Which factors or phenomena may shape and pattern political representation? This is one of the most common questions in the Brazilian, international, and comparative literatures in the political and social sciences. Several consensuses have emerged regarding the impact – on political representation – of cleavages ( ), culture ( ; ), the evolution of the media and type of political parties ( ; ), and, more recently, the internet and social media ( ; ; ). The book ‘Political representation […]

Several recent studies have investigated if support for Jair Bolsonaro in the presidential election of 2018 is positively associated with COVID-19 infections and deaths in Brazil. In these studies, COVID-19 outcomes in 2020 and 2021 are the dependent variables, and votes for Jair Bolsonaro in the 2018 presidential election (as a proxy for ideology) are the key explanatory variable. This article discusses why ecological research designs are difficult to test empirically. We discuss why correlations between vote shares and COVID-19 […]

How can activist bureaucrats unexpectedly influence policy outcomes? What strategies do these actors adopt in order to defend and implement public policies in institutional settings unfavorable to their ideas? How do the individual trajectories of activist bureaucrats influence their strategies and repertoires of action? Drawing from the literature on institutional activism, this article shows how bureaucrats worked as activists to create and institutionalize participatory arenas in slum upgrading projects, within an institutional setting adverse to popular participation. Our research was […]

This article presents a meta-analysis of the history and the literature on the current state of political science in Mexico with the aim of obtaining an overall picture of the characteristics and profiles of political scientists and political science. It notes that there has been a process of change in the profiles of authors and the foci of texts, with a tendency to formalize analysis and a growing influence of the American tradition, along with a process of professional academic […]

Do previous trajectories of Federal Supreme Court justices influence their votes in court? Despite recent advances in research on judicial behavior, questions remain about the factors influencing the decisions of STF justices. Building a new typology of these justices’ career paths, this article tests the hypothesis that professional characteristics influenced the judicial behavior of the justices judging the Ação Penal 470, a criminal case known as Mensalão . Our theory suggests that STF nominees bring to the court law interpretations […]

In this article, I consider the approach of racial relations versus the perspective of racial politics. The former, formulated within the framework of the Chicago School of Sociology in the 1920s, assumes that races interact with each other according to the “cycle of racial relations”. This interpretation highlights the cultural and psychological dimensions and neglects the ideological, political, and institutional factors constraining and driving individual and collective choices. The racial politics approach suggests that social interactions are mediated by attributes […]