Brazilian Political Science Review

10-38

Authors: Vanessa Elias Oliveira, Lincoln Noronha

This paper aims to demonstrate how the responses of public health officials to judicial decisions have shaped drug distribution policies in the state of São Paulo. Data was collected and structured interviews were conducted at the state of São Paulo Department for Health in order to show how different strategies of response to judicial decisions affected the policy of medication distribution by the public sector. We also analysed recent Supreme Federal Court jurisprudence to show how the Court reformed its earlier views on the subject as a result of the demands made by public health officials. It is our understanding that the current literature has failed to produce a more comprehensive view of this phenomenon because of its focus solely on judicial decisions, without taking a step further to analyse how public health officials reacted to them, which would have addressed the compliance problem inherent to positive rights enforcement. Finally, we see this process not as merely positive or negative, but as one that goes beyond the different normative biases present in the literature on the subject, and focus on the mechanisms behind the impact of the judicialization of the right to healthcare on policies of medication distribution.

75-93

Authors: Eduardo Munhoz Svartman

This article discusses the military relations between Brazil and United States in the Cold War. Focusing on the dynamic of these relations and on arms transfers, one argues that the Brazilian military sought in the USA a path towards organizational modernization, industrialization and regional supremacy. Thus Brazil operated a movement from a very close and dependent position to a more distant one, since Washington did not support Brazilian objectives of military modernization and strategic autonomy and the anticommunist agenda became less important to Brazil.

117-145

Authors: Carlos Aurélio Pimenta & Gustavo Gomes Machado

The aim of this article is to analyse the process of expansion of the Belo Horiz onte Metropolit an A rea, cre ated in 1973 wit h 14 municipalities, which today comprises 34 municipalities, making it the second largest MA in Brazil. After the redemocratization, more specifically after the promulgation of the State Const itut ions in the late 1980s, several new metropolitan areas were created in the country, and all nine MAs instituted in the early 1970s increased their number of member municipalities, in a context of low prioritization of the MAs by the federal government. The article highlights the factors of a legal, institutional, symbol ic and pol it ical/electoral nature that explain the expansion of the BHMA, also very present in other regions. It underscores the impact of the model of met ropol it an management adopted after t he 1989 State Constitution on the capacity to produce cooperative action in the metropolitan sphere. It also analyses the manner in which the dilemma of collective action for the management of t he MAs in the state of Minas Gerais was sought to be overcome, by means of adopting a new institutional model, in the mid-2000s.