The politics of oligarchy : the persistence of traditional elites in contemporary Brazil

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Political Science, 1986.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND DEWEYBibliography: v.2, leaves 410-427.by Frances Hagopian.Ph.D

Rethinking Measures of Democracy and Welfare State Universalism: Lessons from Subnational Research

Democracy and the welfare state are two of the most extensively studied concepts and themes in the field of comparative politics. Debate about how to best measure the two concepts has failed to contemplate the extent to which political and social rights are uniformly present across distinct regions of the national territory, despite the presence of substantial subnational research that underscores wide variation inside countries. We argue that this omission hampers our understanding of the two phenomena and we propose a new measure of democracy and healthcare unversalism, which we call the Adjusted Measures of Democracy and Welfare Universalism. The new measures integrate territorial inequality into existing national-level indicators, providing a more accurate picture of country performance and opening the door to new, multi-level theory building

Cidadania mediada : processos de democratização da política municipal no Brasil

This article discusses the notion that the persistence of &ldquo;traditional&rdquo; political practices weakens Brazil&rsquo;s democracy.Drawing on the cases of three Brazilian municipalities administered by the Workers&rsquo; Party (PT), the author examines the space between &ldquo;traditional&rdquo; and &ldquo;modern&rdquo; and argues that successful democratization does not eradicate practices such as clientelism and patronage, but it tends to incorporate and build on these traditional political elements. Moreover, the article maintains that the democratization of municipal politics is inextricably bound up with the eradication of poverty and the construction of a responsive, state-based social safety net.<br /

Ni crisis ni panaceas: dinámicas y transformaciones de los sistemas partidarios en América Latina

A nivel global, tanto en la literatura especializada como en el debate público, la desafección ciudadana hacia la cosa pública, el debilitamiento de los partidos políticos y el aumento de la abstención contribuyeron a asentar la idea de una crisis de los sistemas de partidos y de la democracia. Diferentes indicadores darían cuenta de esta crisis: el desarraigo social de los partidos que consagró el modelo del partido cartel (Katz y Mair 1995); el declive de la militancia (Van Biezen, Mair y Poguntke 2012; Whiteley 2011); la erosión de las estructuras partidarias tradicionales capturadas por el lobby corporativo (Crouch 2004 [2014], 112) o la tecnocracia; la pérdida de capacidad de los líderes para construir partidos programáticos que expresaran identidades políticas duraderas (Cheresky 2006; Dalton 2004; Luna 2014b); o su incapacidad para responder con una mayor deliberación interna a los desafíos de la representación política (Accetti y Wolkenstein 2017).Fil: Alenda, Stéphanie. Universidad Andrés Bello; ChileFil: Varetto, Carlos Augusto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de San Martin. Escuela de Politica y Gobierno. Centro de Estudios Federales y Electorales; Argentin

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead