Brazilian Research and Studies Journal

Governance rather than rules

2022-03-09T13:44:48+00:00

In recent years, Brazilian environmental policies have been criticized when compared to policies implemented particularly from 2004 to 2010. One particular feature is focused on environmental law enforcement governance, taking into account the expanding Protected Areas and Indigenous Lands, the development monitoring systems to detect vegetation loss, and others, like an important task force including Federal Police and other ministries. In this sense, this work aims to tell the rise and fall of Brazil's environmental policies, aiming to present the changing conditions from a strong to weak environmental governance. The hypothesis of the article is based on the idea that law enforcement governance is more important to explain the environmental policies outcomes than rules. Following literature, we use “environmental governance” to refer to the set of regulatory processes, mechanisms and organizations through which political actors influence environmental actions and outcomes (law enforcement). The research is based on extensive statistical data from Brazil's public data (deforestation, protected areas, illegal harvesting, budget, etc.) and also local and international reports. Additionally, the work aims to identify the environmental governance actors in Brazil: market actors, state actors and, more recently, civil society-based actors such as nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and local communities. The article evidences the importance of enforcement of the law and the weaknesses of environmental institutions and governance process considering the partisan perspective (state capacity). Finally, some proposals will be presented to overcome the ongoing extractive posture in Brazilian environmental governance.

The organizational ground of cabinet redesign

2022-01-28T11:23:08+00:00

This article approaches jointly at portfolios and the presidency in the study of cabinet politics, which brings the organizational features of executive politics into its focus. We analyzed these features focusing on presidential strategies of agency design and the appointment of ministers and presidential advisors. We argue that presidents redesign their cabinets, by either portfolio or the office of the president, to deal with coordination problems of the cabinets. We use a novel dataset to offer empirical evidence that focusing on cabinet redesign offers a more comprehensive picture of presidential strategies for managing cabinets than does a strict analysis of cabinet reshuffling looking only at the entry and exit of ministers. Cabinet redesign alters the organizational base of executive power and redefines the power that the president actually shares with other parties and groups. We analyzed Brazilian presidential cabinets from 1990 to 2022. We first describe the changes in the cabinet units and, after, estimate the cabinet survival of ministers and office holders. We found that presidents alter the make-up of all units of the cabinet, portfolios and the presidency agencies, and resort to reallocation of all ministers and presidential advisors, as needed.

The Culture Industry in Brazil

2022-03-09T13:57:27+00:00

The ‘classic' model of the culture industry, according to Adorno's and Horkheimer's typification in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, arises in the first decades of the 20th century, based in the appropriation, by the then rising big capital, of technologies of reproducing sounds and images like movies and gramophone with the possibility of broadcasting them, as in the case of radio and TV. According to this model, Brazil was one of the first countries in the world to have an indigenous culture industry, since radio broadcasting began there in the twenties and in the thirties appeared the earliest motion pictures produced in the country. In addition to it, television broadcasting in Brazil began to work as early as in 1950 and had since then an enormous development. As is broadly known, around 1990 culture industry as a whole went through a strong process of modification, due to the overcoming of the analogical technology and prevailing of digital media, on one hand, and as a consequence of the so called globalization, on the other. Also the Brazilian culture industry underwent this situation and the analysis of that process is the very topic of this article.

The Impact of COVID-19 Pandemic on the Issue and Ideological Congruence of Trump and Bolsonaro Administrations

2022-02-05T21:53:15+00:00

Recent political developments and government control actions in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic draw attention to the contrast between the duties of government and the demands of democratic representation. Elected by mobilizing far-right issues, Trump and Bolsonaro moved away from the WHO guidelines but had to accommodate demands on the health and on the social protection system on the one hand and demands from the economic sector on the other. This study used the MARPOR Project method to assess the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the issue and ideological congruence between the electoral and governmental arena in both the Trump and Bolsonaro Administrations. Findings reveal issue congruence between arenas in "National Way of Life: Positive", "Law and Order," and "Technology and Infrastructure" for Donald Trump, and "Welfare State Expansion" for Bolsonaro. Ideological estimation results show that Trump and Bolsonaro positioned to the right in their presidential elections, initially moved to the center-right. However, welfare policies actions at high frequency during the COVID-19 pandemic moved the ideological estimations of both governments to the center-left, despite their denial rhetoric.

Imprint

2022-08-12T15:32:38+00:00

The uncertain future of Brazilian democracy

2022-07-25T07:42:29+00:00