Policy Change in Brazil: New Challenges for Policy Analysis in Latin America

Abstract

From the emergence of punctuated equilibrium theory in the United States in the mid‐1990s to the creation of the Comparative Agendas Project, scholars have predicted that punctuated equilibrium theory and related agenda‐setting theories can be applied across all systems. Yet most of the literature to date has focused on Western countries. The Brazilian Agendas Project has now made data available on a wide range of policy inputs and outputs, the first such data available in Latin America. The objective of this article is introduce the data from the Brazilian project, justify the choices made in collecting and coding it, and present descriptive analyses on the dynamics of governmental attention toward different policy issues over time.

Democratic institutions in Brazilian tourism policy: An analysis of council laws

“…The 10 capitals included in this study are among the 12 largest cities in Brazil, all with more than 1.4 million inhabitants, São Paulo being the largest, with some 12 million people (Brasil, 2020b). From the perspective of tourism, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte (both in the Southeast), Porto Alegre, and Curitiba (in the South) out for their business, events, and cultural tourism.…”

“…Brazil is a federative republic in South America, with an estimated population of 210 million people and a territorial area of approximately 8.5 million km², divided into five geographic regions-North, Northeast, South, Southeast, and Midwest (Brasil, 2020b). These regions are separated into 26 states (each with its capital) and a Federal District (Brasília, the nation's capital), for a total of 27 federative units and 5568 municipalities (Brasil, 2020a).…”

“…In Brazil, since the Federal Constitution of 1988, there is a diversity of spaces for democracy. Despite variations in their institutionalization, obligation, and size, these spaces are responsible for bringing the population closer to decision makers in certain public policies (Brasil et al, 2020; Lüchmann, 2020).…”

Brazil's LGBTQ public policy: A Potemkin policy?

“…Given the federal system and power divisions in Brazil (Montero, 2001), the federal executive and judiciary branches have compensated for the legislative vacuum by creating palliative policy outputs to assure some LGBTQ rights (Barroso & Osorio, 2019; Mello, Brito, et al, 2012; Rios, 2015). As Brasil et al (2020) point out, presidents play a crucial role in shaping Brazil's policy agendas and processes. Through executive decrees, the number of LGBTQ policy outputs has rapidly increased in the country.…”

The Colombian Political Agendas Project: analysing presidential attention during the administrations of Uribe and Santos (2002-2018)

“…The study on the dynamics of presidential attention from the perspective of the CAP is practically non-existent in Latin America, with the exception of the doctoral thesis of Aranda-Jan (2018) which analyses presidential speeches in Mexico to account for the dynamics of presidential prioritization, and the nascent Brazilian project within the CAP which is mainly focused in executive attention (Brasil, Capella, & Fagan, 2020). Furthermore, the comparative politics literature on Latin America recognizes that the presidents of the region have an enormous capacity to set agendas but their analyses focus on the ability to define the agenda of Congress (Cheibub-Figueiredo, Pérez-Liñán, & Martins-Vieira, 2009;Santos, Pérez-Liñán, & García Montero, 2014).…”