Presidents want public institutions that give them ample control of bureaucracy. Conversely, members of Congress purposefully choose to place new agencies outside presidents’ control as a way of shielding those agencies from presidential influence. These claims are two well-known assumptions in the literature on agency design.
“If there is any great lesson we Americans need to learn, George Kennan once famously wrote, with regard to the methodology of foreign policy, it is that we must be gardeners and not mechanics in our approach to world affairs.” He was aiming at the practice and mental habits of the American diplomatic and national security establishment; however, the statement also indirectly reflected Kennan’s skepticism about the possibilities of the type of knowledge proposed from some sections of academia as a solid basis for the engineering approach.
By the end of 2012, Brazilian graduate education comprises 1,717 doctoral, 2,894 Academic Master's, and 395 Professional Master's programs. We see a basically continuous upward line regarding the number of doctoral, Master's, and Professional Master's programs. There are no breaks or shifts in this pattern that may be associated to political or institutional changes. We see no pattern breaks after 1985, when the military regime gave way to civilian governments.
La ciencia política en la Argentina ha experimentado un desarrollo notable en los últimos diez años. Tanto los indicadores institucionales en términos de enseñanza e investigación como los indicadores sociales en términos de la relevancia política y social de la disciplina y sus miembros, muestran avances sostenidos y relevantes.
Anibal Pérez-Liñan, professor of political science at the University of Pittsburgh was recently honored with the award of Best Book of Comparative Democratization of 2014 by the American Political Science Association for Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall. The book was co-authored by Scott Mainwaring of Notre Dame. I was fortunate to sit down with Professor Pérez-Liñan to discuss his book and the theories and issues that it poses.
