An agenda-setting study of human rights policy at the subnational level in Brazil

Abstract

The process of agenda setting for human rights public policies in Brazil is still an underexplored field of research. Especially when the analysis is focused on the sub-national level. In this sense, this investigation brings two main axes. The first effort was to present, in a coordinated way, the existing theoretical framework on the history of the agenda and the institutional architecture of human rights policy at the national level. Then, the work concentrated efforts on trying to understand some main features of the agenda-setting process at the subnational level, based on empirical research. For this, the public budget allocated to the human rights agenda was analyzed in the 26 federative states and between the mandates from 2007 to 2018 and, moreover, it was presented the typological profile of the government programs. With this, it is expected to understand which subnational states allocated more investments to the human rights agenda in the period analyzed, how this investment evolved over the years and mandates, and, also, what were the main programmatic characteristics of these policies. In general, it was observed that the per capita budget values ​​for human rights were higher in the South and Southeast regions and lower in the North and Northeast regions. Furthermore, considering the three periods analyzed, the largest budgets were concentrated outside the human rights secretariats and, finally, they presented detailed specifications of their programming.