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 […]

The 2008 financial crisis stands out for being a crisis that occurred not in developing countries, but in the core capitalist countries, thus assuming greater proportions and with broader ramifications. In this context, the G20 gained new impetus, and, as a result, several studies have sought to understand not only the crisis but the role of the reformed G20 in the process of resolving it. Despite the relevance of this literature, little attention has been paid to the G20 outreach […]

In the article “Seven Reasons Why: A User’s Guide to Transparency and Reproducibility”, doi: 10.1590/1981-3821201900020001, at the header, Where it reads: […]

Despite a widespread agreement on the importance of transparency in science, a growing body of evidence suggests that both the natural and the social sciences are facing a reproducibility crisis. In this paper, we present seven reasons why journals and authors should implement — transparent guidelines. We argue that sharing replication materials, which include full disclosure of the methods used to collect and analyze data, the public availability of raw and manipulated data, in addition to computational scripts, may generate […]

Discussions in the field of urban policy in São Paulo hearken back to Brazil’s first attempts to build its own school of public policy, especially at the local level. The necessity of organizing space, and the community relations that existed there, with a focus on municipalities, from the 1950s on, were the impetus behind the creation of such institutions as the Instituto Brasileiro de Administração Pública (the Brazilian Institute of Public Administration, or IBAP) in Rio de Janeiro and the […]

Adopting a postcolonial perspective, this article approaches Brazilian South-South cooperation ‘narratives’ in Africa as part of a politics of identity that helps redefine Brazil’s place in the modern world. The article discusses how South-South cooperation operates as a site of knowledge and power through which a developmentalist Brazilian identity is reproduced and subalternity can be constantly renegotiated. Through a brief analysis of the narratives of Brazilian involvement in Angola, it emphasizes how the production of the state self is also […]

How do socially relevant attributes influence juvenile criminal sentencing? While judicial decisions should, in principle, be fully based on legally relevant factors such as the seriousness of the offense and the defendant’s criminal record, I ask whether and how extralegal characteristics related to the adolescent’s position in structural relations affect the decision-making process. I propose a mixed-methods design to study mechanisms of criminal sentencing. Using data from a representative sample of the São Paulo juvenile justice system records, I estimate […]

This article offers an explanation for the intensity of redistributive policies from Latin American leftist governments during the so-called ‘left turn’. It challenges the idea that the recent radical leftist governments are the product of region-specific characteristics. Based on theoretical models that analyze the implications of inequality in democracies and the moderating effects of different economic and institutional structures, it argues instead that the left’s redistributive policies were more intense in countries where capital mobility is low and there was […]

It is known that Brazilian presidents are able to approve most of their own legislative bills. However, it is still unclear what factors influence and explain the variation in presidents’ level of legislative success between different governments and even within an individual term. Seeking to understand this phenomenon, this article analyzes the legislative success of Brazilian presidents, based on the governments of Cardoso, Lula and Rousseff. More precisely, I examine the impact of prerogatives and exclusive policy matters on presidents […]

The book ‘Elecciones y partidos en América Latina en el cambio de ciclo’, edited by Manuel Alcántara, Daniel Buquet and María Laura Tagina, and published in 2018 by the Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas in Madrid, Spain, is composed of 20 chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. Most of the authors have received their PhDs from the University of Salamanca, and many of the chapters include sources of information produced in that institution. The project Parliamentarian Elites (PELA ) , by […]