Harvesting Influence: The Building of the Bancada Ruralista from the Constituinte to Today

Date: 

Thursday, November 30, 2017, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S050, 1730 Cambridge Street

Speaker: Belén Fernández Milmanda, PhD Candidate, Department of Government, Harvard University

Moderator: Frances Hagopian, Jorge Paulo Lemann Senior Lecturer on Government, Harvard University

Belén Fernández Milmanda will be presenting the Brazilian chapter of my dissertation which studies how rural elites organize to influence policy-making in contemporary Latin America. She will be focusing on the case of the Bancada Ruralista and how they have evolved to become one of the most powerful groups in the Brazilian Congress.

Belén Fernández Milmanda is a fifth-year Ph. D. candidate at the Government Department. Before coming to Harvard she was a doctoral fellow of the Federal Scientific Council in Argentina where she received her B.A in Sociology and masters in Political Science. Belén’s dissertation studies how economic elites organize to influence policy making in Latin American democracies. Her work compares how agricultural producers organize in the electoral arena in Argentina Brazil and Chile and explains why they have chosen different strategies of political participation. Besides her dissertation Belén is working together with Prof. Candelaria Garay at Harvard Kennedy School in a project that studies the political determinants of deforestation in the Argentine Chaco forest.