Building Democracies: Challenges, Crisis and Responses to Rule of Law, Access to Justice and Political Representation

In view of the theoretical and empirical issues raised before, this book brings together ten studies which critically exam the influence and effects of different dimensions of democratization processes for the quality of democracies which they gave rise in different parts of the world. The texts were originally presented at the International Conference “Quality of Democracy: Institutions, Agents and Public Policy” held in December 2015 in São Paulo, under the auspices of the Working Group on the Quality of Democracy of the Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA) and the Center for Public Policy Research (NUPPs), both of the University of São Paulo. The conference was also part of an agreement of cooperation between the University of São Paulo and the North Carolina State University. The book is organized in two main sections. The first one, Comparative Perspectives, comprises six analyses comparing Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, Jamaica, the United States and India; the second, The Case of Brazil, gathers four other studies about important features of the development of the Brazilian democracy in the last three decades.