Product Description: Brazilian Politics offers the most comprehensive and up-to-date introduction to the contemporary politics of South Americas largest democracy. Accessibly written for students, the book traces the major trends in Brazils political development and analyses the main challenges facing the country today...read more

The nine essays in this collection represent the first book-length treatment of one of the major changes that have shaped Latin America since independence: decentralization of the state. Contributors argue that though the assignment of political, fiscal, and administrative duties to subnational governments has been one of the most important political developments in Latin America, it is also one of the most overlooked. This volume is divided into three sections. Part one presents an overview of the topic by the editors; part two considers the political origins of decentralization; and part three examines decentralization and economic reforms. Decentralization and Democracy in Latin America explores the causes of decentralization in six significant case studies: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela. Shorter analyses of Uruguay and Peru are also included. The essays in this volume find substantial common ground across regime types, historical periods, and countries, and yield several substantive conclusions. First, historical-institutional and socioeconomic legacies matter. Second, democratization and neoliberal reform are neither necessary nor sufficient to explain decentralization. Finally, institutional and electoralist approaches, supplemented with analysis of macro and distal factors, offer the most promising avenues for further research.   (view table of contents)

Product Description: Shifting States in Global Markets contributes to the debates over the political economy of globalization by focusing attention on the increasingly important role of subnational governments in implementing economic policies. Challenging the view that the effects of decentralization are positive or negative uniformly and can be explained by reference to the influence of national political institutions, Alfred Montero uses his comparisons of industrial policy in Brazil and Spain, and between different regions in these countries, to argue that we need to pay attention to political conditions at the subnational level to account for the variation in economic success between regions...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)