Politics & Government Professor Signs Book Contract

Jeff Seward, Politics & Government, has signed a book contract with Routledge Press for his completed manuscript, "The Politics of Capitalist Transformation: Brazilian Informatics Policy, Regime Change, and State Autonomy." Publication is tentatively set for May 2016.

This manuscript is the only book-length study of the highly protectionist Brazilian informatics policy from its origins in the early 1970s to the collapse of the market reserve in the early 1990s and its impact in subsequent decades. It provides a complex political analysis of how state activists constructed high levels of state autonomy to try to shift Brazil to a new variety of capitalism by eclipsing the multinational companies (especially IBM) that dominated the Brazilian computer sector and replacing them with local companies with 100 percent Brazilian technology and ownership. This ambitious policy required repeated shifts of political strategy and policymaking institutions to respond to a constantly changing economic and political environment as Brazil made a dramatic transition from military dictatorship to democracy.