Race and campaign resources: candidate identification numbers in Brazil

Party elites may hinder racial and ethnic minorities from winning public office by withholding resources. Prior studies have explored the distribution of money, media access, and party-list positions. In Brazil, party elites provide each candidate with a unique identification number. Voters must enter their preferred candidate's identification number into an electronic voting machine to register their support. In this article, we replicate and extend Bueno and Dunning's (2017) analysis of candidate identification numbers. They conclude that party elites do not provide white candidates with superior identification numbers than non-whites. We contend that assessing intraparty variation is theoretically and methodologically warranted. Using party fixed effects, we find that party elites provide non-white candidates with worse identification numbers than whites. We demonstrate that our findings are generalisable using data from other elections. Moreover, we show that party elites also withhold advantageous numbers from women and political novices

Antivenoms for the treatment of snakebite envenomings: The road ahead

The parenteral administration of antivenoms is the cornerstone of snakebite envenoming therapy. Efforts are made to ensure that antivenoms of adequate efficacy and safety are available world-wide. We address the main issues to be considered for the development and manufacture of improved antivenoms. Those include: (a) A knowledge-based composition design of venom mixtures used for immunization, based on biochemical, immunological, toxicological, taxonomic, clinical and epidemiological data; (b) a careful selection and adequate management of animals used for immunization; (c) well-designed immunization protocols; (d) sound innovations in plasma fractionation protocols to improve recovery, tolerability and stability of antivenoms; (e) the use of recombinant toxins as immunogens to generate antivenoms and the synthesis of engineered antibodies to substitute for animal-derived antivenoms; (f) scientific studies of the contribution of existing manufacturing steps to the inactivation or removal of viruses and other zoonotic pathogens; (g) the introduction of novel quality control tests; (h) the development of in vitro assays in substitution of in vivo tests to assess antivenom potency; and (i) scientifically-sound pre-clinical and clinical assessments of antivenoms. These tasks demand cooperative efforts at all main stages of antivenom development and production, and need concerted international partnerships between key stakeholders.Universidad de Costa Rica//UCR/Costa RicaInternational Foundation for Science//IFS/SueciaCiencia y Tecnología para el Desarrollo//CYTED/EspañaConsejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas//CRUSA-CSIC/EspañaUCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias de la Salud::Instituto Clodomiro Picado (ICP

Land, Violence and Empowerment: Post-conflict Land Reform in Central America

This thesis examines how land reform can contribute to transitional justice by preventing a recurrence\ud of violence in post‐conflict societies. One common assumption about redistributive land reform is that it can reduce rural violence and “substitute” for revolution by correcting the economic and social\ud inequalities that are often at the root of civil conflicts. However, empirically, land reform has had an uneven record in conflict‐prevention, and several major land reforms implemented in the 20th century were closely followed by an escalation of civil war or peasant rebellion. The central objective of this\ud thesis is to explain why land reform does not always succeed at reducing rural violence. I argue that in order to be an effective conflict‐prevention mechanism, land reform must do more than correct an unequal distribution of land; it most also empower the peasants by encouraging them to organize\ud politically and by giving them the dignity and political agency that they need in order to voice their demands and hold their governments accountable. Peasants have both economic and political goals, and land reforms that offer them land but keep them excluded from the public realm cannot truly\ud substitute for revolution.\ud I demonstrate this by comparing three Central American countries' experiences with land reform in the late 20th century. I show that the land reforms implemented in El Salvador and Nicaragua in the 1980s\ud failed to prevent the escalation of these countries' civil wars because these reforms neglected the peasants' political grievances. However, after these civil wars ended in the 1990s, both countries\ud revisited the land question and implemented new land reforms that mobilized and empowered the peasants. This has contributed to the peace‐building process in post‐conflict rural El Salvador and Nicaragua because now that the peasants have political standing, they no longer need to turn to violence to make their voices heard. By contrast, Guatemala neglected to implement land reform after its civil war ended in 1996, and as a result, the Guatemalan peasants remain marginalized and powerless compared to their counterparts in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Guatemala's failure to address its peasants' grievances after its war ended is one of the reasons why it has seen much greater rural\ud violence than the other two countries over the last two decades

Replication Data for: Building Parties from City Hall: Party Membership and Municipal Government in Brazil

Replication data and R code for "Building Parties from City Hall: Party Membership and Municipal Government in Brazil.

The Life of the Party: Grassroots Activists and Mass Partisanship in Latin America

This dissertation argues that low-level party activists are the primary tool that Latin American political parties use to forge and maintain other voters partisan loyalties. Through their year-round grassroots party work, activists pull their network peers into the party, tailor their party’s image to each community’s particular political tastes, and mediate the flow of political information through their social networks. Consequently, parties are more likely to attract new partisan supporters and hold onto their partisans during moments of crisis in communities where they have a dense network of local activists and strong grassroots party organizations. I test this argument using a mixed-methods research design that combines historical analyses of the development of parties across the region, field research on contemporary grassroots party activism in Chile and Uruguay, and quantitative analyses based on both historical and contemporary data on local party organizations and mass party identification. Chapters 1 through 3 develop a theoretical framework about the relationship between party leaders, party activists, social networks, and ordinary voters. Chapters 4 through 7 trace the historical development of Latin American parties from the 19th century to the present. These chapters demonstrate that the way that Latin American parties organized themselves at the grassroots level in different periods explains the rise and decline of mass partisanship over the last two centuries and the wide variation in the fates of different parties in each period. Chapters 8 and 9 use spatial analysis and social network analysis to test the effect of party activists on the partisanship of the other voters in their communities