The Mercosur Parliament was created in 2005 to represent the peoples of the region. The constitutive documents affirm the necessity of reinforcing and deepening integration and democracy within Mercosur through an efficient and balanced institutional structure. In order to examine the potential role of the Parliament in strengthening the institutional framework of the bloc, this paper aims to analyse its initial years of activity. What is the institutionalization level reached by the assembly so far? The research is grounded on […]

The received wisdom on Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s was that countries where presidents enjoyed strong constitutional powers and where multiparty coalitions prevailed would be doomed to instability and institutional crises, while countries boasting weak presidents and strong parties were expected to consolidate democratic rule. After almost two decades, it is now widely acknowledged that this prediction failed. Recent re-conceptualizations of presidentialism have partly corrected the flaws in the established diagnosis but left unexplained the role of checks […]

Norberto Bobbio (2005) taught us that the “great dichotomy” between public and private constitutes one of the most important definitions in political and social thought. It is as relevant as peace and war, democracy and autocracy, society and community, state of nature and civil state. By itself, this assertion would justify the major interest elicited by the work of Telma Maria Gonçalves Menicucci among public policy scholars and activists from the health field. Público e privado na política de assistência […]

Democracy has been one of the most studied themes in the field of comparative political science. This is owed not just to questions of value but also to countries’ growing adherence over time to this type of regime. Studies in this area have sought to answer two main questions: what are the conditions under which democracy emerges and what are the conditions under which democracy survives. The debates have been permeated by different interpretations and currents, most of which use […]

Introduction Our objective is to report the results of an ongoing comparative research project that aims to investigate the institutional and political determinants of government performance in Latin America. Our dependent variable is the legislative success of the executive. Studies on government performance in parliamentary countries usually focus on the stability of the government measured by its duration. The literature on presidential performance, in turn, has turned its attention to the fate of bills sponsored by the government. These different […]

The aim of this article is to discuss the distribution of preferences of members of the Chilean and Argentinian Congress on foreign policy issues through the analysis of roll call votes. This goal is guided by the debate in Latin American literature concerning the decision-making process in foreign policy. The predominant argument focuses on the Executive as the principal decision-maker, disregarding the Legislative as relevant in this field. Thus, legislators would tend to abdicate from their preferences in determining foreign […]

The present article discusses the conditions for the adoption of development strategies in Latin America in the aftermath of neoliberal reforms, focusing specifically on the role of political institutions as a component of productive regimes in selected countries. Development is treated as an endogenous process, shaped over time in terms of trajectories that are continuously redefined according to specific political conjunctures. Having moved from restricted democracies or authoritarian regimes and autarchic economies to mass democracies operating in the context of […]

Abstract Many observers have expressed concern that low voter turnout reflects an acute shortcoming in democratic politics. One proposed remedy, making voting compulsory, has garnered increasing attention among academics over recent years. Our article focuses on some of the technical properties of compulsory voting rules (CVR) while ignoring the philosophical debate over whether voting should be an obligation or a right. Using basic probability analysis, we compare a voluntary voting rule (VVR) to a compulsory one. We show that, under […]

Abstract The article presents a comparison between some aspects of the socio-political theories of Auguste Comte and John Rawls. Its aim is to highlight certain elements that approximate and distance the two authors from one another in terms of political objectives and theoretical-methodological procedures, particularly on the basis of the Comtean perspective. The result is surprising: applying the mutatis mutandis methodological clause, i.e., considering the different socio-political contexts, there are more elements that approximate Rawls to Comte than elements that […]

Abstract This paper discusses the relationship between technological development and the weapons industry in Brazil, stressing the dependence of the latter on the former. It shows how changes in the arms trade have meant that the production of small arms for export is currently prioritized. The conclusion is that maintaining projects of this nature is only feasible by taking advantage of the remaining industrial base for dual-use production, i.e., to meet both civilian and military demand. Lastly, the possibility that […]

The book Reforma da previdência em perspectiva comparada: Executivo, Legislativo e sindicatos na Argentina e no Brasil, originally a Ph.D. thesis, presents an analysis of trade unionism-government interaction in the pension system reform processes during the administrations of presidents Carlos Menem (1989-1999) of Argentina and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995-2002) of Brazil. The author starts off from the following questions. To what extent can the trade union (TU) movement influence the course of pension system reform? Under what politico-institutional conditions is […]

Multilateral Cooperation Although the essays constitute, in the author’s own words, a defence of multilateralism (p. 16), international multilateral cooperation is neither seen as a panacea, nor as easy to achieve. Hence the need to understand the limits and potentialities of multilateral institutions, especially of the UN System (p. 17), as well as how multilateral political will is formed (p. 49). On the question of multilateral political will, the author states that the greatest difficulty in consensus-building originates in the […]