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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of left Brazilian political parties and partisan disruption on the homicide rate in Brazil.

The authors use panel data for the states between the years 1980 and 2011. The database used is an unbalanced panel covering a sample of 27 Brazilian states over 32 years, 1980-2011, totaling about 855 observations.

It is estimated that these two political factors are sources that have connection to the increased level of violence in Brazil. These analyses provide several important results. First, partisan disruption is associated with a higher homicide rate, compared to non-partisan disruption. The results from the panel also suggest that left-parties in government have a positive impact on homicide, compared to non-left-parties.

Information regarding premeditated homicides (CID-BR-9 database) is available for all Brazilian states, and may be tabulated from the same micro-data at any level of aggregation. Some of the well-known problems regarding the choice of this variable are as follows. First, deaths resulting from wounds are sometimes included in the statistics whether wounds were intentionally inflicted or not. In addition, some incidents end up not being registered because certain deaths are not reported. This tends to occur more frequently in rural areas. Fortunately, this second problem does not appear to be too significant, as under-registry of deaths due to external causes is much lower than the amount resulting from natural causes (see, e.g. Cano and Santos, 2000). In addition, this problem may be controlled if under-registry remains stable over time by applying fixed effects to the panel data.

The main Brazilian political parties diverge on the causes of crime and how criminals should be punished. For example, in Brazil, the minimum age for one individual to be punished with imprisonment is 18 years old. Practices crimes for young people between 12 and 18 implies only in socio-educational measures. Given the high level of violence in Brazil, there is a bill being debated in the parliament that proposes to reduce the age to 16 years. Based on the research, 90 percent of the population approves the reduction of age to 16 years. However, the majority of parliament is opposed to changing the law. In general, the more conservative parties are favorable to changing the law.

These divergent postures can be associated with the ideological essence or to belief system of each political party. Political parties have the potential capacity of changing crime trends through economic and social policies as well as by applying stronger sanctions against crime. Given the law enforcement system, the cycle of crime in Brazil may be related to the profile of the political party elected.

The authors assume the hypothesis that the current Brazilian multi-partisan system has an incentive system in which politicians do not respond adequately to the basic wishes of voters. Among such desires, the authors emphasize public safety. This paper evaluates the empirical effect of partisan disruption on homicide rate.

This chapter examines the professional identities of Brazilian journalists. It does so through an analysis of the growing professional autonomy of journalism from 1950 to 1990 through the life stories of 10 intellectual-journalists, individuals whose journalistic activities have crossed over into other intellectual fields.

This study applies a symbolic interactionist framework to understand how these actors managed their reputations and careers within the intellectual world. The narratives were taken from qualitative semi-structured interviews, and supported by additional research such as interviews, biographies, and articles which have been published about their lives.

The life stories were compared to the extensive structural changes affecting the world of journalism and the world of intellectuals in Brazil. This comparison revealed gaps between these two spheres of practice, within which the ambivalent form of journalists’ identities have been constructed.

This chapter offers two contributions to the study of Brazilian journalists. From a theoretical and methodological viewpoint, it advances beyond other studies that focus more on the prevailing representations of journalists’ professional identities and their role in society. From an empirical standpoint, it describes the complex negotiations between the worlds of journalism, culture and politics. This chapter also reexamines the current dominant explanation for the changes in Brazilian journalism. It shows that building careers and new levels of interpersonal cooperation for intellectuals and journalists has been a slow process. Ultimately, this development has left some behind, especially those actors stretched between multiple professional identities such as those who self-identify as intellectual-journalists.

Welfare state retrenchment in advanced industrialized countries seeks to expand market-like logics in public services, based on the assumption that public services benefit from non-state initiative and competition. This logic gained a stronghold in policymaking, but its implementation nevertheless struggled to find acceptance. Public university tuition is one such case where policymakers aimed to increase investment in human capital through cost sharing. While students in some countries accept them as a necessary evil, opposition arises in others. Students in Germany and Turkey took to the streets in support of tuition-free higher education. Despite differences in their political contexts and the differential mediating role political culture plays, student mobilization reversed right-wing parties' policies. This article focuses on how opposition to tuition policies is covered by the news in both countries. Using a mixed-methods approach combining topic modeling with qualitative analysis, I show that student protests and tuition policy discussions are reported separately. In both countries, student protests involving confrontation were highlighted whereas reports on institutional actors dominated policy discussions. However, when movements pressure political parties to “own” an issue in their platform, party endorsement subsequently amplifies issue salience even if movement organizations and parties are not covered together by the media. This indicates an indirect effect of movements' collective action on news coverage. Political party endorsements mediate the amount of coverage movement issues receive. This finding provides insights into how opposition to welfare state retrenchment might navigate difficulties in closed media cultures that heavily favor institutional actors.

This chapter focusses on whether women heads of states and governments use their powers of selection to empower women. Compared to their male counterparts, do they appoint greater quantities of women to cabinet positions and to more prestigious posts? Examining Germany and Brazil, two countries constituting diverse cultural and institutional settings, this chapter provides in-depth analysis of cabinet appointments and regional breadth. It confirms that women executives do indeed promote more women to their cabinets overall and to higher powered portfolios. This stands in contrast with prevailing findings from within the global literature but generally reinforces those derived from single country and regional explorations.

Focusing on the conditional cash transfers (CCTs) first created and implemented in Brazil and Mexico, this article takes a new look at the factors facilitating the creation of these innovative policies. In order to shed light on the continuous struggles that are faced when pioneering, formulating and adopting these anti-poverty policies, the authors analyze three types of ambiguities: axiological, partisan and electoral.

Based on a gradual institutional change approach within the advocacy coalition framework, the authors conduct a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews, official public administration archives and newspapers.

This article demonstrates that advocacy coalitions (for human capital, basic income and food security) and the quest for electoral gains are viable contexts for exploring the complex processes involved in setting up CCTs, of which Brazil's Bolsa-Família and Mexico's Progresa-Oportunidades-Prospera (POP) provide emblematic examples.

The findings contribute to comparative social policy research and institutional change analysis. The coalitions and ambiguous consensuses studied here expand the perspectives with a more detailed understanding of the chaotic processes involved in developing social policies.