Master’s Degree
1. Mandatory Disciplines (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
State and Public Policies (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: The objective of this course is to discuss the concept of State in the main paradigms of contemporary Political Science, seeking the interfaces with the reflection on the conception, object and field of study of the public policies, highlighting the analysis models. The notion of public and private and the birth and consolidation of the public sphere. The process of policy formation: themes, agenda setting; implementation and evaluation: conceptual and methodological aspects. Agents, rationalities and decision-making bodies. Agenda Powers. The public policies of social cut: principles, mechanisms and their trajectory and development in the international level and of Brazil.
Political Institutions (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: The rules of the political game. The institutional design and the democratic state. Parliamentary, Presidentialism and Semi-Presidentialism. The relationship between powers. Representative institutions. Federalism and intergovernmental relations. The issue of accountability and responsiveness, the problems of state building and the configuration of democracy in Brazil; analysis of the institutional arrangement in force after 1988 and electoral and partisan system and reform of the Brazilian State.
Methodology of Research in Political Science (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: This module proposes to outline a comparative approach of the scientific methodology, encouraging, first, the formation of an integrated vision of Political Science with the other areas of social research. It will present, for the discussion and study, an overview of the methods and techniques of the contemporary social sciences, based on the theoretical and practical instruction of the program, introducing the graduate student to the study of research methods most used by political scientists.
Research Seminar (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: The seminar is designed to offer students a systematic orientation in the structuring of their research projects in order to prepare their master's dissertations. The account of the diversity of substantive themes, the monitoring of the research activities will be constituted of an agenda of evaluation of these proposals and of the oral exposition of them, by the ones. The basic requirements to be defined will be checked: delineation of the problem question; definition of the object to be investigated; pertinent and relevant bibliographic evaluation with the possibility of new proposals; assessment of the adequacy between the problem and the methodology to be used; feasibility of the research, means and sources to be used. Final substantive assessment and guidance will be the responsibility of the advisors.
Political Theory I (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: In this course we will study the reflections of the main modern political thinkers, produced between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. When we study the works of these authors, we will highlight their theoretical contributions to the construction of political modernity, as well as the legacy they have left us for contemporary political reflection. In our study we will emphasize the following themes: 1 - theories about the foundation of the State and the political society. 2- The conceptions of democracy, republic, law, freedom and equality. 3- The moral and positive foundations of legitimacy and obedience to the social contract, the State, the government. 4. The forms of ordering of the political order, the representation and the political participation in the nation-state. 5- The conservative, liberal and democratic-socialist matrix of political reflection. 6- The influence of these matrices in the contemporary theoretical debate between liberal individualism, communitarianism, multiculturalism in the perspective of the resumption of the theme of the social contract.
2. Elective Disciplines (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
State and Judicial Branch (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: To discuss the nature and institutional political foundations of the role played in Brazilian society, its crisis of legitimation and possible alternatives engendered by the reform of the judiciary and the possibility of incorporating access to justice and legal pluralism as pillars of a public policy of modernization.
State, Politics and Theory of War (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: The course aims to reflect on the relationship between politics and war as a social phenomenon. To present and discuss the analytical models in the field of war theory from classic and contemporary authors, emphasizing the role of the State as a relevant actor in the development of strategic policies for defense and security at national and global scale.
Democratic Political Institutions (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Political Institutions, Patterns of Executive-Legislative Interaction (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: Brazilian presidentialism and relations between Executive and Legislative; The electoral and partisan system and its influences on the decision-making process; Electoral connection in the House of Representatives. The models of analysis of the relations between powers; Analytical models of legislative functioning; used in the study of the legislative organization of the United States Congress and its applicability to the Brazilian case. Characterization of some of the main Brazilian political institutions; The behavior of relevant political actors (president, governors, parliamentarians and voters) and the incentives and constraints to the action of these actors.
