Many countries have experimented with different electoral rules in order either to increase involvement in the political system or make it easier to form stable governments. Barry Ames explores this important topic in one of the world's most populous and important democracies, Brazil. This book locates one of the sources of Brazil's "crisis of governance" in the nation's unique electoral system, a system that produces a multiplicity of weak parties and individualistic, pork-oriented politicians with little accountability to citizens. It explains the government's difficulties in adopting innovative policies by examining electoral rules, cabinet formation, executive-legislative conflict, party discipline and legislative negotiation. The book combines extensive use of new sources of data, ranging from historical and demographic analysis in focused comparisons of individual states to unique sources of data for the exploration of legislative politics. The discussion of party discipline in the Chamber of Deputies is the first multivariate model of party cooperation or defection in Latin America that includes measures of such important phenomena as constituency effects, pork-barrel receipts, ideology, electoral insecurity, and intention to seek reelection. With a unique data set and a sophisticated application of rational choice theory, Barry Ames demonstrates the effect of different electoral rules for election to Brazil's legislature. The readership of this book includes anyone wanting to understand the crisis of democratic politics in Brazil. The book will be especially useful to scholars and students in the areas of comparative politics, Latin American politics, electoral analysis, and legislative studies. Barry Ames is the Andrew Mellon Professor of Comparative Politics and Chair, Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh.

With contributions from leading international scholars, this Handbook offers the most rigorous and up-to-date analyses of virtually every aspect of Brazilian politics, including inequality, environmental politics, foreign policy, economic policy making, social policy, and human rights. The Handbook is divided into three major sections: Part 1 focuses on mass behavior, while Part 2 moves to representation, and Part 3 treats political economy and policy. The Handbook proffers five chapters on mass politics, focusing on corruption, participation, gender, race, and religion; three chapters on civil society, assessing social movements, grass-roots participation, and lobbying; seven chapters focusing on money and campaigns, federalism, retrospective voting, partisanship, ideology, the political right, and negative partisanship; five chapters on coalitional presidentialism, participatory institutions, judicial politics, and the political character of the bureaucracy, and eight chapters on inequality, the environment, foreign policy, economic and industrial policy, social programs, and human rights. This Handbook is an essential resource for students, researchers, and all those looking to understand contemporary Brazilian politics.

Political parties and democratic politics go hand in hand. Since parties matter, it matters too when elected politicians change party affiliation. This book shows why, when, and to what effect politicians switch parties in pursuit of their goals, as constrained by institutions and in response to their environments.

How race quotas--and their public perception--reflect Brazil's complicated history with racial injustice

This book provides the first cross-regional study of an increasingly important form of politics: coalitional presidentialism. Drawing on original research of minority presidents in the democratising and hybrid regimes of Armenia, Benin, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Kenya, Malawi, Russia, and Ukraine, it seeks to understand how presidents who lack single party legislative majorities build and manage cross-party support in legislative assemblies. It develops a framework for analysing this phenomenon, and blends data from MP surveys, detailed case studies, and wider legislative and political contexts, to analyse systematically the tools that presidents deploy to manage their coalitions. The authors focus on five key legislative, cabinet, partisan, budget, and informal (exchange of favours) tools that are utilised by minority presidents. They contend that these constitute the 'toolbox' for coalition management, and argue that minority presidents will act with imperfect or incomplete information to deploy tools that provide the highest return of political support with the lowest expenditure of political capital. In developing this analysis, the book assembles a set of concepts, definitions, indicators, analytical frameworks, and propositions that establish the main parameters of coalitional presidentialism. In this way, Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective provides crucial insights into this mode of governance. Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

"Analyzes the development of the movement for agrarian reform in Brazil, and attempts to explain the major moments of change in its growth trajectory, from the late 1970s to 2006"--Provided by publisher.

THE POLITICS OF INCREMENTAL PROGRESSIVISM ‘Ungovernable neoliberal post politics assemblage metropolis from the South? No. This book shows innovative redistributive policies, regulation, and social participation recently in São Paulo, although gradually, slowly, and contentiously, and despite failures and inequalities. This great one-city-many-policies comparison departs from high quality empirically grounded research to show that collective action and public policies are back in town. In São Paulo, they have made a difference.’ Patrick Le Galès, Sciences Po CNRS research Professor, Dean Sciences Po Urban School, France ‘For anyone interested in urban governance, The Politics of Incremental Progressivism is a must-read. Nowhere in the world have cities faced greater challenges yet been more innovative in tackling the problems of urban poverty and exclusion than in Brazil. One could not ask for a more incisive, detailed and groundbreaking set of studies on urban transformation and the politics of change.’ Patrick Heller, Lyn Cross Professor of Social Sciences, Brown University, USA Large metropolises of the Global South are usually portrayed as ungovernable. The Politics of Incremental Progressivism analyzes urban policies in São Paulo – one of the biggest and most complex Southern cities – not only challenging those views, but showing the recent occurrence of progressive change. This book develops the first detailed and systematic account of the policies and politics that construct, maintain and operate a large Southern metropolis. The chapters cover the policies of bus and subway transportation, traffic control, waste collection, development licensing, public housing and large urban projects, additionally to budgeting, electoral results and government formation and dynamics. This important book contributes to the understanding of how the city is governed, what kinds of policies its governments construct and deliver and, more importantly, under what conditions it produces redistributive change in the direction of policies that reduce its striking social and urban inequalities.