Beatriz Silva da Costa

This article is part of the field of political control studies in the context of coalition presidentialism and the delegation of powers within the federal intra-executive scope in Brazil. Guided by the question, “What were the CGU’s administrative designs between 2001 and 2016?”, the article intends to explore the changes in the administrative designs of the agency in order to verify possible interferences in the degree of discretion and autonomy. Using the analytical model of agency design proposed by Lewis (2013), the main findings of the article point to the strengthening of the CGU in the two mandates of FHC (PSDB) and in the mandates of Lula and Dilma, both PT, and a possible weakening of the organ during the government of Michel Temer (PMDB). However, the findings do not allow definitive conclusions in this regard.

As a very popular topic in the Public Administration literature, many studies have been published about internal control, but mostly from a perspective of public management or accounting. The trajectory of this phenomenon dates to the beginning of the twentieth century and enters the 21st century. However, the 1987 National Constituent Assembly marked the beginning of the reformulation of the internal control system of the Federal Executive Power in Brazil in a democratic context. This article analyzes what were the institutional changes in the internal control system of the Brazilian Federal Executive between the Constitution of 1967 and 1988. Using the theory of institutional changes, this article intends to contribute to the literature of Social Sciences and Political Science on the types of changes that occurred, the types of political agents involved in such changes, as well as interpret the influence of the political context at the time on the results promulgated with the Brazilian Federal Constitution of 1988.

Under which conditions do campaign finance reforms level the playing field in public procurement? I argue that a corporate donation ban's disruptive force depends on three conditions: pre-ban market concentration, political continuity, and the personal networks linking firm shareholders to politicians. Testing this with Brazil's 2015 ban and a firm-level panel of 1.78 million bidder–tender observations across 349 municipalities from 2013 to 2024, I find that donor firms lose 0.76 percentage points of procurement market share — a 41% decline relative to their pre-ban mean — while win rates remain unchanged: the ban reshaped market structure through participation, not individual contract steering. Losses are largest in noncompetitive procurement markets under new mayors (−2.2pp) and near zero in competitive procurement markets under reelected incumbents. They fall entirely on donor firms whose shareholders did not personally donate to the new mayor, and a symmetric control-side test finds no offsetting gains — the reform narrowed access rather than redistributing it.

Under which conditions does organized crime capture public procurement? I argue that procurement is a side business a criminal organization enters only where it already runs the drug trade — the same operatives, enforcement, and laundering pipeline that make front firms cheap — so capture follows the network's territorial footprint and concentrates where the pool of legitimate bidders is thin; once inside, the organization manufactures competition by quietly owning multiple firms that bid against one another. I test this for São Paulo's Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), linking ten administrative and judicial sources across 645 municipalities and 531,464 tenders from 2018 to 2024, with a behavioral layer that flags decoy bidders. Within the 773 tenders a confirmed network firm contested, netting out same-network bids roughly doubles the single-bidder share (from 4.9% to 10.1%; gap 5.2pp, randomization-inference p < 0.001): about half of the network's apparently competitive auctions collapse to a single real bidder once its own front firms are removed. Entry is governed by territorial complementarity — a one-standard-deviation rise in local lethal violence raises the odds of entry by roughly 60%, and proximity to the network's firm hub by roughly 110% — while political dominance shapes only how deeply capture runs. Measures of prior corruption are null at both stages: the network does not go where politics is already dirty, but where it already lives.

When a new minister inherits a bureaucracy, which offices does she replace, and why? I develop a theory of gatekeeper politicization: ministers target the small set of offices — procurement gatekeepers — that convert authorized budgets into contracts and funds, and the intensity of replacement follows two logics, loyalty-monitoring and distributive politics, scaling with the minister's partisan geography and the electoral calendar. I test this across the Brazilian federal administration from 2013 to 2022, combining a monthly personnel register of 959,742 appointed position-months held by 28,441 people across 22 ministries, 231 ministerial transitions, 959,480 discretionary transfers to 5,568 municipalities, and 1.5 million procurement tenders, in a difference-in-differences design that compares procurement to non-procurement positions at the same tier within the same ministry. Senior procurement leadership exits at roughly twice the rate of comparable non-procurement leadership in the twelve months after a ministerial change (+3.1 percentage points, p < 0.001); the effect concentrates on the senior coordinators who decide contract routing and reverses among the operational staff who execute contracts. Targeting intensifies sharply in the twelve months before a municipal election (+7.9 percentage points, p < 0.001) — consistent with ministers installing loyal procurement leadership precisely when the electoral return to controlling contract timing is highest.

Does experiencing an interruption of self-governance shape attitudes towards democracy later in life? We examine this by studying targeted authoritarian interventions during Brazil's military government (1964–1985), which replaced popularly elected mayors with appointees in certain municipalities while allowing others to continue electing theirs. Combining more than twenty years of public-opinion data on attitudes towards democracy with spatial variation in the sites of intervention (21,098 individuals across 662 municipalities), we compare individuals who experienced intervention during the key period of political socialization (late childhood to early adulthood) to others in the same municipalities who did not. We find that experiencing an intervention during these impressionable years leads to a small but statistically significant reduction in the valorization of democracy later in life.