Studies on patronage and politicization typically focus on the dilemma politicians face when recruiting public personnel. Politicians must choose between appointing loyal allies to implement policies or party members to garner political support. The term politicization typically emphasizes the political facet of the public bureaucracy. Through an integrative literature review, this paper aims to provide new insights into the concept of patronage and its relationship with the politicization of bureaucracy. The paper introduces findings from an intensive literature review of […]

In this study, we explore novel data concerning party affiliations within ministries to characterize political-party appointments in high and mid-level bureaucracy from 1999 to 2018. We argue that party cleavages within these organizations hold significant importance. To scrutinize the variance among ministries, we propose an index of intra-ministerial party fractionalization. By emphasizing the distinction between party politicization and fractionalization as separate dimensions that vary significantly among ministries, our argument underscores the importance of intra-ministerial party cleavages in understanding government dynamics […]

Regarding one of the founders of Political Communication in Brazil, this praise may seem only a protocol compliment. But the recently published book ‘Mirrors of Whiteness: Media, Middle-Class Resentment, and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil’, by Mauro Porto, a professor and researcher at Tulane University, in New Orleans, is both an urgent and welcome work. The book is pedagogic regarding the differences of class, race and geographic origin in Brazil, and serves as a document both for […]

This article looks into the explanatory dimensions of social services governance in São Paulo and Belo Horizonte. It considers the vertical axis of the interconnections between levels of government and the horizontal axis of interactions between state and non-state actors. We argue that it is necessary to advance in integrated explanations on how these multilevel interactions restructure local governance patterns over time in order to fill a gap in the literature on multilevel governance. Cases are compared based on the […]

In this study, we investigated judicial behavior during custody hearings in Brazil, a legal proceeding in which judges determine whether the arrested person should be kept in custody or released pending trial. Drawing on primary data obtained from hearings held between 2015 and 2016, our objective was to investigate the consistency of judges’ decisions and discern whether these decisions were influenced by individual ideologies. We employed semi-structured interviews, which we contend to be a valuable research method, to evaluate the […]

This article delves into Environmental Politics studies, which has emerged as a burgeoning field within Political Science since the 1990s, aiming to explore the intersection of environmentalism and politics, with a particular focus on examining the roles of the State and environmental movements in shaping this dynamic. In this proposal, we revisit a portion of the existing literature to highlight three crucial dimensions in understanding these studies: Firstly, we explore how environmentalism has shaped environmental policy and certain political practices, […]

The ongoing global climate emergency has sparked renewed interest in transitioning away from carbon-based economies towards renewable energy sources. While there exists a growing body of literature exploring the conditions, incentives, and processes of adopting solar and wind power worldwide, most of this research primarily focuses on advanced industrialized nations and China, with still considerably less studies on other developing countries. Kathryn Hochstetler’s latest book (2021), ‘Political economies of energy transition: wind and solar power in Brazil and South Africa’ […]

The article examines the relationship between victimization, fear of crime, and democratic legitimacy in Latin America, considering both the causal mechanisms and contextual effects involved in this process. Fear of crime and victimization are regarded as distinct (yet interconnected) phenomena, each potentially operating through different causal mechanisms. Democratic legitimacy is understood from a multidimensional perspective. The hypotheses consider country-level contextual factors and are tested using multilevel analysis, based on data from the 2016 and 2018 Americas Barometer. The findings underscore […]