Brazilian Political Science Review

e0003

Authors: Pablo de Rezende Saturnino Braga

This article aims to understand how democratization processes have influenced the foreign policy of regional powers in the Global South. Our theoretical model brings together the concepts of ‘regional power’ and ‘graduation dilemma’. It is used for a comparative study of Brazil and South Africa’s foreign policy in two stages: 01. ‘prestige diplomacy’ with a focus on human rights in the 1990s; and 02. global projection in the 2000s. We employ a comparative methodology that uses process tracing to build an analytical grid in order to reveal the particularities of the causal mechanisms in the historical trajectories of the two countries. Prestige diplomacy was successful for both Brazil and South Africa in the 1990s and both sought to play international leadership roles in the 2000s. Nonetheless, their responses to the graduation dilemmas were different, especially in relation to their respective regions. South Africa engaged more actively in crisis mediation processes and peace operations in its region; Brazil had a more inconsistent participation in regional crises and frequently retreated from regional alliances when seeking to increase its international status, which generated friction with its neighbors.

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Authors: Diego Moraes Silva, Thaise Kemer

This study investigates digital activism and democratic culture among citizens of São Paulo, Brazil. It aims to understand: 01. whether digital participation is becoming a surrogate instance of other forms of participation; and 02. whether digital activists share a specific political culture regarding democratic attitudes and behaviors. Drawing on a representative sample of 2,417 interviews, we apply multivariate analysis techniques to characterize digital activists in terms of political participation and democratic culture. Our findings show that digital participation complements – rather than replaces – other forms of participation. We also found that although the levels of democratic culture among digital-only activists were lower than among activists who participate in several arenas, digital-only activists embrace democratic culture more significantly than non-activists. This finding suggests that digital-only participation could be an important first step in developing democratic attitudes in individuals, albeit this form of participation is not sufficient to foster the highest level of democratic culture.

e0008

Authors: Ana Paula Karruz, Natália Sátyro, Eleonora Cunha

A growing body of literature addresses Brazil’s National Policy of Social Assistance, but little is known about the factors that affect the creation of nonprofit, private social assistance providers (PSAPs) in the country. This paper analyzes the historical patterns of PSAP creation in Brazil. We argue that the place of PSAPs within the social protection system changed during the 2000s and that this change stems from a reassessment of the state’s role in this area. We also contend that a switch in incentives and increased state provision slowed down the rate of PSAP creation. We conducted a document analysis to create a panorama of the institutional landscape (1930s-2000s); using a unique dataset, we also estimated the association between state presence and PSAP creation (2000-2017). This mixed-method research strategy supports our claim that the direct provision of social services by the state has contributed to the decline in PSAP creation, as the mixed-method approach reveals both a mechanism for institutional change and evidence of its implications.

e0003

Authors: Nunzio Alí

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 unacceptable inequalities seem acceptable. This paper defends the argument that only an ‘institution-dependent’ conception of equality of opportunity, such as Rawls’ fair equality opportunity, is the most adequate interpretation for a liberal democratic society. Nonetheless, it does not mean that individual merit has no place in liberal democratic societies. Fair equality of opportunity – if correctly understood – is deeply relevant and might contribute to a significant reduction of economic inequality, much more so than is currently perceived in the public debate.

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Authors: Marcelo de Almeida Medeiros, Igor Henriques Sabino de Farias, Ana Gabriela Belarmino

In the current international system, countries have responded in distinct manners to migratory phenomenon, principally in the internal sphere. Using Hermann’s Model, this study intends to verify, using documentary analysis, the level of influence which the international treaties signed by Brazil exercised on the formulation of migration legislation in the country between the Foreigner Statute (Law Nº 6.815/1980) and the 2017 Migration Law (Law Nº 13.445/2017). The results show that the Migration Law was more successful in enshrining terms established in international agreements, since the Foreigner Statute was created in a period in which the foreign policy agenda did not defend post-national citizenship.

