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This paper analyzes the role of political neighborhood brokers in the execution of public policies in slums. It studies their relationships to the State as well as their capabilities to boost or hinder the implementation of public policies. In particular, the paper focuses on the processes of redevelopment at two slums in the City of Buenos Aires: Rodrigo Bueno and Playón de Chacarita. The evidence gathered shows that if the State and the brokers establish relationships of cooperation the process of redevelopment smoothly moves forward. On the contrary, if they come into conflict the entire process is put at risk. Furthermore, the absence of brokers compels the State to lead the redevelopment without links to the neighborhood which obstructs the development of the project. The same situation occurs if brokers lose their legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to understand the intellectual influence of Aristotle on Tocqueville in the elaboration of his “new political science”. Our thesis is that, in order to try to counteract the threats inherent in democracy, Tocqueville integrates some Aristotelian categories, and that this is one of the nuclei of his new political science, and is also the origin of many of its ambiguities. The paper is divided into five parts. In the first we will briefly examine Tocqueville’s dissatisfaction with a certain liberalism that precedes him. In the second, we will dwell on the notion of citizenship elaborated by the French aristocrat, with which he attempts to resolve his concerns. The third part argues that the Tocquevillian notion of citizenship has a close kinship with some aspects of Aristotelian practical philosophy. The fourth section offers some reflections on Tocqueville’s political philosophy, and the fifth closes with some brief conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a theoretical paper in the field of democratic theory. It reviews the discussions on one of the elements proposed to measure the quality of democracies: government responsiveness to citizens' preferences. It analyses theoretical discussions on democracy, quality of democracy and in particular the debate on whether responsiveness is useful to measure quality, what challenges it implies and what are its conceptual and empirical limits. It concludes with a research agenda on this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Affective polarization has recently become one of the phenomena of greatest interest to social researchers. The large number of papers on this concept requires a systematic review to organize its main explanatory theories. In the following, we analyse the distinctive dimensions of affective polarization, a political polarization with non-political effects, and the hypotheses that help us to understand its emergence, from the perspective of the masses, the elites and the media ecosystem. In particular, we are confronted with the possibility that ideological radicalization is at the origin of this affective polarization or that, on the contrary, without being so far apart in ideas, it is the constitution of political identities as social identities that causes a perceptual sense of false polarization that induces greater animosity between the supporters of the conflicting groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What factors impact on the productivity of legislators? In this paper, we argue that legislative productivity depends not only on party affiliation, seniority, gender, and other contextual considerations (e.g., alignment with the executive), as previous studies have shown, but also on the connections between legislators. Our main argument is that legislators' effectiveness in getting their proposals approved by the chamber depends on their centrality in the cosponsorship network. Unlike previous studies of Latin American legislatures, which usually consider bills as the unit of analysis, we focus on legislators and their individual records. We consider individual productivity as the number of authored bills approved by the chamber in a two-year congress. To test our hypothesis, we use data from the Argentine Chamber of Deputies from 1983 to 2019. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]