We conduct a global, large-N analysis of proportionality in the partisan distribution of cabinet portfolios. Formulated in the context of postwar Western European parliamentary democracy, Gamson’s Law predicts that parties joining a coalition government will receive cabinet ministries in direct proportion to the seats they are contributing to the coalition on the floor of the legislature. Using a sample of 1551 country-years of coalitional government in 97 countries from 1966 to 2019, and comparing all main constitutional formats (parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential), we find that Gamson’s Law does not travel well outside its context of origin. Among the constitutional predictors of cabinet proportionality, we find that pure presidentialism is a major outlier, with an exaggerated form of formateur advantage. Introducing party-system and assembly-level predictors to the debate, we find that party institutionalization tends to increase fairness in portfolio allocation within parliamentary systems only.

This research note contributes updated and extended point estimates of the ideological positions of Brazilian political parties and novel estimates of the positions of all presidents since redemocratization in 1985. Presidents and parties are jointly responsible for the operability of Brazil’s version of coalitional presidentialism. Locating these key political actors in a unidimensional left–right space over time reveals rising challenges to the institutional matrix, particularly since 2013. Ideological polarization among parties has sharply increased, presidents have become more distant from Congress, and the political center has become increasingly vacated. Coalitional presidentialism is being subjected to unprecedented ideological stress as President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva begins his third term in office.

This article reviews the state of Brazilian democracy at the close of the Cardoso-Lula era. Brazil has now completed a quarter century of competitive politics, the longest democratic period in the country's history. Although evaluations of the regime's prospects were often pessimistic in the 1985–1993 period, the performance of democracy improved markedly after the Plano Real stabilization plan in the mid-1990s, which was followed by significant policy achievements under presidents Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Party of Brazilian Social Democracy, or PSDB) and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Workers' Party, or PT). Since 1995, the axis of national politics has turned on the competition between the PSDB and allies versus the PT and allies. Under this emerging bicoalitional architecture, several key policy domains have been objects of consensus between the two camps, which has led to major policy advances; however, certain policy areas remain outside the zone of consensus and pose enduring challenges. Despite the improving quality of democracy, the mass public continues to display a surprisingly high level of indifference to the regime type.

In a recent article published in the Latin American Research Review, Simone Bohn analyzed electoral results and survey data from Brazil to contest several theses concerning the reelection of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2006. In particular, Bohn asserted that beneficiaries of Bolsa Família, a conditional cash transfer program that was reaching eleven million families at the time of the 2006 election, were already supporters of Lula in 2002, and therefore the program could not have contributed to the change in Lula's constituency between his election in 2002 and his reelection in 2006. We show that these claims are based on voter recall data collected between nine and fifty-seven months after the elections, and that these data grossly overestimate actual electoral support for Lula—probably as a result of well-known reporting biases. Reanalysis of Bohn's data as well as analysis of more reliable surveys suggest that there were indeed significant changes in voting patterns between 2002 and 2006, and that Bolsa Família did play an important role in the 2006 elections.

We present a new data set on the left-right placement of major Brazilian political parties serving in the first five legislatures under democracy. On the basis of survey responses of more than 850 federal legislators from 1990 to 2005, we generate party placements on an ideological scale where 1 = “left” and 10 = “right.” The data are rescaled to account for idiosyncrasies in responses as well as variation in use of the survey scale across time. We discuss both the validity and the reliability of our new measures by comparing them to other data sets. We further discuss three substantive issues that the data reveal. First, ideological polarization has moderated over time. Second, the median legislator has shifted noticeably to the left and now stands equidistant from the influential PT and PSDB, the parties that have anchored recent presidential elections. Third, Brazilian political elites continue to shun self-identifications associated with political conservatism or neoliberalism.

This article analyzes Luiz Inácio da Silva's resounding reelection victory in the wake of corruption scandals implicating his party and government. Voters with lower levels of economic security and schooling played a critical role in returning Lula to the presidency. Least prone to punish the president for corruption, poorer Brazilians were also the most readily persuaded by the provision of material benefits. Minimum wage increases and the income transfer program Bolsa Família expanded the purchasing power of the poor. Thus, executive power and central state resources allowed Lula to consolidate a social base that had responded only weakly to his earlier, party-based strategy of grassroots mobilization for progressive macrosocietal change. Although Lula won handily, the PT's delegation to Congress shrank for the first time, and the voting bases of president and party diverged. The PT benefited far less than the president himself from government investment in social policy.

