This article looks into Amnesty International’s most controversial issue expansion, the incorporation of Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ESCR) in its mission statement. It starts with a discussion on global frames drawing from the sociology of transnational movements to reflect on the weight of the North-South dichotomy in AI’s understanding of human rights as expressed in its most relevant documents. To this end, we reviewed the annual reports published by the organization from 2001 to 2018 using issue-oriented category-based content […]

Can crime victimization affect support for democracy through its effect on satisfaction with democracy? Drawing upon AmericasBarometer data representative of eighteen Latin American countries, this study answers this question by employing an identification strategy that deals with two strong limitations to causal inference with observational data: covariate imbalance between treatment and control groups and unobserved confounders bias. This strategy combines matching, a novel estimation for mediation analysis, regression-with-residuals, sensitivity analyses, and tests that rule out the possibility of reverse causality. […]

Black Atlantic is the term used to describe the transnationality and interculturality of the space-place that comprises Africa (the continent), the Americas, and Europe (the diaspora). It is in the Black Atlantic diaspora that one of the many black movements is established: Pan-Africanism. The pan-Africanist movement emerged in the early twentieth century as an alternative means to fight against oppression and exploitation and for the emancipation of all black peoples in the world. This study aims to investigate the dialogue […]

This article presents a theoretical-normative instrument for climate policymakers to address the climate issue from the social studies’ sociological perspective intersected with political ecology. Climate initiatives and policies are on the agenda of various social groups; at the same time, climate policymakers need instruments. Brazil lacks such theoretical-normative instruments. Based on a comprehensive review of the literature on climate ethics from a sociological perspective, this study developed and tested ‘PLANB Index’ in twenty-two Brazilian climate instruments formulated by the state, […]

Despite its recent growth, the academic literature on credit displays theoretical controversies and empirical differences regarding the predominant effects of consumer credit policies. At the same time, such policies have been given central importance in the historical accounts of a government that adopted them on a large scale in Brazil: the Lula government. Drawing upon theoretical debates and descriptive content, this article aims to contribute to the existing literature by examining the trajectory of Brazilian credit policies from the perspective […]

The objective of this article is to problematize the place of liberalism in the work of Pierre Rosanvallon through a comparison of two moments of his intellectual career. The first moment is the book ‘Le capitalisme utopique’, in which the author extends Claude Lefort’s critique of totalitarianism to the classical economic liberalism of the 18th century, which he accused of suppressing the political in its representation of society as a market. The second moment is the book ‘Notre histoire intellectuelle […]

(Da Ros, Luciano and Taylor, Matthew M. Brazilian Politics on Trial: Corruption Reform under Democracy. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2022) The crisis of liberal democracies is perhaps the main topic in political science in this century. Its relevance goes beyond the boundaries of academia, as attested by the number of books on authoritarianism and democratic backsliding making their way onto bestseller lists. Brazil can undoubtedly be included as a case study representative of this process in which democratic institutions are […]

Until 2013, the Brazilian executive branch had control over the execution of all discretionary public spending. In that context, all Brazilian legislators could do was amend the budget proposal prepared by the government. This article analyzes whether EC 86/2015, known as the mandatory budget amendment EC, has reduced executive dominance over the financial cycle of individual budget amendments. To this end, we examine descriptively and inferentially the main changes proposed by EC 86/2015, as well as data about the individual […]

In the article “Clientelism and Local Politics: Interactions Between Municipal Councilors and Voters in the State of Minas Gerais”, DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1981-3821201900030002, published at 13(3): e0002. Page 1: […]

Has war become obsolete? Some argue that macro-historical social processes are leading war into obsolescence, while for others that pattern is explained by the fact that war is a lingering potential outcome of international politics. I argue that both answers reveal a fundamental problem with the debate about the ‘end of war’. The focus on securing predictions about the end of war keeps analyses trapped in either a teleological or nomothetical linearity and overshadows the varied set of contingent mechanisms […]

This article evaluates the effects of two educational policies implemented in the Brazilian state of Ceará. The first was a tax incentive (TI) for mayors to improve municipal education. Under this policy, municipal tax transfers were conditioned on educational achievement. The second was a program to offer educational technical assistance (TA) to municipalities. The impact of these policies was estimated by employing the synthetic control method to create a synthetic Ceará not affected by TI and TA. When the two […]

Among the themes frequently studied by Brazilian social movement’s scholars is the relationship between movements and the state. The Lula administrations (2003-2010) were marked by intense state-society interactions, which allowed for important theoretical and analytical advances (ABERS and BULOW, 2011; ABERS, SERAFIM and TATAGIBA, 2014; BLIKSTAD, 2012; DOWBOR, 2012; DOWBOR et al. 2018; GUTIERRES, 2018; GURZA LAVALLE et al., 2018; NASCIMENTO, 2012; SILVA and SCHMITT, 2012; SILVA and OLIVEIRA, 2011; TATAGIBA and TEIXEIRA, 2021; TEIXERA, 2013). The ‘mutual constitution’, the […]