Gendering Coalitional Presidentialism in Brazil

Coalitional presidentialism is a power-sharing strategy deployed in multiparty presidentialist democracies that entails the distribution of cabinet positions to coalition partners to facilitate governability. This model of governance is increasingly common worldwide, gaining growing scholarly interest. The consequences of coalitional presidentialism for women’s cabinet representation, however, have received scant attention. In this article, we provide a gendered analysis of the Brazilian experience with coalitional presidentialism. Through the quantitative analysis of an original dataset of all ministerial appointments (N = 597) under eight Brazilian presidents (1985–2019) and a descriptive assessment of the coalitional dynamics during that period, we evaluate the Brazilian experience with coalitional presidentialism through the lens of Feminist Institutionalism. We show that coalitional presidentialism restricts women\u27s access to cabinet seats, with the demands of multiparty coalition formation and management often overriding presidential considerations about descriptive representation, and coalition parties rarely advancing women to fill portfolios allocated to them by the president

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

Racialized differences in perceptions of and emotional responses to police killings of unarmed African Americans

Widespread attention to, and mobilization against, police killings of unarmed African Americans shatter any lingering myths of a post-racial America. We argue that the entrenched racial divide in the lived experiences and perceptions of whites and African Americans is mediated by emotions. Continuing research about the perceptions of and emotions attached to political events by people of different races, we draw on an embedded experiment. We contend that stories about police killings will elicit distinct emotions from whites and African Americans. The experiment varies the race of a victim of a police-involved shooting as well as whether the victim was suspected of criminality. We find that the majority of respondents express disappointment without regard to condition and that African Americans are more likely than whites to express anger as an emotional response. We see in-group/out-group psychological tendencies, with whites who read about a white victim (regardless of criminality) more likely to recommend criminal charges for the officer versus those who received a black victim. The findings highlight how identity moderates the connection between emotions and politics while also contributing to our understanding of race relations today

The Representation of Women in Brazilian Politics

Book DescriptionWith 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