e0007

Authors: Felipe Gonçalves Brasil, Renata Bichir

The recognition of issues as public problems and the ways governments prioritize them constitute focal points in the study of policy change and policy dynamics. In Brazil and other Latin American countries, social welfare systems and related policies have undergone transformations throughout the recent democratic period. This article aims to understand changes in the Brazilian social welfare agenda by means of an analysis of the attention given to social welfare policies at the federal level. The main analytical and methodological contribution of this article is its use of the research strategy developed under the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) to analyze the Brazilian situation. We drew on a set of unpublished datasets on the attention given by governments to social welfare policies from 1988 to 2018 that involves more than one thousand observations across six different datasets. The analyses are made at two different levels: first, we seek to understand macro trends and moments of continuity and inflection in social welfare policy by federal government administration. Second, we analyze the composition of the attention given to social welfare policies, thereby identifying the themes given the highest priority.

e0002

Authors: Marcia Rangel Candido, Luiz Augusto Campos, João Feres

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 de Pessoal de Nível Superior – CAPES) and published in the most prominent Brazilian journals between 2005 and 2018. Next, we scraped abstracts and other bibliographic information from publications in the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) platform and used a topic modeling technique to identify the most recurrent topics. Finally, we associated the identified topics with the authors’ gender. The data was examined based on two specific types of the gendered division of labor: the ‘horizontal’ and the ‘vertical’. Our results show that women and men as first authors tend to cluster around specific topics (horizontal division), but we did not find a tendency in journals to reject works on the topics in which women are better represented. In other words, differently from what was found by the international literature, the Brazilian journals in our sample do not seem to grant a lower status to these topics (vertical division). It is noteworthy, however, that men are the majority of first authors in all topics, including feminism.

e0004

Authors: Camila Rocha, Jonas Medeiros

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’.

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Authors: Gustavo Macedo

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 Council, and its relation to the principle of responsibility to protect (R2P). Finally, based on contextual evidence, I carry out a prospective analysis of the narratives that might be constructed to justify applying this principle to the Brazilian Amazon.

e0002

Authors: Pedro Rapozo

This study presents a reflection on violence and socio-environmental conflicts in indigenous territories in the Brazilian Amazon based on policies implemented during the Bolsonaro administration. It adopts an approach based on the statistical description of the data. In ‘Amazônia Legal’ violence against indigenous peoples and their territories has been marked by the consequences of economic development policies and the capitalist reappropriation of nature. State inefficiency in recognizing the territorial rights of indigenous peoples, even when the latter establish forms of (re)existing marked by political mobilizations, has led in recent years to multiple forms of violence evidenced in the violation of human rights, the state of exception, and the submission of life to the power of death.

e0004

Authors: André Freire

The 2015-2019 left-wing government alliance in Portugal merits attention for several reasons, of which four stand out. First, because, if it worked well, it may offer a solution to the crisis affecting social-democratic parties by pushing them back to the left. Second, because it may offer the radical left greater influence. Third, because existing studies offering comprehensive overviews of the Portuguese case tend to be descriptive in nature. Fourth, because existing studies that are more analytical and explanatory in nature tend to be rather limited in their scope. This study offers an original contribution in that it uses empirical data and takes a comprehensive, analytical and explanatory approach. We argue that the crisis was an important factor in changing old patterns of coalition politics on the Left in Portugal, both because it brought the socialists and radical left parties together in government, and because these changes were very important in guiding the socialists to shift in their policy orientations. Broadly, we argue that the new patterns of coalition politics on the Left and an increased influence of the radical left on domestic politics offer a means of renewing and rejuvenating social democratic parties in Portugal and elsewhere.

