Flexibilidade institucional e qualidade da democracia:sobre a comparação de conceitos historicamente construídos e geograficamente situados

• Main Authors: Marta Maria Assumpção-Rodrigues, José Veríssimo Romão Netto
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Confins 2019-03-01
• Series: Confins
• Subjects: quality of democracy; institutional flexibility; incompleteness; rigidity
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/confins/18995

From the experience of sharing a research agenda between the Centre for Public Policy Research at the University of São Paulo and the Institute of Local Government Studies at the University of Birmingham, this paper discusses the challenges that political scientists and public managers have to face in order to standardize concepts such as quality of democracy, and institutional flexibility / incompleteness and / or rigidity. It argues not only that these concepts must be historically contextualized but, most importantly, that such contextualization must pay greater attention to the relationship between the quality of democracy and institutional designs. Otherwise, the comparative analysis will not be fruitful in bringing into light the differences (and similarities) that characterize the cases studied.