This article examines Japanese International Relations in the last quarter of the 20th century, highlighting the history of IR academic development and the opportunities and constraints posed by the International System. It demonstrates that Japanese approaches to IR varied in strength and representativeness, despite the co-existence of four strands of thought: Staatslehre, Historicist, Marxist and American Style. The lack of integration between these approaches and in methodological refining can be held accountable for the absence of a stricto sensu bumiputra […]

The rise of new powers and attendant shifts in the global balance of power have led to calls for UN Security Council reform. Established powers have often responded by linking increased influence in the international system with the assumption of more international responsibility by aspirant powers. Based on ethical and philosophical approaches from the individual and state levels, and a case study of Brazil, this article analyses the way in which the notion of responsibility is discursively constructed, demonstrating the […]

Current elite studies argue that inequality produces negative externalities to elites, who may either promote democracy or adopt authoritarian measures in order to shield their interests from the actions of the rebellious poor. This article argues that elite framing of poverty and inequality in the press is a good thermometer of elite public response to such externalities. The press represents a communication tool shared by elites in the state, market, civil society, and, most evidently, the media itself. If inequality […]

This article analyzes the role of Mercosur’s Parliament within Mercosur’s institutional design and decision-making process by associating its institutional arrangements to potential outcomes over representativeness. Generally, it discusses how representative Mercosur’s chosen mechanism for ruling seats in its Parliament, the so-called “citizen representation”, is and how that might affect coordination trends and solutions concerning political conflicts. Hence, the article investigates such mechanism in terms of its consequences for representativeness. The method relies on a Game Theoretical perspective through the application […]

The purpose of this article is to analyze the U.S. international agricultural trade policy by focusing on instruments and institutional arrangements. Policy decision-making is analyzed by means of three variables: 1) how interests are mobilized; 2) how information is disseminated; and 3) how spaces are occupied in deliberation arenas. The study refers to the corn sector and observes how the National Corn Growers Association operated to ensure subsidies and incentives for this supply chain along the elaboration of the 2002 […]

Although Lijphart’s typology of consensus and majoritarian democracy can be regarded as the most widely used tool to classify democratic regimes, it has been rarely applied to Latin America so far. We try to fill this gap by adapting Lijphart’s typological framework to the Latin American context in the following way. In contrast to previous studies, we treat the type of democracy as an independent variable and include informal factors such as clientelism or informal employment in our assessment of […]

This article proposes an indicator for measuring the hierarchy of academic production in Brazilian political science, based on Qualis, the impact factor and the share of articles on Political Science in selected journals. The dataset comprises 23 renowned national journals. Findings show that disciplinary traditions emphasizing institutional analysis as well as quantitative and nomothetic approaches, based on the proposition and testing of hypotheses and causal arguments predominate. This state of affairs, in turn, is explained by particular parameters for evaluating […]

What is the impact of small parties on electoral outcomes? This articles aims at contributing to the literature on party systems by proposing a new method to classify political parties. The methodology is applied to Brazil by focusing on the description of the election results of small parties. Cluster analysis is employed to classify political party size based on their percentage of votes in the Brazilian states. The main findings indicate that classifying parties through cluster analysis is more objective […]