This article seeks to address the question of how the Federal Senate acts in approving the appointment of authorities to lead diplomatic missions and to determine if the decision-making process on foreign policy is similar to the handling of other matters. It therefore aims to contribute to the debate about the action of lawmakers in the foreign policy decision-making process in Brazil and in the understanding of the elements that influence the approval process of authorities by the Federal Senate. […]

In the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 04, 1989, which epitomized the end of the Cold War, many countries experienced new forms of democratization with the involvement of non-State actors in politics. It had taken two decades for the democratic transition to spread around the world. Blossoming civil society organizations would need another decade to “democratize democracy” () in these countries. In the meantime, almost every country from Latin America and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe […]

This article addresses the subject of clientelism with reference to an unprecedented set of data resulting from a survey of 422 municipal councilors in 44 Brazilian municipalities. Our aim was to verify whether a propensity for clientelist behavior was uniformly distributed among the councilors surveyed and, in the event that it was not, to identify factors that could explain any variations. Our analysis revealed that clientelism – understood as the degree of exposure on the part of councilors to voter […]

From the political point of view, major sporting events are seen as a way of strengthening a country’s institutional image and, as a result, the popularity of its leaders. Events in Brazil in response to the 2014 World Cup, however, point towards other conclusions. The objective of this article is to analyze the relationship between public opinion and the World Cup in Brazil with reference to data from quantitative and qualitative opinion polls conducted by the Office of the Secretary […]

The article aims at understanding the determinants of ministerial turnover in presidential systems. There are essentially three key factors that govern the propensity for ministerial turnover in a presidential system: 01. political ambition – reflected in the individual or collective strategies and tactics employed by the party-affiliated actors represented in the cabinet; 02. the presence or absence of a governing coalition – which has bearing on the degree of ideological distance between the president and such political parties as form […]

Written by one of Brazil’s leading proponents of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of discourse, ‘1961-1964: The Brazilian Dictatorship in Two Coups’ presents an innovative conception of the events that led up to a dictatorship that lasted 21 years. A Laclauean perspective permeates the entire work. One can appreciate the discourse of the main actors involved – political groups, unions, social and military movements – through solid documentary analysis in which special attention is paid to antagonistic debates that reveal the construction […]

Elected by the Oxford Dictionary as the word of the year in 2016, ‘Post-truth’ has become an object of study in several different fields. In his homonymous book, Lee McIntyre defines it as the phenomenon whereby “objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (McINTYRE, 2018, p. 05) or as “part of a growing international trend where some feel emboldened to bend reality to fit their opinions, rather than the other way […]

To bring democracy to a city is to move toward the ideal of the inclusive city – a particular challenge in a world where housing costs and demand for housing are both on the rise, and both factors in the problems of housing affordability and displacement. The notion of an inclusive city entails not only housing interventions, but also the inclusion of civil society in official decision-making. ‘Democratizing Urban Development: Community Organizations for Housing across the United States and Brazil’ […]

This article presents a critical evaluation of the study of military coercion, a field that has gained growing prominence since the end of the Cold War. Its purpose is to analyze what may be the most representative work to come out of this line of research: Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War, by Robert A. Pape (1996). It will interrogate the underlying premise of the work – one shared by the remainder of the substantial literature in […]

The development of intelligence and internal security institutions in Portugal and Brazil were directly influenced by the ways in which both countries transitioned to democracy and by the nature of their political regimes prior to the mid-1970s. This article compares these processes, highlighting how Brazilian and Portuguese intelligence and public security institutions and bodies developed over the course of the 20th century, and in particular following democratization of their political regimes. Our analysis examines the main factors explaining the arrangements […]

This article analyzes aspects of two ubiquitous phenomena in contemporary societies: migration and violations of rights to physical integrity. It focuses on violations of rights to physical integrity, such as torture and political assassination, that take place in the countries that migrants leave behind (home countries). This paper explores the association between migration and violent political repression via one observable aspect of migration: transfers of sums of money from migrants to individuals in their home countries. These transfers are called […]

The ‘salience theory of party competition’ moves on from the ‘programmatic paradox’ imposed by the classic Downsian proximity model and demonstrates that parties compete with each other by means of the emphases they give to certain issues. They do this by leveraging their government programs to shape voter preferences that form an innate component of the electoral process. This phenomenon has been neglected in a Brazil supposedly dominated by weak parties, personality politics and clientelism. This scenario is most pronounced […]