Laboratory: Election Research (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: The objective of this subject is to provide students with basic knowledge of electoral processes, introducing the fundamentals of research methods in political science, with special interest in the research problem related to the dynamics of elections and electoral results and their influence on the democratic institutions of contemporary societies. In this way, the discipline’s activities will be sequential, first, being carefully reviewed the explanatory theories on political participation, electoral behavior, electoral competition (where party systems, forms of representation and voting will be observed) and means of information circulation (media and electoral propaganda), using a current literature distributed between a basic and mandatory bibliography and a complementary one. This is followed by the focus of the elections conducted through research methodologies, case studies, using aggregate electoral data, from which the main political-electoral indicators (nature, format and dynamics of party systems, electoral behavior and decision-making of vote) that can correlate (or not) with other indicators (social, economic and / or demographic) to extract the explanations about the variables that will be used in the analysis. The practical dimension of the discipline will be the methodological evaluation of a recent electoral fact in available aggregate data.
Media and Politics (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Media and Politics (Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior) - 2nd Semester 2017
Syllabus: Study of communication and media theories, whose field of dissemination disseminates the information of the particular and internal space of politics (parties, candidacies, electoral rules) as well as reaching the electorate, forming a mass of images used by public opinion and becoming a determinant for the formation of electoral preference (advertising).
Brazilian Politics (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: Formation of the Brazilian national state. Oligarchies and coronelismo. Local power and its relations with local and central power. The political system of the Second Kingdom. The Old Republic. The Republic of 1946. The coup d'état of 1964 and the Military Regime. The transition to democracy and the New Republic. Constitution of 1988, State reform, actors of the federative pact at development agendas.
Public Policies for the Amazon (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus and Objective: The objective of this discipline is to present the debate about the public policies implemented in Amazonia, especially the regional development policies that have generated anthropic impacts and altered the landscape of the region over the last three decades, with emphasis on the ways in which they are being implemented in the contemporaneity and how they incorporate the conflict between development and environmental preservation in the action of the State. It is proposed to identify the theoretical paradigms under which the different analytical methodological perspectives that deal with environmentalism and sustainable development and issues related to political-institutional processes in different levels of power of the state apparatus in the Amazon are articulated, such as the performance and bureaucratic profile of its main institutions and state organizations, identifying rationalities, agents and interests.
International Relations (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: Concepts, objects and paradigms of international relations: idealism, realism, liberalism and institutionalism, Marxism, critical theory, constructivism, other paradigms (post-colonialist, feminist, postmodern / poststructuralist). Main visions about globalization: hyperglobalists, skeptics and transformationalists. The question of governance and the actors of contemporary world dynamics: States, transnational corporations, international organizations and transnational and global non-governmental organizations.
Electoral System and Brazilian Party (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: In a contemporary Brazil, the coexistence of proportional and majority electoral rules produces different impacts on the party system, such as the tendency towards bipolarisation, especially in the disputes for the presidency, and, on the contrary, the high party fragmentation in the parliaments. The course proposes to explore this reality, analyzing the relations between electoral and partisan systems in Brazil from the following themes: Electoral and partisan systems - typologies and fundamental concepts; Electoral and party systems in Brazil under historical perspective; Electoral systems in Brazil - major and proportional open list; Party fragmentation, electoral volatility and effective number of parties; Representativeness and proportionality of political representation; Electoral coalitions; Custom vote versus partisan vote; Political reform; Institutionalization of the party system in Brazil; Parties in the executive and parliament; Political representatives and electoral connection; Recruitment and social bases of parties; Perception of the electorate about the parties; Election results and results.
Democratic Theory (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: The course proposes to discuss the different approaches to the participation, in theory and practice, of contemporary democracies. Overview of different contemporary conceptions of democracy (minimalist, participatory, deliberative and republican conceptions). Current theoretical debate on the relations between participation and representation; participation; inequality, social exclusion and political participation.
Political Theory II (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: This course aims to promote the study of contemporary political theories that focus on reflection on justice, highlighting their contributions to the construction of new paradigms of the social contract, in its normative, institutional and participatory aspects, both within the sphere of civil society as well as in the State. We will highlight how these theories help us to understand the complex relationship between social justice, distributive justice, social inequality, justice of difference, the dilemma of the State between deciding for the implementation of universalist or focused social public policies; the impasses arising between their institutions and the demands of the social movements of minorities for social justice, motivated by the constitutional and legal principles and precepts of human rights and difference. With this subject we aim to provide analytical references for the historical studies of the research lines of the program.
Special Topics I (4 Credit Units, 60 Credit Hours)
Syllabus: This course will deal with different themes according to different theoretical perspectives; political orientations and transversal approaches of multiple traditions in Political Theory.