This article examines key ideological, economic, and institutional preferences of the Brazilian political elite in the first 25 years of the country's present democratic regime. Introducing the unified dataset of the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, it examines several crucial dimensions of politicians' attitudes, including elite placement on a traditional left-right scale, preferences concerning the fundamental economic model, direct comparisons of the recent Cardoso and Lula governments, and orientations toward Brazil's global and regional projection. On many of the central issues, attitudes have remained stable, but on the dimensions that have seen notable change, nearly all the change has been in the direction of decreasing polarization. In contrast to the experience of some neighboring countries, the Brazilian case demonstrates that the sustained practice of democracy can lead to attitudinal convergence and macro-political stability, even when the initial political and socioeconomic conditions appear daunting.

This article analyzes a dataset of policy views of members of the Brazilian Congress to assess the nature of support for genderrelated policy issues. It makes three core claims. First, liberal and progressive opinions on gender correspond to party membership more than to sex. Left parties have consistent and programmatic policy positions on controversial gender issues. Women and men are more divided, as are parties of the center and the right. Second, coalitions supporting change differ across policy issues. Support for gender quotas, for example, does not translate into support for more liberal abortion laws. Third, there is a large gap between legislators' attitudes toward gender-related policy and actual policy outcomes. Institutional deadlock and executive priorities explain this discrepancy. This article concludes that although women may share some interests by virtue of their position in a gender-structured society, these interests may be trumped by partisan, class, regional, and other cleavages.

This review essay critically examines the evolution of scholarly literature on Brazil's Partido dos Trabalhadores since the PT's founding in 1980. We periodise the relevant literature into four phases, examining the foundation of the PT, the party's early experience in subnational government, its transformation and moderation in the late 1990s, and finally its experiences in national government since capturing the presidency in 2002. After detailing strengths and weaknesses of this research, we also examine the trajectory of the PT in light of recent comparative work on the so-called ‘left turn’ in Latin America. We conclude by offering an agenda for future research on the PT.

The emerging literature on executive decree authority has generated important insights, but it has tended to select on the dependent variable (decrees), rather than view decrees as one of several possible ways that presidents can initiate policies. This article examines the conditions under which presidents resort to extraordinary rather than ordinary means of legislative initiative. Unilateral action theory claims that presidents will resort to decrees in unfavorable political environments, while delegation theory claims that decrees will flourish when the president is more politically secure. A study of four Brazilian presidents between 1988 and 1998 yields inconsistent support for both theories. Presidential popularity is only weakly related to the use of decree authority, but executive-legislative relations—especially coalition management via multiparty cabinets—is a more reliable predictor. Neither unilateral action theory nor delegation theory can fully account for the wide variation in the legislative strategies of presidents.

Brazil is changing rapidly under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Cardoso’s watershed election in October 1994 allowed Brazil to resume the agenda of neoliberal economic reform first initiated by the disgraced former president, Fernando Collor de Mello, who was impeached in 1992. The size of Cardoso’s electoral majority, the breadth of the party coalition that backed him, and the consistently neoliberal programmatic content of his legislative agenda in 1995 and 1996 signified to many observers that Brazil was embarking on a fundamental transformation of its political economy. To call this a “paradigm shift” or the “adoption of a new development model” may not be hyperbole: after fits and starts in the early 1990s, Brazil under Cardoso appears to be definitively abandoning the dirigiste, import-substituting model of the past 60 years in favor of a model based on market reforms and a drastic reduction in the role of the state.

A process has been developed to manufacture biodegradable composite foams of poly(DL-lactic- co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) and hydroxyapatite short fibers for use in bone regeneration. The processing technique allows the manufacture of three-dimensional foam scaffolds and involves the formation of a composite material consisting of a porogen material (either gelatin microspheres or salt particles) and hydroxyapatite short fibers embedded in a PLGA matrix. After the porogen is leached out, an open-cell composite foam remains which has a pore size and morphology defined by the porogen. The foam porosity can be controlled by altering the volume fraction of porogen used to make the composite material. Foams made using NaCl particles as a porogen were manufactured with porosities as high as 0.84±0.01 (n=3). The short hydroxyapatite fibers served to reinforce the PLGA. The compressive yield strength of foams manufactured using gelatin microspheres as a porogen was found to increase with fiber content. Foams with compressive yield strengths up to 2.82±0.63 MPa (n=3) with porosities of 0.47±0.01 (n=3) were manufactured using 30% by weight hydroxyapatite fibers in the initial composite prior to leaching. These composite foams with improved mechanical properties may also be expected to have enhanced osteoconductivity and hence provide a novel material which may prove useful in the field of bone regeneration.

Brazil began the 1990s the same way it began the 1980s: in crisis. A decade ago, popular dissatisfaction with the performance of the political system was at an all-time high. As the legitimacy of the military regime installed in 1964 gradually dissipated, political and military elites turned their attention to the question of what kind of regime would be able to replace the one which was disintegrating. In one important aspect their vision coincided with the aspirations of the general population: the new political regime would have to be based on increased competition. Military elites would yield executive power, and the civilian politicians replacing them would agree to submit themselves to the popular verdict.