How does the use of a secret vote affect the likelihood that legislators will punish their peers? Two contending arguments exist in the literature: some argue that secret voting may be prejudicial, while others argue that it may help accountability. We address this controversy by analyzing the...

Conventional wisdom claims that Brazilian economic governance underwent a sea-change over the three decades between the return to democracy and the election of 2018. Yet even during moments of intense reform, Brazil adopted a much more moderate and incremental approach than its Latin American...

Amidst the current economic crisis in Brazil, it is often forgotten that the structure of the Brazilian economy, and especially the strong role of the state as an economic actor, predates the Workers' Party administrations (2003-present) and has been a fixture of the democratic regime. This...

Over the course of the past thirty years, the Brazilian judiciary has been remade. The courts have left behind the timidity of the military authoritarian era, as death and retirements gave rise to new corps of senior judges and a new constitution transformed their basic institutional...

Brazil features regularly in global comparisons of large developing economies. Yet since the 1980s, the country has been caught in a low-level equilibrium, marked by lackluster growth and destructive inequality. One cause is the country's enduring commitment to a set of ideas and institutions...