This article presents results of ongoing research into personal networks in São Paulo, exploring their relationships with poverty and urban segregation. We present the results of networks of 89 poor individuals who live in three different segregation situations in the city. The article starts by describing and analysing the main characteristics of personal networks of sociability, highlighting aspects such as their size, cohesion and diversity, among others. Further, we investigate the main determinants of these networks, especially their relationship with […]

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between institutional economics of cooperation and the political economy of trust. Transactions costs, principal-agent theory, market power, increasing-returns theory and value creation, strategic management: competitive forces, resource-based theory, organisational knowledge and learning, strategic choice theory and collective efficiency theory are reviewed. Lastly, the political economy of trust is sustained.

Brazilian politics has been usually analyzed as a case full of pathologies by scholars and political journalists alike. Fragmentation, volatility, clientelism and inefficiency have become bywords for describing the performance of Brazil’s political institutions. As a counter to this view, this work argues that the country’s democracy in the post-1988 period presents enough evidence in favor of classical hypotheses about electoral politics in the contemporary world, theories that invariably are based on premises of rationality in the behavior of voters […]

In analyses of female representation in lower houses, the adoption of quotas, the electoral system and the religious aspect have been identified as the main explanatory variables. In the case of upper houses, I see a relationship between their political strength and women’s presence in them: when they are weak, the presence of female representatives tends to be larger; when they are strong, women’s presence is smaller. Furthermore, the article shows that an analysis based solely on the number of […]

The article aims, in the first instance, to make a detailed analysis of the work of Hedley Bull, approaching the main themes and concepts developed by him. Secondly, it aims to re-evaluate the potential of the author’s contribution, given the new conditions of the post-Cold War period. With this in mind, the article critically analyses the most recent interpretations of his work, which seek to highlight its critical and normative potential, as well as to dissociate it from the realist […]

The recent creation of United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), an organization of local authorities of universal scope, is the culmination of the emerging process of a new political actor on the international scene. The article describes and analyses some aspects of the interaction between this global political actor-in-the-making and the United Nations (UN) system. The theoretical question it addresses is how the new global actor has — even if partially — achieved its objectives, given its limited power resources […]

Since the 1990s, the English School of International Relations has re-emerged as a research program. The work of its classical authors has been taken up again and new theoretical investments have projected it onto the centre of the debates on transformations in the international order after the Cold War. The English School has thus gained a renewed momentum. In spite of the remark by as to the alleged development of two streams within this tradition — classical theorists of international […]