Political Appointments in Brazil

Date: 

Thursday, September 27, 2018, 12:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S050, 1730 Cambridge Street

Speaker: Felix Lopez, Researcher, Institute of Applied Economic Research (Ipea)

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

The lecture presents general results from different research questions about political appointments -- the appointee’s yearly turnover and survival, the role of the President and the role of the political parties in filling the top-level positions -- and connects these results with a discussion about the prospects for a more efficient public policy implementation in Brazil.

Felix Lopez's major research interests and publications discusses the logics of political appointments in the Brazilian federal bureaucracy; how the Executive Branch defines and builds its public policies agenda; the local councilmen political representation strategies at the local-level politics; and the role of NGOs in the federal public policies. Lopez edited the books “Cargos de confiança no Presidencialismo de Coalizão Brasileiro” (2016) and “Perfil da Organizações da Sociedade Civil no Brasil” (2018). Currently he is a Visiting Fellow at DCRLAS where he conducts a research about class perceptions on social inequalities in Brazil.