Political scientists from the Southern Cone have enriched the discipline with pioneering work. Many of them went into exile for political reasons, and thus produced part of their work abroad. Although Latin American political science has professionalized since the 1980s, many scholars still emigrate for study and employment. Argentines most numerously seek academic careers abroad, while Brazil has many more domestic doctorates and returns home after doctoral studies abroad. Uruguayans emigrate in proportionally high numbers and tend to settle in Latin American countries, while the number of Chileans and Paraguayans abroad is minimal. These contrasting patterns are explained by reference to factors such as the availability of high-quality doctoral courses, financing for postgraduate studies, and the absorptive capacity of national academic markets. Paradoxically, the size and performance of the diasporas may increase rather than reduce the visibility and impact of national political science communities.

How does the state ensure the implementation of national policies in a context of decentralized political authority? This article identifies a new strategy utilized by national bureaucrats to regulate the behavior of subnational politicians: mobilizing civil society as government watchdog and political advocate. In the context of decentralized governance, in which local politicians administer most social sector programs, reform-minded bureaucrats often find that they have little control over the implementation of their progressive policies. In Brazil’s AIDS policy sector, however, bureaucrats have ensured the successful implementation of their policies by developing allies outside government. These state actors—here called activist bureaucrats—have been largely overlooked in the English-language literature, yet they form a new layer of politics in Latin America.

Latin American evangelicals have become a common presence in legislative politics. Brazil exemplifies the potential clout of evangelical legislators and a troubling tendency toward political corruption. This article explains the quality of evangelical interest representation by focusing on church organization and theology, arguing that evangelicals approach electoral politics via three different modes: rejection; participation as individual, politically engaged believers; and engagement as church corporate project. While individual participation is unrelated to political corruption, the corporate model fosters machine politics, characterized in Brazil by resource-based politics, narrow voter bases, and frequent party switching. We link these characteristics to evangelical involvement in two corruption scandals that occurred during the administration of President Lula da Silva. The analysis shows the central role of evangelical organization and theology in shaping interest representation and suggests future duplication of the church-as-political-machine model, particularly where the “Prosperity Theology” variant of pentecostalism is strong.

Why do some candidates prefer to use clientelistic strategies to mobilize voters while others do not? Building on existing explanations that highlight the importance of voters’ demand for particularistic goods and parties’ capacities to supply goods and monitor voters, this article focuses on candidates’ political careers. It argues that how candidates begin mobilizing voters to participate in rallies and elections becomes crucial in explaining their preferences to use clientelism. Candidates who receive a salary based on their ability to mobilize voters—paid party activists—are more likely to use clientelism than candidates who are not paid for their political work, unpaid party activists.

Crime and violence have made public security a major concern to voters throughout Latin America. Existing research predicts that such widespread concerns should make public security a consistently successful issue in presidential election campaigns. Yet recent empirical reality in Latin America has been more varied. This study argues that success on public security is not so automatic. Human rights concerns combine with low trust in security forces to make success on security contingent on the correct conditions. Two key conditions affect the use of the issue: the degree to which security threats are organized and the degree to which recent repression has occurred. Then, winning votes depends on two further conditions: having a civilian background and a campaign that balances security with other issues. Together, these factors explain the dramatic variation in success, and suggest a key change from Latin America's past.

Since at least 2005, Mexico has confronted a severe security crisis that threatens to undermine its rule of law and democracy. An effective police response has been hindered by frustrated citizens who do not report crime, come forward with information, serve as witnesses, or support their police. This foments a vicious cycle whereby insecurity and corruption foster dissatisfaction, which yields further insecurity and corruption. Breaking this cycle requires a better understanding of why citizens are dissatisfied with their police. One view holds that discontent is due to police corruption, but a somewhat rival perspective contends that citizens are primarily concerned with security outcomes. This study uses comparative survey data from 14 major Mexican cities to test these potentially rival approaches. It finds that both corruption and security outcomes matter, but direct experience with bribery has the single largest impact on dissatisfaction with the police.

The Movement Toward Socialism (MAS) emerged in Bolivia’s Chapare region in the 1990s. Born of a rural social movement of coca growers, it spread to the cities and became the country’s dominant political force as its leader, Evo Morales, was elected to the presidency in 2005. This article argues that the MAS is a hybrid organization whose electoral success has been contingent on the construction of a strong rural-urban coalition, built on the basis of different linkages between the MAS and organized popular constituencies in rural and urban areas. Whereas the MAS’s rural origins gave rise to grassroots control over the leadership, its expansion to urban areas has fostered the emergence of top-down mobilization strategies. The analysis also reveals how much popular sectors allied with the MAS have pressured the Morales government from below and held it accountable to societal demands.

