This book offers the first conceptually rigorous analysis of the political and institutional underpinnings of Brazil's recent rise. Using Brazil as a case study in multiparty presidentialism, the authors argue that Brazil's success stems from the combination of a constitutionally strong president and a robust system of checks and balances.
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To what extent is the language of judicial opinions responsive to the political and social context in which constitutional courts operate? Courts are reason-giving institutions, with argumentation playing a central role in constitutional adjudication. However, a cursory look at just a handful of constitutional systems suggests important differences in the practices of constitutional judges, whether in matters of form, style, or language. Focusing on independently-verified leading cases globally, a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis offers the most comprehensive and systematic account of constitutional reasoning to date. This analysis is supported by the examination of eighteen legal systems around the world including the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice. Universally common aspects of constitutional reasoning are identified in this book, and contributors also examine whether common law countries differ to civil law countries in this respect.
The Unwritten Brazilian Constitution offers an unexplored topic outside Portuguese language: the leading cases on human rights in the Brazilian Supreme Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal – STF). The Brazilian Constitution of 1988 represents an institutional framework able to restructure the relationship between the powers after the military dictatorship. The constituents drafted the Brazilian Constitution in order to set an extensive system of judicial protection for fundamental rights, by means of several instruments that have strengthened access to the Judiciary. Because the Brazilian Constitution has an extensive list of fundamental rights, the STF was called to interpret them several times and it developed an unwritten understanding of these fundamental rights. These decisions are not available to the international community since they are not translated to English. Based on this gap, this original book illustrates the main rulings on human rights analyzed by great scholars in Brazil. The text presents a deep discussion regarding the characteristics of the cases and demonstrates how the STF has built the legal arguments to interpret the extension of the fundamental rights.
This book generates a wealth of new empirical information about Latin American party systems and contributes richly to major theoretical debates about party systems and democracy.
With contributions from leading international scholars, this Handbook offers the most rigorous and up-to-date analyses of virtually every aspect of Brazilian politics, including inequality, environmental politics, foreign policy, economic policy making, social policy, and human rights. The Handbook is divided into three major sections: Part 1 focuses on mass behavior, while Part 2 moves to representation, and Part 3 treats political economy and policy. The Handbook proffers five chapters on mass politics, focusing on corruption, participation, gender, race, and religion; three chapters on civil society, assessing social movements, grass-roots participation, and lobbying; seven chapters focusing on money and campaigns, federalism, retrospective voting, partisanship, ideology, the political right, and negative partisanship; five chapters on coalitional presidentialism, participatory institutions, judicial politics, and the political character of the bureaucracy, and eight chapters on inequality, the environment, foreign policy, economic and industrial policy, social programs, and human rights. This Handbook is an essential resource for students, researchers, and all those looking to understand contemporary Brazilian politics.
A thorough study of Brazilian politics from 1930 to 1964, this book begins with Getulio Vargas' fifteen-year-rule--the latter part of which was a virtual dictatorship--and traces the following years of economic difficulty and political turbulence, culminating in the explosive coup d'état that overthrew the constitutional government of President Jo~ao Goulart and profoundly changes the nature of Brazil's political institutions. The first book by Thomas E. Skidmore, Politics in Brazil, 1930-1964, immediately became the definitive political history in English and Portuguese of those turbulent times. It was published by OUP in 1937 in hardcover but has been out of print in recent years. For this 40th anniversary, James Green, who is Skidmore's literary executor at Brown University, will write a new foreword for the book, placing it in the context of the literature.a
Concurrency of powers – the exercise of jurisdiction by federal governments and constituent units in the same policy areas – is a key, if not the central, mode of governance in most federal systems today. Moreover, the experience has been that federal governments dominate the concurrent space giving rise to contestation. This volume, Concurrent Powers in Federal Systems: Meaning, Making and Managing, edited by Professor Nico Steytler, is the first to examine from a comparative perspective this crucial issue confronting both established and emerging federations. Case studies of 16 countries on five continents dissect the various manifestations of concurrency, analyse what drives this modern governance mode, and review management strategies that seek to guard against central dominance of concurrent areas.