Date:
Location:
"The Politics of Visibility: How Local Elections Undermine Representation in Brazil"
Speaker:
Peter Johannessen, Postdoctoral Fellow, Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School.
Moderator:
Steven Levitsky, Faculty Associate; Chair, Weatherhead Research Cluster on Global Populism/Challenges to Democracy. David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies, Department of Government, Harvard University; Harvard College Professor.
Contact:
Jillian Scales
jscales@fas.harvard.edu
Abstract:
Brazil has made impressive gains in expanding access to public services over the past two decades, but citizens continue to be dissatisfied with the quality of those services – an anger that culminated in a destabilizing wave of protests in 2013. In this talk, I will explore how Brazil’s unique combination of political, fiscal, and administrative decentralization has contributed to the poor quality of public services in the country. Specifically, I will demonstrate that citizens have unwittingly pushed mayors to prioritize highly visible infrastructure projects at the expense of less visible – but potentially more effective – policies.
