Abstract Globalization is not merely a competition for market shares and well-timed economic growth initiatives; neither is it just a matter of trade opportunities and liberalization. It has also evolved into a social and political struggle for imposing cultural values and individual preferences. Based on this broader context, this paper adopts the following assumption: transnational networks of social movements are the expression of a new social subject and have shifted their scale of political intervention since the 1990s in order […]

Abstract The article analyses the veto power of territorial governments in Brazil, by examining the parliamentary behaviour of state caucuses (bancadas) as well as their institutional veto opportunities when it comes to matters related to sub-national governments’ revenues and decision-making authority over their own taxes, policy responsibilities and expenditures. The “imposition of losses” upon territorial governments characterized legislative production during the 1989-2006 period, even though these decisions were intensely negotiated. The article concludes that the decision-making centralization the central arenas, […]

Abstract The Senate remains as an almost uncharted territory for women. And not only in re-democratized countries like Brazil, but also in advanced democracies such as the USA. To date, 33 American and 28 Brazilian women have served in their Senates. Why are these numbers so reduced? This article discusses the key obstacles that women face and, through OLS and probit analyses, examines the degree of competitiveness and rate of success of all candidacies. We show that, even though women […]

Research on Brazilian federalism and state politics has focused mainly on the impact of federal arrangements on national political systems, whereas comparative analyses of the workings of state political institutions and patterns of political competition and decision-making have often been neglected. The article contributes to an emerging comparative literature on state politics by developing a typology that systematizes the variation in political competitiveness and the extent of state elites’ control over the electoral arena across Brazilian states. It relies on […]

This article discusses the emergence in the late 1990s of an innovative conceptualization of security that proclaims the global HIV/AIDS epidemic a threat to international peace and stability. The study provides a framework for understanding the securitization of the HIV/AIDS epidemic as an international norm defined and promoted mainly by multilateral bodies, powerful states in the North and transnational HIV/AIDS advocacy networks. The HIV/AIDS securitization norm (HASN) is an attempt of the present analysis to synthesize under a single analytical […]

Introduction The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia defines “government coalition” as “ in which several parties cooperate. The usual reason given for this arrangement is that no party on its own can achieve a majority in the parliament.” (Emphasis added.) This commonsense view predominated until very recently in academic circles. Studies of government coalitions were limited to countries with parliamentary systems and the comparative literature assumed that presidents, because they have fixed terms that are independent from the legislature, would not have […]

The relationship with the United States has been a central element of Brazil’s foreign policy since the early 20th century. What shaped the two paradigms that guided Brazil’s international insertion until the late 1980s — the americanist paradigm and the globalist paradigm — were relations with the USA (; ; ). For the americanist paradigm, the approximation, cooperation and understanding were justified not only for pragmatic reasons, given the emergence of the USA as a power hub in the Americas […]

The collection titled Governo, Políticas Públicas e Elites Políticas nos Estados Brasileiros (Government, Public Policies and Political Elites in the Brazilian States), organized by Celina Souza and Paulo Fábio Dantas Neto, of the Federal University of Bahia, is a landmark in the welcome, but still incipient, process of decentring of Brazilian political science. I say this because the nine studies compiled promote significant displacements in relation to three of the guiding axes of Brazilian politicology, those being the thematic, the […]