Fernando Leite

He is a Dphil student in Sociology at the Universidade Federal do Paraná. The topic of his research is the field of Brazilian Political Science. There are three units that compose the field: Political Scientists, academic production of ideas and academic institutions. He tried to answer two questions: how is the field of Brazilian Political Science structured? Why is it structured this way? His hypothesis is that the units are based on two oppositions: (i) between those that study institutionalized politics and those that do not; and (ii) between empiricist and ‘theoricist’ approaches. He used statistical techniques such as Correspondence Analysis to analyse the field and Logistic Regression to test the hypothesis. He argued that these oppositions were the product of a conflict between Political Scientists following the role model of the American Political Scientist “scholar” and Social Scientists following the role model of the French “intellectual”.