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This paper aims to analyze the main characteristics and challenges of institutionalized participation in the Brazil’s health system. First, it discusses the features and principles of the Unified Health System (SUS), highlighting the importance of social mobilization in shaping the country’s current health system. Next, the characteristics and attributes of health councils and conferences are presented as institutionalized mechanisms of participation. The health councils are analyzed for parity composition and deliberative function. Lastly, the results of the case study of the health council of the state of Bahia are discussed. The results demonstrated the low power of the social representatives’ agenda and the health council’s fragile capacity to exert influence in the definition of health policy.

This paper poses the question of the present state of criticism while also analyzing, in a more circumscribed manner, the specific phenomenon of “populism”. It shows the way in which populism as appeared in the public space mainly in a pejorative sense, and it suggests, along with Laclau (2005), that this phenomenon must not be rejected as such, insofar as it contains a specific rationality that is important for the democratic process but that must also be submitted to critical scrutiny. Thus, putting forward what the article calls a “critique of populist reason”, not only does it aim at reassessing what reason means today, but it also tries to distinguish the productive from the pernicious uses of populism by analyzing the narratives and values that each “populist” discourse mobilizes.

In this paper we analyze the results of a quantitative survey conducted with members of the Brazilian Public Prosecutor’s Office (MP) in order to answer three questions: Who are the members of the MP? Does the Public Prosecutor deserve the title of Guardian of Democracy? Are the members of the MP promoters of criminal prosecution or true guarantors of a more just society? The results indicate that persons in the MP are from the Brazilian elite, and they focus their actions on the criminal process, assuming the function of guaranteeing broad, collective and homogeneous individual rights. In addition, their work is office‑based, thus hindering an effective involvement with demands coming from the population. The MP is, thus, an old institution that has not effectively assumed its new functions, granted at the time of re‑democratization.

The subject of this paper is the judicialization of politics in democratic contemporary societies, which is a phenomenon that could have a certain relevance regarding the way popular sovereignty is exercised. Furthermore, it could affect the ways that social practices of emancipation might be regarded. In this respect, and starting out with a very specific consideration of the notion of “people” and “the political”, my intention is to analyze the different interpretations (critical and enthusiastic perspectives) about the judicialization of politics. Finally, I ask about the possibility of exploring the political-emancipatory potential of judicial disputes.

This text focuses on the advance of the “punitive state” in contemporary societies, or in other words, the prominence of control rather than social protection and social rights policies. Its central topic is the increasing investment in fighting crime by contemporary democracies, which helps to consolidate the figure of the “punitive state”. The recent sociological reflections of Loïc Wacquant, David Garland, Nils Christie and Zygmunt Bauman, among others, will be used to explore this topic, which is still little discussed by the academic community. The current capitalist arrangement has almost instantaneously spread around the globe, tying the success of economic enterprises to the new face of crime policy. The paper therefore aims to offer an alternative approach to thinking about social control by addressing the so‑called “punitive state”, a policy that suits the economic, social and cultural changes under way in the last thirty years and that, according to some contemporary theorists, inaugurated postmodernity.