An emerging literature finds that legislators frequently suffer a negative incumbency advantage in developing countries but disagrees as to the sources of this anti-incumbent bias. We contribute to this literature by examining the case of Brazil, where the extant literature predicts a large incumbency disadvantage. Building a new methodology for OLPR which leverages both inter- and intraparty thresholds, we find, contrary to expectations, a large ‘positive’ incumbency advantage. We further exploit within-country variation and show that this advantage appears to […]

Voting for a presidential ticket is a common characteristic that is particular to the majority of presidential systems. When a voter chooses a candidate for president, they are actually also voting for the other person on the ticket, in other words, the potential successor if the mandate is interrupted. Therefore, the selection of the candidate who will run for election alongside the presidential candidate represents an opportunity to nominate someone who can increase the ticket’s electorate or increase a possible […]

Although equality of opportunity is a fundamental idea of the egalitarian project, there is a continuing controversy about the effective distributive implications of the notion. This paper focuses on this controversy, and maintains that when equality of opportunity is correctly understood, it entails strong distributive implications. In this way, this paper intends to reject the notion that equality of opportunity is associated with a non-institutional idea of meritocracy: an idea which is often used as an ideological tool to make […]

The three principles of the Unified Health System (Sistema Único de Saúde – SUS) – universality, integrality, and equity – underlie most analyses of the Brazilian public health system. How these three elements combine to guarantee the right to health is a question that allows different interpretations. One possibility is through the lens of judicialization, a theme treated very competently by Octávio Ferraz (2021), based on consistent data and a meticulous theoretical discussion. The universal public system signified an enormous […]

In this article, I briefly present the multilateral discussion on ‘climate security’ and its relation to the protection of the Amazon. First, the text points out the importance of the Amazon for keeping global climate balance, the drastic change to the environmental agenda of Brazilian diplomacy, and the growing call in international public opinion for an internationally coordinated action to reverse deforestation in the region. Next, it introduces the concept of ‘climate security’, its development within the United Nations Security […]

In the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the left reached power in various regions of Latin America, remaining there for around 15 years – a period known as the ‘pink tide’. There was an expectation that the leftwing governments would stimulate social inclusion and the expansion of citizenship rights. However, the scenario began to change with the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil in 2016 and the election of presidents more aligned with the ideas of […]

In the article “The Gendered Division of Labor in Brazilian Political Science Journals”, DOI: http://doi.org/10.1590/1981-3821202100030002, published at 15(3): e0002. Page 18: […]

Despite the obvious connection between conservative Christian leaders and Bolsonaro, from his electoral campaign to the formation of his administration, religious agency in Brazilian politics goes beyond a mere conservative register. This article seeks to trace various dimensions of the trajectory made by evangelicals in Brazilian politics as a tipping factor in the emergence of a new protagonism of religious actors in politics. It discusses how the emergence of evangelicals as public actors has included different ideological and practical expressions, […]

This article focuses on the controversial and infamous behavior of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro in the public sphere. Based on an understanding that there exists something specific in relation to his strategy of rhetorical mobilization and the discursive domination related to broader dynamics in the Brazilian public sphere, we seek to analyze here the use of what we consider to be a ‘dominant counterpublicity’.

A longitudinal analysis of the use of televised electoral advertising by the two political parties that have been the central actors in presidential elections in post-democratization Brazil: the Workers’ Party (hereinafter referred to using the Portuguese acronym the ‘PT’) and the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (hereinafter referred to using the Portuguese acronym the ‘PSDB’). Our objective is to identify patterns and changes in Brazilian electoral advertising between 2002 and 2018 with reference to Brazil’s system of free electoral advertising time […]

This article analyzes the gendered division of labor in Brazilian political science. We seek to answer two questions: what are the predominant topics in political science that are being published in the discipline’s journals? How are women and men’s authorship distributed in these journals? The methodology involved three stages. First, we built a corpus with 2,363 articles that were classified as ‘political science and international relations’ by the Coordination for the Improvement for Higher Education Personnel ( Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento […]

The aim of this paper is to examine how, in the context of the Cold War and Latin America’s National Security dictatorships, conservative Brazilian intellectuals turned to history to demonstrate the country’s ‘incompatibility’ with progressive values and left-wing government. It analyzes a selection of lectures given by acclaimed conservative intellectuals at the National War College during the 1960s and 70s. An examination of these lectures demonstrates that many of the elements chosen to define ‘national identity’ under the ‘Estado Novo’ […]