Caught in an Authoritarian Trap of Its Own Making? Brazil's ‘Lava Jato’ Anti-Corruption Investigation and the Politics of Prosecutorial Overreach

The negative and corrosive impacts of corruption in the fields of economics, politics, and law are widely discussed. Less understood are the potentially negative impacts of anti-corruption struggles and strategies themselves. This article presents a case study of Brazil's ‘Car Wash’ (‘Lava Jato’) scandal from a legal and political perspective. Although the subsequent Operation Car Wash investigation was widely regarded as remarkably successful, supposedly buttressing the rule of law through high-profile prosecutions of leading politicians and businesspersons, the article argues that legal due process, wider constitutional law, and the political process were undermined. While the use of media leaks to strengthen the investigation proved tactically successful, when coupled with new legal instruments it undermined the presumption of innocence and contributed to a climate in which political and legal debates themselves became increasingly subordinated to simplistic polarizing anti-corruption discourses, thereby undermining an already fragile political and institutional environment.     

Domestic Contestation and Presidential Prerogative in Colombian Foreign Policy

The study of Colombian foreign policy emphasises external constraints and presidential prerogative in foreign policymaking. Drawing on insights from recent foreign policy analysis literature and evidence from several cases (Plan Colombia, US military bases, free trade talks with China, and ICJ arbitration of a maritime border with Nicaragua), this article challenges commonplace presidentialist assumptions. A novel model of ‘contested presidentialism’ better captures how Colombian domestic actors mobilise to raise political costs to block or modify presidential preferences. When the opposition fails to raise costs, presidentialist assumptions apply. Otherwise, presidents respond strategically by abandoning policies or substituting second-best alternatives.     

HOW TRADITIONAL ARE THE AMERICAN,FRENCH AND GERMAN TRADITIONS OF PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION? A RESEARCH AGENDA

Consistent with the notion of tradition, public administration scholars usually interpret and compare administrative developments in the US, France, and Germany as inheritance, assuming continuity. However, administrative traditions have thus far not been an object of systematic research. The present research agenda aims to address this research gap by introducing the transfer‐of‐ideas approach as a means to examine the empirical substance of national traditions. We claim that for current research, the benefits of this approach are twofold. First, the transfer‐of‐ideas approach contributes to comparative public administration since it reveals in how far intellectual traditions are hybrid instead of distinctively American, French or German developments. Second, the approach may help to address the polysemous meanings of and terminological difficulties within administrative concepts that prevail in Public Administration on both sides of the Atlantic.     

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT IN POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS: EXPLAINING PERCEPTIONS OF WHITE HOUSE CHIEF OF STAFF INFLUENCE

The notion that public managers influence organizational performance is common in public administration research. However, less is known about why some managers are better at influencing organizational performance than others. Furthermore, relatively few studies have systematically examined managerial influence and scholars have yet to investigate either quantitatively or systematically managerial influence in the White House. Utilizing original survey data collected from former White House officials who served in the Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton administrations, this study applies empirical public management theory to examine for the first time the key determinants that shape perceptions of chief of staff managerial influence. The findings demonstrate how several core concepts in public management theory help explain the dynamics that drive perceptions of managerial influence, thereby providing a new contribution to the literature on public management.     

Structural changes in Central and Eastern European economies: breaking news or breaking the ice?

This paper extends the sparse existing literature on structural breaks in emerging markets in Central and Eastern Europe by analyzing structural breaks in the intercept, trend and variance of monthly key macroeconomic variables, such as industrial production, inflation, monetary aggregates, nominal exchange rates and series related to the labor market. Using the Bayesian procedure developed by Wang and Zivot (2000, A Bayesian time series model of multiple structural changes in level, trend and variance. J Busi Econom 18:374–386), we provide strong evidence in favor of multiple structural breaks in the series under study. As most of the existing empirical literature on European emerging markets does not sufficiently deal with structural breaks, the instability found in this paper has important implications for macro-econometric modeling as well as the ensuing recommendations for economic policy.     

Exhibiting the collections of the Spanish Crown and nobility for the nation: the Count of Valencia de Don Juan and the 1892 European historical exhibition

This article focuses on the place and role accorded to the collections of the Spanish Crown and nobility at the Exposición Histórico-Europea organized in Madrid in 1892. It sets the exhibition in the political and cultural context of the Fourth Centenary of the Discovery of America and analyses the role of Juan Crooke y Navarrot, the Count of Valencia de Don Juan to understand how royal and aristocratic collections were instrumentalized in a bid to assert the place of the Spanish monarchy on the European and international scene and strengthen its prestige. Commissioner of Crown property, the Count of Valencia de Don Juan was one of the members of the nobility who exhibited their collections to the public. Therefore, his investment in the organization of the exhibition, as a non-professional curator, helps understand what the event meant for Spanish nobility. This enables us to gauge what role such exhibiting played in the construction of the national heritage and art historiography of Spain.     

From Racial Mixture to Black Nation: Racialising Discourses in Brazil's African Affairs

The article links reflections about Brazilian race relations with institutional transnational dialogues between Brazil and ‘Africa’. I point out that although racial/cultural mixture and the ‘brown’ census category have traditionally reflected much of national identity in Brazil, Brazil today is increasingly spelling out its blackness, both on the national and international scenes. I highlight that, not by coincidence, this fact is happening at a historical moment when programmes of ‘black’ affirmative action and other differential politics in favour of Afro‐descendants are taking off in the country, and also at a time when Brazil is expanding its geopolitical and economic interests in Africa.     

US Intervention in Colombia: The Role of Transnational Relations

In July 2000, US President, Bill Clinton, signed into law the aid package popularly known as ‘Plan Colombia’. Foreign policy analysts examining the ‘US drug war’ have generally focused upon the perceived national security interests of the US state and/or the intermestic nature of domestic politics, or the economic interests of an imperial US state in explaining US drug policy. I posit that the development, initiation and implementation of Plan Colombia cannot solely be understood through these various nation‐state paradigms, as this process was aided by, and facilitated through, an incipient transnational state. The emergence and consolidation into power of a neoliberal state within Colombia, the role of transnational lobbying by US and Colombian policy‐makers, as well as the influence of transnational corporations all played instrumental roles in the initiation, development and implementation of Plan Colombia.