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.
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.
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