Resumo em Inglês:

This article investigates the electorally expressed ideology of Brazilian voters via ecological analysis at the municipal level between 1994 and 2018. Our purpose is to analyze the main conditioners of aggregated patterns of ideology measured at a high spatial resolution. We test four major explanations for the variation in ideology at the municipal level: the effect of incumbent alignments, social modernization, political pluralism, and social inclusion. We find that although the Brazilian electorate as a whole leans to the right, there has been a ‘gravitational effect’ exerted by presidential incumbents over local ideology, and during the PT years this was visible in municipal outcomes. However, the vast majority of municipalities tended to the right even during the period of PT national government. During the late Dilma Rousseff years there was a return to a more conservative vote-revealed ideology at the local level, with a sharper veer to the right in the 2016 municipal and 2018 federal elections under Michel Temer. Overall, when we examine local voting in PR elections, we observe that there was no durable electoral realignment in the period under study.

Resumo em Inglês:

This study presents the UN's narrative in the construction of the post-war world. Spanning a period of more than 70 years, this narrative is described through the parallel narrative of football as the game that everyone can play and win, regardless of size, attributes and abilities. Using the language of football through the words of Eduardo Galeano, the paper reveals a common history with different aspects, which is read largely in the light of Michel Foucault's thinking. In this respect, the UN is approached as fully adapted to a sovereign rationalism that organises reality by ordering each category of (international) political practice and discourse in terms of surveillance and suppression, while at the same time wielding, through its choice of strategies and techniques, a power that has a reformative and productive side. The basic aim of this study is to demonstrate, through the analogy with football, the dual nature of the UN through its application of technologies of power over the course of its lifelong operation.

Resumo em Inglês:

Participatory Budgets, Public Policy Conferences and Public Policy Management Councils, among other participatory institutions in Brazil, are altering the configuration of processes that define and elaborate public policies, while incorporating citizens and civil associations into political spaces where different mechanisms of participation and representation converge. These new institutions call for reflections concerning political inclusion and representation that go beyond electoral models. We propose to contribute to these debates by discussing the perceptions of some actors, in particular the leaders of civil society organizations, with regard to conferences' capacity for inclusion, and the meanings that they attribute to representation through conferences. The research findings allow us to identify a broadening of the idea of political inclusion and to highlight some of the tensions raised by demands for representation as presence in conference spaces.

Resumo em Inglês:

It is known that Brazilian presidents are able to approve most of their own legislative bills. However, it is still unclear what factors influence and explain the variation in presidents' level of legislative success between different governments and even within an individual term. Seeking to understand this phenomenon, this article analyzes the legislative success of Brazilian presidents, based on the governments of Cardoso, Lula and Rousseff. More precisely, I examine the impact of prerogatives and exclusive policy matters on presidents and political contexts in determining legislative success. The results point to prerogatives and exclusive matters having a positive influence on success rates, such as provisional measures and administrative and budgetary matters. They also indicate that legislative success is enhanced during the honeymoon period, that is, the further away a government is from an electoral period, and there is significant positive variation as the size of the governing coalition increases. However, the results show that skill does not impact significantly on success, and popularity has a negative effect, thus not contributing to Brazilian presidents' legislative success.

Resumo em Inglês:

This article offers an explanation for the intensity of redistributive policies from Latin American leftist governments during the so-called 'left turn'. It challenges the idea that the recent radical leftist governments are the product of region-specific characteristics. Based on theoretical models that analyze the implications of inequality in democracies and the moderating effects of different economic and institutional structures, it argues instead that the left's redistributive policies were more intense in countries where capital mobility is low and there was no pro-elite legislative veto player. To evaluate this explanation, we offer original evidence from time-series -cross-section regression models of social spending, based on data from thirteen Latin American countries over the years 2003 to 2015. The results show partial support for the explanation: there is strong evidence that social spending decreased with the ideological distance between the president and the pro-elite veto player, but only weak evidence that capital mobility attenuated this effect.

Resumo em Inglês:

How do socially relevant attributes influence juvenile criminal sentencing? While judicial decisions should, in principle, be fully based on legally relevant factors such as the seriousness of the offense and the defendant’s criminal record, I ask whether and how extralegal characteristics related to the adolescent’s position in structural relations affect the decision-making process. I propose a mixed-methods design to study mechanisms of criminal sentencing. Using data from a representative sample of the São Paulo juvenile justice system records, I estimate mixed-effects logistic models to assess the probability of being sentenced to confinement given certain extralegal attributes, while controlling for legally relevant variables. Interaction effects show that adolescents registered as full-time students and classified as drug users are more likely to be sentenced to confinement than their counterparts, even when the arraignment is the same. The second step involved weekly visits to the juvenile courthouse in São Paulo over four months to observe judicial hearings. Prosecutors are central to the decision-making process. The standard decision-making mechanism is based on police documents and legally relevant information. When there is a rupture in the definition of the situation (usually when non-minority defendants enter the courtroom), a new mechanism emerges and more lenient decisions are made.

Resumo em Inglês:

Adopting a postcolonial perspective, this article approaches Brazilian South-South cooperation ‘narratives’ in Africa as part of a politics of identity that helps redefine Brazil’s place in the modern world. The article discusses how South-South cooperation operates as a site of knowledge and power through which a developmentalist Brazilian identity is reproduced and subalternity can be constantly renegotiated. Through a brief analysis of the narratives of Brazilian involvement in Angola, it emphasizes how the production of the state self is also permeated by several ambivalences that update colonial tropes and bring new forms of subjugation. If, on the one hand, the movement undertaken in the article permits discussing the very ambiguity of the postcolonial condition – mainly by exposing the tensions and indeterminacies that permeate Brazil’s engagements in the global arena – on the other hand, it opens up new theoretical avenues for analyzing Brazilian foreign policy.