Brazilian Federalism as Polity, Politics and Beyond. Examining Primary Education with Case Studies in Ceará and Pernambuco.

Autor/in	Boekle-Giuffrida, Bettina
Titel	Brazilian Federalism as Polity, Politics and Beyond. Examining Primary Education with Case Studies in Ceará and Pernambuco. Gefälligkeitsübersetzung: Brasilianischer Föderalismus als Politics, Polity und darüber hinaus.
Quelle	Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin (2013), 302 S. PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei (1); PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei (2); PDF als Volltext kostenfreie Datei (3) Link als defekt meldenVerfügbarkeit Berlin, Freie Universität Berlin, Diss., 2012.
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	online; Monographie
URN	urn:nbn:de:kobv:188-fudissthesis000000094797-9
Schlagwörter	Bildungsqualität; Bildungspolitik; Grundschule; Föderalismus; Politischer Prozess; Dissertation; Ergebnis; Brasilien
Abstract	Many studies about federalism entirely focus on federalism as a polity, considering it as a static system of institutional rules and normative settings. William Rieker, the founding father of federalism, even thought in 1969 that "Federalism is at most an intervening and relatively unimportant variable". Yet, it is without doubt that the institutional set-up of federalism plays an important role for the outcome of a policy. The common vision about federalism as an institutional set-up considers federalism seldom as a dynamic system of political relationships and networks. A focus on the political process leading to policy outcomes in federalism, as well as how the political interactions or politics are intertwined with federal institutions, will provide a much more comprehensive explanation about how policy outcomes are achieved. This is precisely what this dissertation is about. The main argument is that federalism needs a much more political reading to understand the policy outcomes it generates; federalism is much more than an institutional arrangement or a polity. Using the empirical case of Brazil and its northeastern states Ceará and Pernambuco for two, most-similar case studies in primary education, it is assumed that the way in which federal institutions form education policy and quality is greatly determined by political relations and networks of various actors conditioned by this federal framework. Presupposing an intertwining (and not separation in) of polity and politics-factors in federalism, the main hypothesis of this dissertation assumes that different quality outcomes in primary education (as measured by students´ performance) exist even in similar states in Brazil because the country´s federal framework does not exclude that political relationships have constraining or enabling effects on institutions. The dissertation investigates in seven chapters why and how different education quality is delivered in both cases, comparing how educational initiatives of both states in the time-frame 1995-2010 strengthened or weekend Brazil´s "collaborative" federal framework in education policy. The studied cases of the federal states of Ceará and Pernambuco show how each one responds to the challenges of a federal framework that is not sufficient to provide education quality in a universal way as proclaimed by the Brazilian Constitution. Depending on the specific context, the framework gives too much leeway to political actors (hereby including not only politicians and civil society organizations, but also employees of the public administration and state and municipal governments as such), opening many spaces for formal, informal and other types of behaviors lying in between. Both empirical cases reveal a different composition of political and institutional factors that explain educational outcomes and how these came about. At the same time, they reveal how closely intertwined institutional and political factors are, and that these can often not be thought independently from each other, contrary to what much research on federalism proposes. (Orig.).
Erfasst von	Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main
Update	2014/1