publication of Donald Rubin’s causal model in the late 1970s (; . Although the “potential outcomes revolution” is still in its infancy, […]

The interest regarding the effects a strong Judiciary may have on political systems has a long history. Tocqueville in his seminal work Democracy in America had already warned us of such phenomenon centuries ago. Very recently, political science as a discipline has dealt with the global phenomenon of the expansion of Judiciary Power. This process presents itself through various levels of social relations up until the political level. In the specific field of politics, we may see the growing inclusion […]

(Mainwaring, Scott and Pérez-Liñan, Aníbal. Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival and Fall. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013) Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñan’s book, Democracies and dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall, is a hefty work. In the book, the authors analyzed 65 years of political regime changes in the subcontinent, from 1945 to 2010, with some digressions on the preceding period, since the early twentieth century. […]

For at least 800 years the wealth of the world was concentrated in those regions that the 20th century called “Third World”. In fact, during this long period, two great nations—China and India—concentrated approximately half of the population and GDP of the world. The 19th century will stage the “Great Divergence”: the West’s fast overtaking of the ancient Asian civilizations (and more generally over the group of countries and regions of the Asian, African, and Latin American continents). The huge […]

What is the need for another book on national development policy in Brazil? In the introduction, the author, a professor of Latin American History at the University of Denver, United States, seeks to undo the impression of a possible déjà vu. He indicates that the book not only includes the extensive literature published in Brazil and abroad on the subject but also an analysis of many new empirical material collected from government and private archives of many Brazilian and American […]

Mendes’s book offers a wide-ranging primer or literature review of constitutional aspects of what may be called the law of deliberative democracy (. This cross-over field of scholarship unites deliberative and legal theory. It should be no surprise that academic interest in this new field is on the rise. The deliberative democratic turn in political theory has often been called a key development in the study of democracy. Yet though deliberative theory makes many assumptions about the functioning of courts […]

During the last quarter of the 20th century the research agenda for comparative studies of Latin America concentrated on the debate over processes of overthrowing authoritarian regimes and that of building new democratic systems. With the transitions completed, this “transitionology” field began to focus on other concerns and objectives. In the 21st century, Latin Americanists began to emphasize themes such as quality and the consolidation of democratic regimes, the institutionalization of party systems (with indicators that in both cases would […]

The classical endeavor of comparing national models of capitalism has fortunately returned to the center of political science. Its resurgence can be attributed to the publication of Varieties of Capitalism () and the multiple debates triggered by this book. Almost a decade later, Ben Ross Schneider has published Hierarchical Capitalism in Latin America, the first comprehensive and systematic effort to apply the framework of VoC to Latin America. This inspiring book feeds the growing community of scholars who are calling […]

(von BÜLOW, Marisa. A batalha do livre comércio: a construção de redes transnacionais da sociedade civil nas Américas. São Paulo: Editora UNESP, 2014) For the contemporary reader, especially a young Brazilian academic, it may not be clear that the debate on free trade has assumed different nuances since 1990. If at that time the issue was strictly related with a neoliberal agenda and, therefore, focused solely on market efficiency while being restricted to a few group of economists and market […]

The debate on effectiveness is today at the centre of the participation agenda. What are the results of participatory institutions, and how and when do they produce change? These are questions asked by activists, academics and governments hungry for assessments for evaluating the outcome of the rich democratic experimentation that has recently taken place in Brazil, and for projecting their future ventures. In academia, this effort means huge theoretical and methodological challenges. After all, when we speak of the results […]