Ciência Política na Ufrgs: Formação, evolução e perfil da produção científica.

The main goal of this article is to reconstruct the history of academic autonomization process of the Political Science discipline in Rio Grande do Sul, since the foundation of its first Graduate Program until the present, through the descriptive analysis of documents and interviews with essential actors of this process. On this basis, we sustain the argument that there was a generation of political scientists at Ufrgs who has contributed in a significant way to the academic autonomy of the discipline at the regional and national level, and, at the same time, was responsible for the local diffusion of the paradigms prevailing in North American and European Political Science. In order to demonstrate the relative adherence to each paradigm, the theses and dissertations defended in the period from 1977 to 2016 are analyzed, based on theoretical and methodological categories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]