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Este artigo oferece uma nova interpretação teórica para os objetivos e estratégias dos partidos em contextos eleitorais autoritários e em democracias frágeis. Proporciona-se aqui um marco teórico para a compreensão do comportamento partidário em eleições competitivas sob regimes autoritários e em democracias frágeis. Nesses contextos o comportamento dos partidos é condicionado pela possibilidade de uma mudança de regime. Nesses contextos, os partidos jogam em duas frentes: um jogo eleitoral, em que o objetivo é conquistar votos ou posições políticas; e um jogo acerca da mudança (ou não) do regime político. A maioria dos partidos na América Latina, que existiam antes da onda de democratização iniciada em 1978, e muitos mesmo depois disso, assumiram este jogo de duas frentes que descrevemos aqui

This essay reviews the following works: Persuasive Peers: Social Communication and Voting in Latin America. By Andy Baker, Barry Ames, and Lucio Renno. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Pp. [...]

The payments industry – the business of transferring value through public and corporate infrastructures – is undergoing rapid transformation. New business models and regulatory environments disrupt more traditional fee-based strategies, and new entrants seek to displace legacy players by leveraging new mobile platforms and new sources of data. In this increasingly diversified industry landscape, start-ups and established players are attempting to embed payment in ‘social’ experience through novel technologies of accounting for trust. This imagination of the social, however, is being materialized in gated platforms for payment, accounting, and exchange. This paper explores the ambiguous politics of such experiments, specifically those, like Bitcoin or the on-demand sharing economy, that delineate an economic imaginary of ‘just us’ – a closed and closely guarded community of peers operating under the illusion that there are no mediating institutions undergirding that community. This provokes questions about the intersection of payment and publics. Payment innovators’ attenuated understanding of the social may, we suggest, evacuate the nitty-gritty of politics.

Based on ethnographically-inspired research in Japan, we report on people's experiences using digital money payment systems that use Sony's FeliCa near-field communication smartcard technology. As an example of ubiquitous computing in the here and now, the adoption of digital money is found to be messy and contingent, shot through with cultural and social factors that do not hinder this adoption but rather constitute its specific character. Adoption is strongly tied to Japanese conceptions of the aesthetic and moral virtue of smooth flow and avoidance of commotion, as well as the excitement at winning something for nothing. Implications for design of mobile payment systems stress the need to produce open-ended platforms that can serve as the vehicle for multiple meanings and experiences without foreclosing such possibilities in the name of efficiency. Copyright 2008 ACM.

This paper is about two related subjects: how to classify political regimes in general, and how Latin American regimes should be classified for the 1945-1999 period. We make five general claims about regime classification. First, regime classification should rest on sound concepts and definitions. Second, it should be based on explicit and sensible coding and aggregation rules. Third, it necessarily involves some subjective judgments. Fourth, the debate about dichotomous versus continuous measures of democracy creates a false dilemma. Neither democratic theory, nor coding requirements, nor the reality underlying democratic practice compel either a dichotomous or a continuous approach in all cases. Fifth, dichotomous measures of democracy fail to capture intermediate regime types, obscuring variation that is essential for studying political regimes. This general discussion provides the grounding for our trichotomous ordinal scale, which codes regimes as democratic, semi-democratic or authoritarian in nineteen Latin American countries from 1945 to 1999. Our trichotomous classification achieves greater differentiation than dichotomous classifications and yet avoids the need for massive information that a very fine grained measure would require.

Any book by Juan Linz or Alfred Stepan is eagerly anticipated, given both scholars' outstanding contributions to our understanding of contemporary authoritarianism, democratic breakdown, and democracy. Fortunately, this long book [...]

Pradeep K. Chhibber, Democracy Without Associations: Transformation of the Party System and Social Cleavages in India. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. 287 + xiv pp. Pradeep Chhibber's book [...]

Consolidating the Third Wave Democracies: Themes and Perspectives. Edited by Larry Diamond, Marc F. Plattner, Yun-han Chu, and Hung-mao Tien. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. 343p. $45.00 cloth, [...]