What can we infer about the effect of polarized politics on the Brazilian policy-making process?We attempt to answer this question by analyzing the country's political landscape and focusing on one specific policy issue concerning agrarian policies, an area that is exposed to much ideological conflict for both the left and right wing. We show how the mechanism has worked in this case to mitigate the polarization effects. Two political groups monopolized national elections over the past two decades sharing very different positions concerning ideological preferences. In this article, we recognize polarization between the two leading parties, but argue that the Brazilian political system features the dynamics of coalitional presidentialism that mitigates party preferences. We analyze funding data for small farmers and rural settlements for the period 1995-2016, arriving at the conclusion that the agrarian policy of the competing parties resembled one another, despite political polarization.

Land inequality in Brazil is alarming and several poor individuals living in rural areas do not have enough income to survive decently. The struggle to access land should lead to a paradigm shift with social movements leading this process since democratization. Their strategies vary, but usually focus on complementary activities of mass mobilization that culminate in the occupation of unproductive land that is not fulfilling its social function in order to force expropriation and the creation of new settlements. This study aims to investigate, through empirical evidence, if such strategies are having the desired effect of allowing the poor to access land, without increasing the already high numbers, and potentially aggravating the violent characteristics, of such disputes. During the Cardoso and Lula presidential administrations the relation between the number of new settlements and the number of deaths caused by land disputes increased. However, there is still a long way to go to improve this policy and achieve positive results. Overall, is this struggle for the reduction of inequality in the Brazilian countryside being won? Is the sacrifice paying off? And what is the price regarding the relation between land conflict victims and the creation of new rural settlements?

The purpose of this paper is to investigate governmental repression combined with the type of regime that might determine a civil war. As a rule, scholars have not considered both variables in one quantitative model, in a systematic fashion. No empirical work employing political philosophy approaches can be found among the current quantitative literature on civil war. Therefore, this paper fills the gap, by grounding our work on a more robust theory, complementing the originally data-driven pieces. Three different hypotheses are tested and the findings indicate that poor countries with hybrid regimes and a high level of governmental repression are more likely to become involved in civil wars than countries with democratic or autocratic regimes. This paper can work as a contribution to the failed states discussion.

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This article analyzes the effect of economic growth on executive elections in the context of a multilevel governance structure and how party ties across federal, state, and local levels affect the relationship, using data from Brazilian municipalities. We test the hypothesis that the president is the main politician accountable for economic performance, measured by local growth, and that party politics moderates the evaluation of the economic performance of state governors and the president. Our research shows that there is a high degree of interdependence between levels of government in the evaluation of economic performance. We highlight how party alliances strongly moderate the economic performance effects at the different levels. Using aggregate local level-municipality panel data and fixed effects estimations, we show that the previous year's economic growth positively impacts the percentage of votes obtained by the incumbent in the presidential elections and that those effects are higher in states whose governors are allied to the president.

-From the last years of the Lula government until now Brazil has been going through a revolution in the federal system of higher education. One of several universities created to include more people from public schools, as well as indigenous and Afro-descendants, is the Federal University of the ABC (UFABC), in the metropolitan region of São Paulo. Fifty per cent of vacancies are reserved for admittance through the system of quotas. The objective of this paper is to investigate whether students who were admitted based on their racial and socio-economic situation have a similar level of academic achievement than their colleagues who have not participated in quotas to join the university, and what lessons should be considered for future selections of students in the federal system of higher education in Brazil. In addition to the conceptual part, the approach adopted ISSN: 16799844 -InterSciencePlace -Revista Científica Internacional Páginas 47 de 207 in this research complements the descriptive with the causal statistics, where the first deals with variables like skin color, gender, income and learning difficulties, and the second tries to explain the success in academic studies. Both approaches focus on the differences among students who entered the university through socioeconomic and racial quotas, since the aim is to understand whether there are differences between the two types of students. The conclusion was that in the beginning the quota students presented a lower level of academic achievement in relation to non-quota students, but this difference is reduced over the years, even if not end on equal ground. However, the simple fact that there is a reduction of academic inequality between the two groups is already a success of educational policies concerning inequality reduction, and they should be improved continuously.Keywords: Higher education. Quotas. Afro-descendants. Federal University of the ABC.Resumo -Desde os últimos anos do governo Lula o Brasil tem passado por uma revolução no sistema federal de educação superior. Uma das muitas universidades federais criadas para incluir mais pessoas que estudaram em escolas públicas no ensino médio, além de indígenas e afrodescendentes, foi a Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC), localizada na região metropolitana de São Paulo. Cinquenta por cento das vagas estão reservadas para o sistema de cotas. O objetivo do presente artigo é investigar se os estudantes selecionados para ingressar na universidade com base em sua situação racial e/ou socioeconômica obtiveram o mesmo nível de êxito acadêmico de seus colegas que não ingressaram por meio das cotas, e quais lições devem ser consideradas para futuras seleções de estudantes no sistema federal de educação superior no Brasil. Além da parte conceitual, a abordagem adotada nesta pesquisa complementa a estatística descritiva com a causal, onde a primeira busca variáveis que tratam de cor da pele, gênero, renda e dificuldades de aprendizado, e a segunda tenta explicar o sucesso nos estudos. Tanto uma como ...

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