Fabiano Santos

Participação como representação: o impacto das conferências nacionais de políticas públicas no Congresso Nacional

The relationship between representative democracy and participatory and deliberative experiences is not trivial. Those who endorse the discourse of a crisis in political representation sometimes defend participatory and deliberative modalities of democracy as a way of denying the legitimacy of the Legislative Branch, questioning the latters real capacity to express the peoples sovereign will. Still, the emergence of new democratic spaces, as well as new actors involved in the management of the public good, can be seen as a way of strengthening political representation, and not as a sign of weakening in its institutions. The current article defends this argument, seeking to demonstrate that the Brazilian national conferences on public policy have actually provided impetus to the National Congress, thereby strengthening representative democracy in Brazil through a participatory and deliberative practice.

La ciencia política en Brasil: el desafío de la expansión

Brazil’s political science managed to establish itself in the 1970s under a military regime. From the 1980s till the late 1990s the discipline grew and became institutionalized. However, there now exist within the country’s political science write out community two schools that simply do not communicate with each other, namely, an empirical school and a normative‐philosophical one. We propose that a political science community that still needs to expand must adopt a, so to speak, consociational model to organize the interaction between its main schools. To do so, there must be an ample consensus on the community’s lines of expansion, a consensus that should rest upon the improvement of the teaching of methods in humanities.

La ciencia política en Brasil en la última década: La nacionalización y la lenta superación del parroquialismo

El periodo 2005-2014 fue una de las mejores decadas de la Ciencia Politica (CP) brasilena. Para que esto ocurriera, contribuyeron, en primer lugar, el crecimiento de la economia del pais y el consecuente aumento del gasto publico dedicado a las universidades y a la actividad cientifica en general y las politicas del Ministerio de Educacion. Tambien fue vital para este exito la accion colectiva eficaz en el seno de la comunidad de politologos brasilenos. Consecuentemente, la CP brasilena se encuentra hoy, en el contexto latinoamericano, mas cercana al potencial generado por la poblacion y la economia del pais. Ademas, la disciplina ha sido nacionalizada y su agenda de investigacion hoy es menos parroquial. Por el lado negativo, sin embargo, se mantiene la relativamente baja visibilidad internacional de la produccion de los politologos brasilenos, se constata la escasa aplicacion fundamentada de metodos cualitativos y, recientemente, ha aflorado una considerable inseguridad sobre los recursos disponibles para la disciplina, teniendo en cuenta los anos de ajuste fiscal que se avecinan.

Political Careers in Brazil: Long-term Trends and Cross-sectional Variation

Brazils political system is a combination of presidentialism and federalism, liberal rules for the creation of political parties and elections based on open-list proportional representation at federal, state and municipal levels. This gives rise to a complex opportunity structure, characterized by many parties, a great number of available professional positions and medium to strong links across and between levels of government. As a consequence, political careers are fairly easy to enter, since party leaders have little control over the choice of aspirants, but politicians face a high turnover in legislative positions and a high risk of being left out of the game altogether. Three main points are defended here. First, it is inadequate to analyze Brazilian political careers under the same criteria used in the USA. Second, they approach the integrated model defined by Jens Borchert, with intense movement not only between the three levels, but also between the legislative and the executive branches of government. Third, notwithstanding all this, a mandate in the federal Chamber of Deputies is still the lynchpin of a successful political career.

Institutional choices and transition by transaction: political systems in Brazil and Spain from a comparative perspective

The objective of this article is to compare the performance of the political systems in Brazil and Spain. In both countries the redemocratization process occurred by way of negotiation with the leaders of the out-going authoritarian regimes. The hypothesis emerging from these two experiences is that this transition format limited the range of possible institutional choices. An analysis of three fundamental dimensions in these choices, the electoral and party systems in each country, the systems of government that were adopted, and the internal organization of the respective Legislative Branches indicates that the history of transition fostered a concentration of decision-making power in the hands of the Administration and the party leadership. Thus, despite important differences in the Constitutional dimension of the respective political systems, Brazil and Spain shaped similar procedural rules that have led to a huge public policy-making advantage for the Administration.

Brazilian Congress, 2014 elections and governability challenges

This research note examines the results of the 2014 elections focusing on the National Congress. Its main objective is to ponder over common claims and predictions regarding the future of Brazilian politics. Beyond agreements and alliances involved in the electoral dispute, President Dilma Rousseff once again shall face the political challenges and dilemmas of Brazilian presidentialism, namely, how to create and manage government coalitions capable of implementing a coherent political program with a fragmented and heterogeneous Congress. The critical examination of the current hypotheses on the latest elections, especially concerning parliamentary fragmentation and a shift towards the right-wing, will serve as a compass attempting to formulate possible answers to such a fundamental problem in Brazilian politics.

Informational theory and the selection of "rapporteurs" in the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

This article analyzes which factors determine rapporteurship allocation for reviewing bills of law submitted by the Brazilian Executive Branch to the Chamber of Deputies. We argue that the rapporteurs’ influence lies in their position as informational agents in the preliminary review committees. Based on this theoretical proposition, we identify the reasons why the first term of the Cardoso Administration witnessed a non-negligible number of rapporteurs from the minority opposition who were designated to report on bills submitted by the Executive. The hypotheses are tested through a statistical model that estimates the number of reports on Executive bills each Deputy obtained during the 1995-98 Legislature by using original data on the characteristics of the Deputies, their parties, and the committees to which they belonged.