In multiparty presidential regimes, the head of the Executive manages a heterogeneous political base through a series of instruments. Among these tools, the use of patronage in appointments for governmental positions and the deployment of pork barrel to please congressional representatives have been highlighted by the literature as the glue that holds together multiparty coalitions. However, current studies neglect the role of politicians as active actors in multiparty presidential regimes in channeling resources to their constituencies and parties when holding a cabinet position. This paper contributes to the literature by merging these two tools of coalition maintenance. We analyze a complimentary strategy that benefits party leaders in the coalition by studying the relation of top-level cabinet appointments and grant transfers to subnational governments. Using data from Brazil, a paradigmatic case of multiparty presidential regime, we intend to answer the following question: Are ministries in Brazil being used to please ministers’ constituency and party allies? Using social networking analysis and econometrics for the period between 2011 and 2014, we provide evidence that ministers use their position to transfer funding to districts governed by fellow party members and not to their own political strongholds following a partisan pattern instead of a personal one.

Has war become obsolete? Some argue that macro-historical social processes are leading war into obsolescence, while for others that pattern is explained by the fact that war is a lingering potential outcome of international politics. I argue that both answers reveal a fundamental problem with the debate about the ‘end of war’. The focus on securing predictions about the end of war keeps analyses trapped in either a teleological or nomothetical linearity and overshadows the varied set of contingent mechanisms that allow for non-violent outcomes to prevail in contentious political episodes. The ‘War on War’ could benefit from analyses that asses shifting configurations of mechanisms in power politics.

Until 2013, the Brazilian executive branch had control over the execution of all discretionary public spending. In that context, all Brazilian legislators could do was amend the budget proposal prepared by the government. This article analyzes whether EC 86/2015, known as the mandatory budget amendment EC, has reduced executive dominance over the financial cycle of individual budget amendments. To this end, we examine descriptively and inferentially the main changes proposed by EC 86/2015, as well as data about the individual amendments executed before and after the constitutional change. Our results indicate that executive dominance was reduced after the change in the budget execution rules: the amount paid and the number of executed individual amendments have increased, while the profile of legislators with executed amendments also changed: Being part of the government coalition became less important. This article contributes to legislative studies by exploring the empirical implications of this important constitutional change. From a theoretical point of view, our findings challenge the expectation that the executive uses amendment execution as a bargaining tool to secure legislative support in roll-call votes in the National Congress, especially in the post-EC 86/2015 period.

The objective of this article is to problematize the place of liberalism in the work of Pierre Rosanvallon through a comparison of two moments of his intellectual career. The first moment is the book ‘Le capitalisme utopique’, in which the author extends Claude Lefort’s critique of totalitarianism to the classical economic liberalism of the 18th century, which he accused of suppressing the political in its representation of society as a market. The second moment is the book ‘Notre histoire intellectuelle et politique 1968-2018’, in which Rosanvallon criticizes the use of the concept of neoliberalism by the contemporary intellectual left, stating that the critique of this monolithic and elusive concept prevents us from imagining political alternatives. The question I probe is whether this criticism of contemporary uses of the concept of neoliberalism is compatible with the author's critique of classical liberalism. To understand the evolution of the problem of liberalism in Rosanvallon's work, I explore his dialogue with Michel Foucault, arguing that this exchange adds complexity to Rosanvallon's interpretation of liberalism. In closing, I assess Rosanvallon's position on overarching concepts such as totalitarianism and neoliberalism, in light of the distinction between the critique of the founding utopias of modernity and the analysis of democratic experiments in contemporaneity.

The objective of this article is to evaluate how the most important political families in the nine states of the Brazilian Legal Amazon responded to two aspects of the 2022 elections: the advance of ‘bolsonarismo’ as a political force in the Amazon, and the environmental agenda. Based on the concept of political dynasties, the main family groupings (one per state) were selected. Our research question is: did the support of candidates backed by these families for Lula or Bolsonaro imply the reproduction of their respective environmental agendas? Two of the selected families have a well-defined ideological trajectory, while seven are marked by great ideological flexibility and are considered ‘swing families’. However, the majority of the families have agendas related to environmental degradation, and their trajectory converged towards candidates linked to anti-environmentalism. One family deviates from the analytical expectation, following a dynamic of economic interests and political calculation specific to the current situation. Evaluating the government programs of the state-level candidates launched or supported by these dynasties, we find that, in a national context marked by a well-defined ideological and programmatic dispute (in which the environmental agenda occupied a strategic place), support for Lula or Bolsonaro also led, in all cases, to the broad reproduction of their environmental agendas.

This article evaluates the effects of two educational policies implemented in the Brazilian state of Ceará. The first was a tax incentive (TI) for mayors to improve municipal education. Under this policy, municipal tax transfers were conditioned on educational achievement. The second was a program to offer educational technical assistance (TA) to municipalities. The impact of these policies was estimated by employing the synthetic control method to create a synthetic Ceará not affected by TI and TA. When the two policies were combined, the results were consistent with a 12 percent increase in Portuguese test scores in primary education and a 6.5 percent increase in lower secondary education. There were similar increases in mathematics test scores; however, these were not statistically significant. This study also investigates the impact of educational interventions on upper secondary schools, which, despite not being directly affected by the new policies, received better-prepared students from lower secondary schools. The findings show no effect on this level of education, highlighting the need for debate on how to extend the benefits of educational policies to upper secondary schools, as well as to other Brazilian states. This research is the first to analyze the impacts of the policies in Ceará on primary, lower secondary, and upper secondary schools using data from 1995 to 2019.

This paper focuses on the timing of coalition formation under presidential systems. While elections in parliamentary regimes have recently been characterized by a high degree of uncertainty both in the results and the formation of cabinets, this is not the case for presidential politics. As a result, we argue that coalition cycles differ across systems of government. As a matter of fact, we argue that the process of coalition formation under presidentialism is more complicated. To test our claim, we look at forty-four multiparty governments in Latin America and Asia. We find that presidentialism — with its fixed mandate and its specific institutional mechanism for selecting the president — directly affects the ‘coalition life cycle’ and fosters a stronger propensity to pre-electoral agreements.

Evangelical black activism exists in Brazil since the 1970s. Its current public reemergence, however, is still under-explored in the social sciences. Moreover, part of the specialized literature has recently characterized this activism as incomplete – since its actors are considered to be ‘rejecting African inheritances’ – and advocates that black and evangelical identities are incompatible. Differing from this perspective, this article shows how evangelicals participate in the public problematization of racism; it proposes to address this issue with a non-essentialist approach in three arguments: 01. evangelical black activism has reemerged publicly; 02. actors configure their religious and racial identities according to the problematic situations and public arenas in which they engage, which requires scholars to adopt a situated and relational approach to this form of activism; 03. the ways in which they reemerge and configure their identities are conditioned by the politically liminal situation of evangelical black actors and, consequently, by their need to acquire the status of a legitimate social movement and legitimate evangelicals. This article presents partial results of a research effort conducted between 2019 and 2021, in which qualitative research methods and techniques were used, such as direct and participant observation (in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Pernambuco), semi-directed interviews, document analysis, and social media monitoring.