The distribution of ministerial portfolios in the formation of government coalitions in Brazilian presidentialism is a crucial factor in determining the governability of the political system. Objective measurement of the relevance of ministries to political parties offers a means of shedding light on the relations between the executive and legislative branches of Brazil’s government. This research note aims to improve the empirical measurement of the relevance of Federal ministries in negotiations between presidents and political parties by including a fundamental […]

The similarity of Jair Bolsonaro’s and Donald Trump’s divisive views on a variety of controversial issues has led many critics to argue that Brazilians elected a ‘Tropical Trump’ in 2018. Research on Trump’s election shows that authoritarian, racist, and sexist voters were essential to his narrow victory; however, it is an open question whether Trump’s pathway to power is the norm or the exception among right-wing nationalists. Even though candidates espousing controversial ideas about democracy and prejudice are gaining much […]

This article discusses the role of the media in deliberative systems, focusing on the relationship between the news media and the formal arena that is the Brazilian National Congress. We investigate the different ways in which the news media are appropriated by politicians, experts and ordinary citizens in public hearings. We focus on a case study of public hearings on the reduction of the age of criminal responsibility in Brazil, a controversial issue that has given rise to discussions in […]

Does ministry type influence profiles in upper-level bureaucracy? To govern, presidents need to 01. maintain control over the content of public policies, 02. make political concessions that earn them enough parliamentary support to see those policies approved, and 03. build or keep in place the bureaucratic competencies necessary to implement them. We argue that the president makes key appointments according to the nature of the policies of each ministry and their centrality in the executive branch’s decision-making process. Employing cluster […]

This article analyzes the effects of antipartisanship in explaining the Bolsonaro vote in the 2018 presidential elections. The expansion of the anti-Workers’ Party sentiment known in Portuguese as ‘antipetismo’ into an antipartisanship that accommodates a wider range of targets and a growing association between antipartisanship and political intolerance provide the context for and underscore the relevance of our tests. Our expectation is that the vote for Bolsonaro was strong related to both antipetismo and negative attitudes towards mainstream political parties, […]

Conditional cash transfer programmes have been adopted by several developing countries. Despite their acceptance, the independent role of the conditionalities on education and health remain under scrutiny. We have used an ecological design to study the association between conditionality monitoring and educational outcomes in Brazil’s Bolsa Família programme. As programme coverage (taken as a proxy of cash transfers) and monitoring and enforcement of the educational conditionalities (proxy of conditionalities) are not correlated at the municipal level, this study fits a […]

The book on which this review is based is one of the most recent in the study of the development of 21st century populism. In it, the authors advance a general theory that explains how a revolution in values has been the trigger for support for populist-authoritarian forces in Europe and the United States, something that had not previously been done for such a wide range of countries. To do this they establish the fundamentals for understanding how and why […]