This article examines whether changes in electoral participation contributed to electoral volatility in Latin America between 1945 and 2000. As a result of literacy voting requirements and authoritarian interludes that disenfranchised large portions of the population, new voters in Latin America probably had different political interests from the previous electorate and were not socialized to electoral politics. The article considers the hypothesis that the inclusion of new voters with different interests produces an immediate, short-term change in aggregate voting patterns, and a lack of socialization of new voters generates lingering instability in electoral behavior. Accounting for confounding factors, the analysis of legislative elections in 12 countries indicates that the expansion of the electorate temporarily disrupted voting patterns in Latin America but did not lead to long-run party system decay.

This article analyzes the developmental impact of two of the earliest investments made by Chinese companies in South America, the Shougang Corporation's mining activities in Peru and Andes Petroleum’s oil extraction operations in Ecuador. The article draws attention to the importance of contextualizing and disaggregating instances of Chinese resource-based investment in order to adequately grasp the complexity of processes that are contingent to particular regimes of natural resource governance, companies’ backgrounds, and the strength and nature of local reactions, among other factors. It thereby encourages a critical examination of Chinese investment in South America that explores how the characteristics of that investment are reshaped by the long and contested histories of resource extraction in the region, the promotion of and resistance to particular visions of development, the agency of multiply situated and complex actors, and the wider transnational production networks in which resource extraction processes are embedded.

Ethnodevelopment is a relatively new type of participatory policy that targets the poverty of marginalized ethnic groups with a focus on identity and self-management. While observers have recognized the empirical significance of this new paradigm, little has been done to conceptualize ethnodevelopment. This article argues that national-level ethnodevelopment implementation is a form of corporatism. Examining ethnodevelopment institutions in Ecuador, it shows that the state has structured, subsidized, and partially controlled the indigenous sector through ethnodevelopment policies and agencies. However, certain components of classical corporatism, such as monopolies of representation, do not characterize this paradigm. This article therefore classifies ethnodevelopment as a diminished subtype of corporatism. It challenges corporatism's long association with a particular historical period in the region and finds that Latin American states and social groups have called on historical institutional repertoires in responding to the newly salient ethnic cleavage in the region.

Beginning in the 1980s, social and political actors across Latin America turned to courts in unprecedented numbers to contest economic policies. Very different patterns of high court–elected branch interaction over economic governance emerged across the region, with crucial implications for economic development, democratic governance, and the rule of law. Building on both institutional and strategic accounts of judicial politics, this article argues that high court “character,” a relatively stable congeries of informal institutional features, channels interbranch struggles into persistent patterns. Two case studies illustrate the argument. In Argentina, the high court's political character encouraged a pattern of court submission to elected leaders marked by periodic bouts of interbranch confrontation over economic governance. In Brazil, the high court's statesmanlike character induced interbranch accommodation. This study demonstrates that even in politically unstable settings, institutional features can shape law and politics.

There is no other country where the division between the old and young electorate is as striking as in Chile. For older voters, turnout exceeded, on average, 90 percent in 2009; for those aged less than 30, it fell below 30 percent. Using individual survey data from 2006, 2008, and 2010, this article studies the current socioeconomic composition of the Chilean young electorate. First, it shows that the young electorate is class-biased. Income is highly correlated with both registration and turnout even after controlling for education. Second, it presents evidence that class bias for the whole electorate has been increasing over time, due to generational replacement. The results are not promising for Chile’s democracy in the years to come, since equal participation is worsening over time.

As institutions are created to engage citizens and civil society organizations more directly, who participates, and what effect does participation have? This article explores two of Peru’s participatory institutions, the Regional Coordination Councils and the participatory budgets, created in 2002. Specifically it asks, once these institutions are set up, do organizations participate in them? and what effect does this participation have on the organizations? The data show that the participatory processes in Peru are including new voices in decisionmaking, but this inclusion has limits. Limited inclusion has, in turn, led to limited changes specifically in nongovernmental organizations. As a result, the democratizing potential of the participatory institutions is evident yet not fully realized.

