Abstract The article distinguishes federal states from bicameralism and mechanisms of territorial representation in order to examine the association of each with institutional change in 32 countries by using constitutional amendments as a proxy. It reveals that bicameralism tends to be a better predictor of constitutional stability than federalism. All of the bicameral cases that are associated with high rates of constitutional amendment are also federal states, including Brazil, India, Austria, and Malaysia. In order to explore the mechanisms explaining […]

Abstract The aim of this paper is to present the results of research on the structures of social, political and academic capital that are able to demonstrate and explain the existence of power structures of the Brazilian juridical field, especially with regard to the administration of the State judicial system. With this objective in mind, the research analyzed the personal, professional and academic trajectories of members of the institutional, associative and academic elites linked to the administration of the State […]

Abstract Approaches to diplomacy tend to be restrictive because of an exclusively interstate insight. Indeed, historically, the state monopoly over diplomacy has always been challenged by private actors. Today, it is defied both from the inside because of growing public fragmentation (every ministry tends to lead its own foreign policy; subnational authorities develop their diplomatic relations) and from the outside (the business sector and civil society play a growing role on the international scene). This proliferation of actors has transformed […]

Abstract The conventional perspective in Political Science expects a strong association between education and political behaviour favourable for democratic coexistence. This approach also infers that increases in a nation’s educational attainment levels will be accompanied by sustained gains in attitudes such as political engagement and democratic support. These hypotheses have been reviewed and tested for Brazil, with analyses of surveys conducted between 1989 and 2006. The evidence confirms the conventional perspective when a single point in time is observed and […]

Abstract Studies on the relation between decentralization reforms and the performance of governments and their policies have presented a myriad of theoretical developments but inconclusive results on the empirically verifiable effects of these propositions. Many of the reviews carried out thus far in this field merely criticize these propositions without proposing alternatives for analysis. This article presents a review of this debate in a very specific way: it selects the propositions that points towards the causal factors explaining government’s responsiveness […]

The “third wave” of democratization in Latin America, starting with the Dominican Republic’s transition in 1978, was accompanied by a vigorous academic debate on the working of presidential systems. This debate started with an initial generation of studies framed by pessimistic argument on the perils of presidentialism, and was soon followed by a second generation of studies emphasising the diversity of institutional formats and party systems in presidentialist countries and, more importantly, how this diversity had a relevant impact on […]

The book Emoções ocultas e estratégias eleitorais by Antonio Lavareda is innovative with respect to explaining the determinants of the vote. The author does not set out to explain the motives for voter decision based solely on what has already been proposed by the Brazilian literature. Grounded in his empirical experience and academic qualification, Lavareda provokes researchers who take an interest in electoral behaviour by proposing arguments that complement existing explanations of the determinants of the vote, as well as […]