Until 2013, the Brazilian executive branch had control over the execution of all discretionary public spending. In that context, all Brazilian legislators could do was amend the budget proposal prepared by the government. This article analyzes whether EC 86/2015, known as the mandatory budget amendment EC, has reduced executive dominance over the financial cycle of individual budget amendments. To this end, we examine descriptively and inferentially the main changes proposed by EC 86/2015, as well as data about the individual […]

(Da Ros, Luciano and Taylor, Matthew M. Brazilian Politics on Trial: Corruption Reform under Democracy. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2022) The crisis of liberal democracies is perhaps the main topic in political science in this century. Its relevance goes beyond the boundaries of academia, as attested by the number of books on authoritarianism and democratic backsliding making their way onto bestseller lists. Brazil can undoubtedly be included as a case study representative of this process in which democratic institutions are […]

The objective of this article is to problematize the place of liberalism in the work of Pierre Rosanvallon through a comparison of two moments of his intellectual career. The first moment is the book ‘Le capitalisme utopique’, in which the author extends Claude Lefort’s critique of totalitarianism to the classical economic liberalism of the 18th century, which he accused of suppressing the political in its representation of society as a market. The second moment is the book ‘Notre histoire intellectuelle […]

Black Atlantic is the term used to describe the transnationality and interculturality of the space-place that comprises Africa (the continent), the Americas, and Europe (the diaspora). It is in the Black Atlantic diaspora that one of the many black movements is established: Pan-Africanism. The pan-Africanist movement emerged in the early twentieth century as an alternative means to fight against oppression and exploitation and for the emancipation of all black peoples in the world. This study aims to investigate the dialogue […]

Can crime victimization affect support for democracy through its effect on satisfaction with democracy? Drawing upon AmericasBarometer data representative of eighteen Latin American countries, this study answers this question by employing an identification strategy that deals with two strong limitations to causal inference with observational data: covariate imbalance between treatment and control groups and unobserved confounders bias. This strategy combines matching, a novel estimation for mediation analysis, regression-with-residuals, sensitivity analyses, and tests that rule out the possibility of reverse causality. […]

This article looks into Amnesty International’s most controversial issue expansion, the incorporation of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ESCR) in its mission statement. It starts with a discussion on global frames drawing from the sociology of transnational movements to reflect on the weight of the North-South dichotomy in AI’s understanding of human rights as expressed in its most relevant documents. To this end, we reviewed the annual reports published by the organization from 2001 to 2018 using issue-oriented category-based content […]

This article investigates the impact of political and electoral institutions on party system stability in 40 democracies, including Brazil. Party stability is analyzed using the Electoral Party Variation (EPV) indicator, based on the Effective Number of Electoral Parties (ENEP). The political and electoral institutions of interest include electoral magnitude, electoral formula, and an approach derived from Sartori (strong, feeble, and moderate electoral systems). The analysis employs four models using the generalized estimating equation (GEE) method for panel data (40 cases, […]