From patronage politics to community deliberation: the recent experience of democratic school management in Brazil

The article discusses the limits and possibilities of school empowerment within education systems plagued by pervasive patronage politics. The analysis focuses on reform initiatives implemented by Brazilian sub‐national governments throughout the 1980s and 1990s to allow for the election of school principals by parents, teachers and students. Until the implementation of this reform, state and local authorities had relied on the school system as a source of patronage resources, and principals were nominated according to political criteria. The new system of democratic school management was expected to undermine this patronage‐based system and foster community participation in school decisions. The article relies on secondary evidence to assess the impact of school elections in what concerns the participation of parents, students and teachers in school affairs and the relationship between schools, party politicians and education administrators. It concludes that high levels of social inequality and the lack of a universalistic and effective system of welfare provision constitute serious obstacles to the empowerment of disadvantaged groups in developing societies such as Brazil. On the other hand, the article argues that school empowerment has the potential to undermine resilient patronage structures, by introducing universalistic mechanisms of decision‐making and making school administrators more accountable to their constituencies. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

European Regional Policy and Backward Regions: Implications Towards EU Enlargement

In this paper we show that the success of the EU Regional Policy, in terms of boosting growth in objective 1 regions, will mean a big opportunity for Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs) and hence the increases in competition arising from an enlarged European market combined with a suitable regional development policy should in the future boost the growth of those countries. In the last part of the paper we made a simulation for the funding envelope from 2007, based on the 2000–2006 budget. We show that the figures of the Agenda 2000 provide enough financial support for 90% of the total CEEC population and for 75% of current objective 1 population.     

Allele frequencies for 13 STR's from two Colombian populations: Bogotá and Boyacá

We present information from populations living in Bogotá and Boyacá, for nine short tandem repeats (STR's) already studied and four new alleles not reported in previous Colombian populations.     

The determinants of minimum wage rates

This paper attempts to test the degree of responsiveness of Canadian provincial governments to different political groups in establishing their relative minimum wage policies over the 1975–1982 period. It discusses alternative explanations of minimum wage policies and focuses on the political market approach, where women, youth, small business and unions play a role. An econometric model is specified and estimated on pooled annual time series and cross-section data for nine provinces in Canada. The results tend to support most of the hypotheses.     

Do people feel more of a duty to vote in some elections?

Prior research on civic duty has focused on national elections, believed to be the most salient. Evidence on turnout gaps between election levels suggests that it is relevant to inquire whether people feel that they have the same duty to vote in national, subnational, and supranational elections. The article investigates this phenomenon, comparing citizens’ attitudes towards national, European, and regional elections in ten regions from four countries. About one-quarter of European citizens demonstrate a lesser degree of duty towards European rather than in national elections. Differences in duty levels for national and regional elections are infrequent and concentrated in regions with nationalist movements. Both rational and identity considerations explain why some individuals feel less obliged to vote in a particular election than in another, but the latter matter more.