This study presents the UN’s narrative in the construction of the post-war world. Spanning a period of more than 70 years, this narrative is described through the parallel narrative of football as the game that everyone can play and win, regardless of size, attributes and abilities. Using the language of football through the words of Eduardo Galeano, the paper reveals a common history with different aspects, which is read largely in the light of Michel Foucault’s thinking. In this respect, […]

Participatory Budgets, Public Policy Conferences and Public Policy Management Councils, among other participatory institutions in Brazil, are altering the configuration of processes that define and elaborate public policies, while incorporating citizens and civil associations into political spaces where different mechanisms of participation and representation converge. These new institutions call for reflections concerning political inclusion and representation that go beyond electoral models. We propose to contribute to these debates by discussing the perceptions of some actors, in particular the leaders of […]

The book ‘Elecciones y partidos en América Latina en el cambio de ciclo’, edited by Manuel Alcántara, Daniel Buquet and María Laura Tagina, and published in 2018 by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas in Madrid, Spain, is composed of 20 chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. Most of the authors have received their PhDs from the University of Salamanca, and many of the chapters include sources of information produced in that institution. The project Parliamentarian Elites (PELA ) , by […]

How do socially relevant attributes influence juvenile criminal sentencing? While judicial decisions should, in principle, be fully based on legally relevant factors such as the seriousness of the offense and the defendant’s criminal record, I ask whether and how extralegal characteristics related to the adolescent’s position in structural relations affect the decision-making process. I propose a mixed-methods design to study mechanisms of criminal sentencing. Using data from a representative sample of the São Paulo juvenile justice system records, I estimate […]

This article investigates the electorally expressed ideology of Brazilian voters via ecological analysis at the municipal level between 1994 and 2018. Our purpose is to analyze the main conditioners of aggregated patterns of ideology measured at a high spatial resolution. We test four major explanations for the variation in ideology at the municipal level: the effect of incumbent alignments, social modernization, political pluralism, and social inclusion. We find that although the Brazilian electorate as a whole leans to the right, […]

This article offers an explanation for the intensity of redistributive policies from Latin American leftist governments during the so-called ‘left turn’. It challenges the idea that the recent radical leftist governments are the product of region-specific characteristics. Based on theoretical models that analyze the implications of inequality in democracies and the moderating effects of different economic and institutional structures, it argues instead that the left’s redistributive policies were more intense in countries where capital mobility is low and there was […]

It is known that Brazilian presidents are able to approve most of their own legislative bills. However, it is still unclear what factors influence and explain the variation in presidents’ level of legislative success between different governments and even within an individual term. Seeking to understand this phenomenon, this article analyzes the legislative success of Brazilian presidents, based on the governments of Cardoso, Lula and Rousseff. More precisely, I examine the impact of prerogatives and exclusive policy matters on presidents […]

Adopting a postcolonial perspective, this article approaches Brazilian South-South cooperation ‘narratives’ in Africa as part of a politics of identity that helps redefine Brazil’s place in the modern world. The article discusses how South-South cooperation operates as a site of knowledge and power through which a developmentalist Brazilian identity is reproduced and subalternity can be constantly renegotiated. Through a brief analysis of the narratives of Brazilian involvement in Angola, it emphasizes how the production of the state self is also […]

Discussions in the field of urban policy in São Paulo hearken back to Brazil’s first attempts to build its own school of public policy, especially at the local level. The necessity of organizing space, and the community relations that existed there, with a focus on municipalities, from the 1950s on, were the impetus behind the creation of such institutions as the Instituto Brasileiro de Administração Pública (the Brazilian Institute of Public Administration, or IBAP) in Rio de Janeiro and the […]

‘International Relations and the European Union’, edited by Christopher Hill, Michael Smith and Sophie Vanhoonacker, is the 3rd edition of a book which is part of ‘The New European Union Series’, by the Oxford University Press. The book is a collection of 20 articles by several authors engaged in research on the European Union (EU), and highlights the importance of creating a link between the internal integration and the policymaking process of the EU, and the development of its international […]