Brazil once had some of the highest vaccination rates in the world, yet coverage has declined sharply since 2015 despite universal and free access. Why has hesitancy increased in a system historically marked by strong immunization capacity and broad political support? Drawing on an original survey and in-depth interviews with health workers and municipal officials, this article argues that vaccine hesitancy in Brazil reflects the interaction of misinformation, partisan alignment, and fragmented institutional trust in a decentralized democracy. First, misinformation surrounding COVID-19 generated spillover effects that reduced confidence in routine vaccines. Second, credibility cues matter: misinformation attributed to physicians is more persuasive than identical claims from political, religious, or interpersonal sources. Third, polarization is directional: Bolsonaro supporters are significantly more likely to express hesitancy, while support for pro-vaccine leaders does not produce equivalent consolidation. In polarized and decentralized contexts, trust in vaccine-skeptical elites can amplify rather than mitigate resistance to preventive health policy.
This article revisits William Gamson's classic hypothesis by examining how combinations of political self-efficacy and institutional trust shape adolescent political participation in Chile. Using survey data from 1316 adolescents interviewed around the onset of the 2019 estallido social , we distinguish between conventional and disruptive repertoires of action and a digitally mediated domain of participation. The results provide partial support for Gamson's argument. Dissidents – those with high efficacy and low institutional trust – are the most strongly associated with disruptive participation and high levels of online engagement, whereas Assureds – those with high efficacy and high trust – are more strongly associated with conventional participation. We also show that the estallido social did not simply increase or decrease participation overall. Rather, it reordered participatory repertoires in ways that reflected pre-existing combinations of efficacy and trust. The findings highlight the continued relevance of Gamson's framework under contemporary conditions of youth mobilisation and institutional distrust.
This article examines how gender and institutional structures shape legal decision-making. Drawing on a unified theoretical model of bounded rationality and legal decision-making, we analyse 1.26 million criminal complaints filed in Chile's Prosecution Office between 2015 and 2022. Integrating insights from rational choice, identity and gender studies, and behavioural organisation theory, we explain how prosecutors evaluate uncertainty and cost when deciding whether to charge a defendant. Using coarsened exact matching and multilevel modelling to account for non-random case assignment, complemented by placebo, specification, and sensitivity checks, we find that female prosecutors are generally less likely to prosecute – but more likely to do so in gender-salient cases. Leadership, experience, and caseload dynamics also display gendered effects. These findings highlight how individual identities interact with institutional environments to reproduce or resist inequality in legal outcomes.
This article examines the pivotal role of private-sector actors as policy entrepreneurs in Mexico’s 2020 pension reform, offering new insights into welfare state transformations in Latin America. Through the analysis of elite interviews and policy documents, it argues that private-sector leadership, coupled with a gradual implementation approach and cross-sector collaboration, facilitated a major reform in a historically challenging policy area. This case study extends theories of policy entrepreneurship to private-sector actors in welfare state reforms and provides a potential model for other Latin American countries struggling with pension system challenges. The success of Mexico's reform challenges traditional assumptions about pension reform processes in the region and highlights the importance of cross-sector collaborations in overcoming political and institutional obstacles.
It is common, both in unitary and federal countries, for politicians at different levels to cooperate in pursuit of mutual benefits. But how can we identify who cooperates with whom to investigate the factors behind these alliances? This article proposes a novel strategy to detect alliances between local executive leaders and national legislators using mayors’ social media data. Drawing on over two million posts from nearly 2000 Brazilian mayors, we develop, through a supervised machine learning model, an indicator that measures the strength of mayor-congressperson relationships. Our findings show that most connections are relatively weak, though partisanship is positively associated with stronger ties. Our approach offers a low-cost, replicable alternative to traditional methods for studying political intermediation. It advances the understanding of multilevel political dynamics in presidential systems with strong local executives and highlights the role of local elected officials as key, yet often overlooked, brokers in comparative politics.
