Resumo em Inglês:

This article aims to analyze Brazil’s policy towards South America during Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva’s government by discussing what kind of leadership the country was able to perform in the region during this time. The authors examine the role played by the policy of International Cooperation for Development on such regional leadership. The central argument is that although Brazil has performed the role of a regional leader, there is a need for distinguishing leadership for regional matters – inwards regional leadership – from leadership for global issues – outwards regional leadership. We argue that inwards regional leadership was in fact successfully performed by Brazil in South America, mainly due to its role as a Development Leader. On the other hand, we also verified that such leadership for regional matters did not always allow Brazil to act on behalf of the entire region on the global arena. Nevertheless, we argue that Brazilian diplomacy left behind the belief that, in order to have global protagonism, the country should use South America as a regional launching platform. Instead, Brazil has been making use of global coalitions such as IBSA and BRICS to boost its global role.

Resumo em Inglês:

This article deals with the State regulation of drinking water and sanitation services in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires. Its main objective is to identify the continuities and ruptures in State regulation during the transition from private management (1993-2006) to renationalisation and State management (2006 onwards). The concept of “State capacities” (both administrative and relational) is used to assess regulatory performance. For the administrative capacities, the correspondence between the design and resources of the agencies, as well as the differences between their formal functions and actual practices, is examined. For the relational capacities, the policies of the National Government and its interaction with both the water and sanitation companies and the regulatory and control agencies are considered. The analysis is based on official documents, legislation and statistics, company balance sheets and reports, newspaper articles and semi-structured interviews.

Resumo em Inglês:

The aim of this article is to investigate the institutionalisation of the state Public Defender's Offices before and after the reform that granted independence and new functions to the Public Defender's Offices in Brazil. We attempt to understand these processes based on theories of judicial empowerment (ideational and governance perspectives), analyse them in the Brazilian states by means of an analysis of two indicators in three different time periods (before, during and after the reform) and verify to what extent the formal (de jure) advances were involved in the exercise of autonomy in the states. The analysis reveals that in spite of the formal achievement of independence, the majority of state Public Defender's Offices are not actually independent and there is a great gap between what the laws stipulate and what actually happens in the public provision of access to justice in Brazil.

Resumo em Inglês:

Regulatory agencies possess the particularity of being controlled by non-elected politicians whose power is derived from delegations made by incumbent powers. There exists, however, a concern with the creation of institutional mechanisms that permit public participation, thus guaranteeing greater democratization and social control of the regulatory process. One of these participatory mechanisms is the public hearing, which was not given much attention by Brazilian literature on lobbying and interest groups. This article seeks to contribute to fill this gap, focusing on the impact of interest groups acting upon the National Civil Aviation Agency, ANAC. Analyzing comments sent to the public hearings, we identified the commentators and the intensity of their participation, the impact of their efforts as measured by the rate of comment incorporation, and we explained why some comments are incorporated and others are not. We organized an original data base of the comments made at all ANAC public hearings between 2007 and May 2012. We analyzed 518 comments concerning 48 regulations. To test participant influence, we classified the comments by degree of technicality, economic or legal argument, authorship, and request for regulation. To understand the incorporation process, we used regression models through which we presented evidence that a comment's incorporation is directly related to its degree of technicality. Technical comments, which effectively subsidize the resolution, have a higher chance of being incorporated. Even more than corporate power or its force of participation, the technical quality proved to be the main factor for comment incorporation.

Resumo em Inglês:

This paper looks at the main finding by Amorim Neto (2011), namely that Brazil's power explains why it distanced itself from the country that had once been its great ally in the first half of the last century. We propose an alternative explanation grounded on the realist literature in IR. Ultimately, we seek to determine whether the variable has behaved in the same way for other South American countries, searching for independent variables that could help us explain a visible pattern in the region: the increasing distancing from the United States (USA) at the United Nations General Assembly. We want to contribute to the debate initiated by Amorim Neto (2011) and Schenoni (2012) for future research in the recent field of quantitative analysis of Brazilian Foreign Policy. Using Panel Corrected Standard Error analysis in ten South American countries from 1970 to 2007 we empirically prove that the lower the power gap between a South American country and the U.S., the lower its alignment with the USA in the UN General Assembly voting.