Resumo em Inglês:

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.

Resumo em Inglês:

Is there Executive interference in the regulatory agencies after its formal establishment as independent bodies? Under what conditions the Executive chooses to interfere in the agencies? This paper analyses the degree of interference in Brazilian national regulatory agencies and provide a tentative explanation for the variation in the degree of interference. The basic hypotheses is that credibility costs, the degree of formal independence and the preferences of presidents are crucial factors affecting the extent to which presidents interfere in the regulatory process. A random effects model is estimated with panel data for the period between 1997 and 2008 covering ten national agencies. The degree of interference is operationalized by an index built using factor analysis. The data suggest that there is political interference, which varies across agencies and over time. The results show that the preferences of the president and some issue area specificity matters for the choice that presidents make regarding the interference in the regulatory process.

Resumo em Inglês:

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.

Resumo em Inglês:

This paper analyses intergovernmental relations in Brazil based on the dynamics of the distribution of federal discretionary transfers to the states between 1997 and 2008. The theme becomes more relevant when we consider the process of fiscal recentralization that has taken place in Brazil, particularly from 1994 on, and the importance of discretionary transfers for state budgets. Our purpose is to identify which factors can account for a higher or lower state's share in overall resources, by building on two explanatory dimensions: the partisan-political and the social-redistributive. The first one examines how the political dynamic affects resource allocation; the second, if discretionary transfers exhibit a redistributive character across states. Our findings show that a governor's partisan alignment with the president or with the president's government coalition are important factors in determining higher resource allocation for his/her state, and that states that are overrepresented in the lower chamber are favored. We have also found a redistributive character associated with federal discretionary transfers, favoring states with lower Human Development Index (HDI) rankings.

Resumo em Inglês:

The aim of this article is to analyse the process of expansion of the Belo Horizonte Metropolitan Area, created in 1973 with 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 Constitutions 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, symbolic and political/electoral nature that explain the expansion of the BHMA, also very present in other regions. It underscores the impact of the model of metropolitan management adopted after the 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 the MAs in the state of Minas Gerais was sought to be overcome, by means of adopting a new institutional model, in the mid-2000s.