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Authors: Alessandro Tokumoto, Rodolfo Dias, Renato Perissinoto, Eric Gil Dantas

This text deals with BNDES between 1995 and 2016. It intends to answer two questions: 01. Which institutions did presidents and directors of BNDES pass through in the period before they achieved their positions in the Bank?; 02. Are there any differences, in this regard, between the PSDB and PT administrations? The article uses Social Network Analysis to capture the prior trajectory of individuals before they reached the positions of president and director of the Bank. The data is presented in four sociograms, one for the FHC administrations, another for the Lula administrations, a third for the Dilma Rousseff administrations, and a last one of directors and presidents of the Bank. Our data reveals important differences in relation to the structure of the trajectories of BNDES directors between different administrations, which could be linked to their different economic projects. By way of conclusion we make some final considerations about the data and its possible theoretical implications.

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Authors: Mariana Batista; Felix Lopez

Does ministry type influence profiles in upper-level bureaucracy? To govern, presidents need to 01. maintain control over the content of public policies, 02. make political concessions that earn them enough parliamentary support to see those policies approved, and 03. build or keep in place the bureaucratic competencies necessary to implement them. We argue that the president makes key appointments according to the nature of the policies of each ministry and their centrality in the executive branch’s decision-making process. Employing cluster analysis, we propose an objective classification of ministries into four types: ‘coordination’, ‘redistribution’ (social policy and income), ‘regulation’, and ‘distribution’. We also identify their relationship with the profiles of those who have occupied positions in the middle and upper echelons of Brazil’s federal bureaucracy – what are referred to in Brazilian nomenclature as ‘DAS roles’ (in which ‘DAS’ stands for Direção e Assessoramento Superior) – in the period from 1999 to 2016. Our findings indicate that presidents choose to professionalize the bureaucracy of the ‘coordination’ and ‘redistribution’ ministries, to appoint partisans to the bureaucracy of the ‘distribution’ and ‘regulation’ ministries, and to allocate partisans of the coalition partners to the ministries controlled by those parties.

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Authors: Luis Henrique Paiva; Fábio Veras Soares; Iara Azevedo Vitelli Viana; Flavio Cireno; Ana Clara Duran

Conditional cash transfer programmes have been adopted by several developing countries. Despite their acceptance, the independent role of the conditionalities on education and health remain under scrutiny. We have used an ecological design to study the association between conditionality monitoring and educational outcomes in Brazil’s Bolsa Família programme. As programme coverage (taken as a proxy of cash transfers) and monitoring and enforcement of the educational conditionalities (proxy of conditionalities) are not correlated at the municipal level, this study fits a number of different ordinary least square (OLS) and growth-curve models to explain variation in dropout rates and school progression in basic education in public schools across municipalities. After controlling for a number of covariates, we did not find a significant association between Bolsa Família coverage and dropout and progression rates. On the other hand, monitoring of school attendance was negatively associated with dropout rates and positively associated with school progression (in the OLS models and in the initial status of the growth-curve models). The association between attendance monitoring and the rate of change of educational indicators in growth curve models was not the same, however, suggesting that its possible positive effect on educational indicators are not strong enough to affect a general tendency for these indicators to converge in the recent Brazilian context.

1-16

Authors: Mark Setzler

The similarity of Jair Bolsonaro’s and Donald Trump’s divisive views on a variety of controversial issues has led many critics to argue that Brazilians elected a ‘Tropical Trump’ in 2018. Research on Trump’s election shows that authoritarian, racist, and sexist voters were essential to his narrow victory; however, it is an open question whether Trump’s pathway to power is the norm or the exception among right-wing nationalists. Even though candidates espousing controversial ideas about democracy and prejudice are gaining much electoral support, we know little about the extent to which their voters hold similar views. This study confirms that many Brazilians share Bolsonaro’s ambivalence about democracy as well as his attitudes denigrating women and sexual minorities; however, the degree of congruence between his supporters’ and his own views on these topics played a minor role at most in shaping voter choice. As in previous elections, ideology and partisanship – specifically, attitudes about Brazil’s Workers’ Party – largely explain whether a voter supported him. This finding largely holds across gender and racial boundaries, although white Brazilians appear to have been modestly more inclined than Afro-Brazilians to vote for Bolsonaro if they shared his divisive views.