Studies of executive-legislative relations are usually based only on the analysis of formal institutions, although informal institutions also shape interbranch behavior. This omission leads to questionable results when scholars examine the capacity of state institutions to audit other public agencies and branches of government. This article explores how the protocols, an informal institution that shapes the Chilean budgetary negotiations, have increasingly allowed the congress to have a more relevant budgetary role than what the constitution permits. It argues that protocols accommodate some of the undesired consequences of a charter that is strongly biased toward the central government, and describes how this institution has departed from its stringent budgetary focus to encompass broader executive-legislative agreements that enhance the legislature's capacity to oversee the executive.

This article studies the processes of nomination and appointment to the Supreme Federal Tribunal in Brazil made by Presidents Sarney through Lula da Silva. It shows that in relations with the Senate, presidential anticipation prevails over presidential dominance. Brazilian presidents are successful appointers because they invest great effort in the moment of selection, when potential candidates are tested in the juridical and political communities. As a consequence, a uniform Senate approval of candidates coexists with a differential pattern of candidate recruitment. Sometimes presidents can select close candidates from their government; sometimes first-choice candidates are ruled out for lack of consensus. The type of coalition the president heads and the number of vacancies available affect the president's chances of imposing a candidate. The filter posed by center-right parties in the Senate induces the selection of nominees with centrist preferences.

Although there is a substantial literature examining public confidence in the judiciary in developed nations, scholars have paid scant attention to analyzing judicial confidence in developing countries. Building on extant work regarding developed nations and introducing original hypotheses in the context of developing nations, this research explains influences on public confidence in Latin American judiciaries by developing a theory that focuses on the potential influences of institutional quality, experiences, and individual attitudes. The hypotheses are empirically tested with the rich individual-level data compiled by the Latin American Public Opinion Project 2006 survey. The results indicate that a variety of factors influence public confidence in Latin American courts; the role of context explains points of consistency and divergence with research on developed nations.

This article examines the dynamics of collective behavior in Santiago, Chile every September 11, the date of the 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. It uses a multiple-method strategy that includes participant observation, personal interviews, and content analysis of three major newspapers during the period 2003–8. The theoretical approach emphasizes time and space coordinates of specified social actors, sociocultural emergence, a limited range of dominant emotions, and dramaturgy to describe the complexity of ritualized commemorations. It shows that incidents occurring on this date are not primarily caused by the actions of social movement organizations. Moreover, the dichotomy of “day and night” used to understand the peaceful and violent commemorations is an oversimplification of a complex network of events, actors, and scenarios that has the effect of denying any legitimacy to actions that fall outside the state-approved practices.

The article analyzes executive-legislative relations in Uruguay between 1985 and 2005. It demonstrates that even after controlling for ideological affinity and acknowledging that ideology affects presence in the cabinet, legislators whose factions hold ministerial positions behave in a more progovernment way than their ideology would predict. This result not only shows that coalitions “work” but suggests that they work because the presidents use resources under their control to attract support from legislators. This article presents a systematic analysis of executive-legislative relations in multiparty settings that builds on the finding that nonideologically contiguous coalitions often form to separate the ideological from the strategic determinants of legislative behavior. It also contributes to the literature by presenting a new set of roll call data and, more generally, highlights the risks of attempting to infer ideology directly from legislative behavior in presidential multiparty settings.

Why do some protest movements in Latin America succeed in rolling back privatizations while others fail? This article argues that protests against privatizations have tended to succeed under two conditions. First, privatization’s opponents form linkages (or “brokerage”) across multiple sectors of society. Broad coalitions are more likely to achieve their goals, while groups acting alone, such as labor unions, are more easily defeated or ignored by governments. Second, civil rights are protected but political representation is weak. In that case, opponents have the legal right to protest, but are unlikely to have opportunities for communicating their concerns through formal institutions, which prompts them to channel their demands outside of existing political institutions. Using case examples and logistic regression, this study confirms these arguments and discusses the implications for democracy in the region.

This article explores competing definitions of equality embedded in contending visions for regional finance in the Americas. The U.S. free market–oriented project envisions extension of a NAFTA-like regulatory framework hemispherewide, promising Latin Americans better financial services, credit, and investment in exchange for strong financial property protections and (implicitly) dramatically reduced financial policy autonomy for their governments. Venezuela's vision of “Bolivarian” finance, exported to the Caribbean and the upper Andes, promotes assertive state management of both foreign and domestic investors, populist redistribution, and increasing reliance on nonmarket financial transactions. Brazil's regional financial project would unite South America through continentwide physical infrastructure and capitalist financial markets while retaining a role for public sector banks responsive to central government priorities. Brazil's approach shares with Venezuela's an emphasis on governments' need for financial policy authority and with the U.S. approach a concern for regulatory predictability and financial deepening.