We test the degree to which presidential approval ratings are related to a series of economic indicators, controlling for the political scenario in Brazil. Results, from 1999M9 until 2010M5, show that unemployment and the minimum wage are the main variables that affect the ratings. There is also...

The shortage of resources, which threats the accomplishment of the Armed Forces' Missions, has urged them to increase their Branches' integration to improve their efficiency as a whole. However, previous research pinpointed several issues in the Portuguese Armed Forces' (PAF) governance that...

Brazilian society has been facing a new historical cycle since the second half of the last decade, whose most relevant characteristic is the adoption of the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s on a more systemic basis, forming an ultraliberal inflection - a concept that refers to the meaning of the...

Pre-industrial Europe saw a relatively rapid evolution of systems of government. Feudalism gave way to medieval constitutional government and this gave way in turn either to the imperial state or to associational government. This rapid evolution was driven by two interrelated processes - one of...

This paper examines tensions in the administration of justice in Canada. These tensions arise in part from what the author describes as a ‘tripartite' responsibility for the courts system, split between two levels of government and the judicial and executive branches. It also identifies...

Part of the project Why Centralization and Decentralization in Federations?, this article studies dynamic de/centralization in Switzerland since 1848 and seeks to account for the patterns observed. It shows that, overall, there has been a wide-ranging process of legislative centralization,...

A very bad deal was concluded not long ago at Love Field airport in Dallas, Texas, a deal that effectively continues for nearly a decade what has by wide consensus been one of the more pernicious, anticompetitive slices of pork-barrel protectionist federal interventions in all of American...

I develop a robust political economy of bureaucracy by highlighting the conditions necessary for hierarchical administrative bodies to govern protectively and productively, but not predatorily. These conditions are residual claimancy and jurisdictional competition. I make this argument by...