Ambition theory suggests that scholars can understand a good deal about politics by exploring politicians' career goals. In the USA, an enormous literature explains congressional politics by assuming that politicians primarily desire to win re-election. In contrast, although Brazil's institutions appear to encourage incumbency, politicians do not seek to build a career within the legislature. Instead, political ambition focuses on the subnational level. Even while serving in the legislature, Brazilian legislators act strategically to further their future extra-legislative careers by serving as 'ambassadors' of subnational governments. Brazil's federal institutions also affect politicians' electoral prospects and career goals, heightening the importance of subnational interests in the lower chamber of the national legislature. Together, ambition and federalism help explain important dynamics of executive-legislative relations in Brazil. This book's rational-choice institutionalist perspective contributes to the literature on the importance of federalism and subnational politics to understanding national-level politics around the world.

Comparative studies of electoral institutions have largely neglected a fundamental characteristic of most of the world's electoral systems: malapportionment. This article provides a method for measuring malapportionment in different types of electoral systems, calculates levels of malapportionment in seventy-eight countries, and employs statistical analysis to explore the correlates of malapportionment in both upper and lower chambers. The analysis shows that the use of single-member districts is associated with higher levels of malapportionment in lower chambers and that federalism and country size account for variation in malapportionment in upper chambers. Furthermore, African and especially Latin American countries tend to have electoral systems that are highly malapportioned. The article concludes by proposing a broad, comparative research agenda that focuses on the origins, evolution and consequences of malapportionment.

Although observers of Brazilian politics commonly hold that voters reward incumbents for "bringing home the bacon," I provide reasons to question the direct link between pork and electoral success as well as statistical evidence demonstrating the lack of such a link. This generates a puzzle: if pork barreling is ineffective, why do Brazilian deputies spend so much time seeking pork? The answer is that deputies do not trade pork for votes, they trade pork for money: porkbarrel success helps incumbents raise funds from private sector interests that profit from government contracts. In turn, politicians' access to money, not pork, directly affects their electoral prospects. This article provides a new understanding of the electoral connection in Brazil by showing that existing analyses either have overestimated pork's impact or are underdetermined because they have not included measures of campaign finance. The findings should also encourage comparativists interested in pork-barrel politics, clientelism, the personal vote, and campaign behavior more generally to focus attention on the role of money in elections.

The global regulator CodY controls the expression of dozens of metabolism and virulence genes in the opportunistic pathogen Staphylococcus aureus in response to the availability of isoleucine, leucine and valine (ILV), and GTP. Using RNA-Seq transcriptional profiling and partial activity variants, we reveal that S. aureus CodY activity grades metabolic and virulence gene expression as a function of ILV availability, mediating metabolic reorganization and controlling virulence factor production in vitro. Strains lacking CodY regulatory activity produce a PIA-dependent biofilm, but development is restricted under conditions that confer partial CodY activity. CodY regulates the expression of thermonuclease (nuc) via the Sae two-component system, revealing cascading virulence regulation and factor production as CodY activity is reduced. Proteins that mediate the host-pathogen interaction and subvert the immune response are shut off at intermediate levels of CodY activity, while genes coding for enzymes and proteins that extract nutrients from tissue, that kill host cells, and that synthesize amino acids are among the last genes to be de-repressed. We conclude that S. aureus uses CodY to limit host damage to only the most severe starvation conditions, providing insight into one potential mechanism by which S. aureus transitions from a commensal bacterium to an invasive pathogen.

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