Affirmative Action for Graduate School in Brazil: Patterns of Institutional Change
Since 2002 several graduate schools of Brazilian public universities have created affirmative action in their admissions’ processes. It happens that such policies are little analyzed by the academic literature, with few studies devoted to understanding how they were structured as public policies. In 2016, Brazilian Ministry of Education (MEC) issued Normative Ordinance No. 13/2016 establishing that the Federal Institutions of Higher Education should submit proposals on the inclusion of vulnerable groups in their master's and doctorate degrees. In most of the graduate programs with AA, the quotas did not exclude the traditional phases of the admission process, but some programs considered the barriers faced by the various groups in accessing this educational level and made modifications in their criteria. The paper will explain what causes institutional change and how the creation of affirmative action has resulted in adjustments in the student admission processes. The analysis is based on the typology developed by Thelen (2003; 2009) and others (Streeck, Thelen, 2005; Mahoney, Thelen, 2010). The data collected in a survey and in-depth interviews indicate that the enactment of Normative Ordinance 13/2016 can be considered an exogenous factor that induced the creation of these policies. However, the major institutional changes are the result of endogenous and gradual processes, in which some actor were able to introduce modifications. In order to identify the types of change, we analyzed and coded the regulations of the admission processes of 139 graduate programs that created AA by their own initiative. The main steps of the process and criteria were coded and used to build an scale of change, so that it was possible to identify the number of changes connected to the AA policies. The data indicates the presence of two forms of institutional change: displacement and layering. The conclusions are based on (a) a data collection and analysis of the admission rules of all 2801 academic graduate programs to identify those who created AA; (b) an online survey; and (c) in-depth interviews with selected actors from some programs and representatives of the federal government.