To what extent can presidents exert gatekeeping power in opposition-led legislatures? Drawing on a study of roll rates in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, where presidents lack legislative majorities and often face a legislature controlled by the opposition, this article argues that gatekeeping power is divided among multiple actors. It finds that presidents exert weak gatekeeping power over the agenda. While presidents and their parties are rarely defeated in votes related to presidential initiatives, they generally create stable, informal coalitions with opposition parties to pass their bills. Moreover, the agenda-setting power of the president and the president’s party is weaker with bills that originate in the legislative branch, where the party is occasionally rolled on legislative initiatives and during the amendment stage if it is not also the median party.

Regional trade agreements have important consequences for developing countries, but the public opinion literature on trade agreements suffers from several shortcomings. Most significant is that studies tend to take a single year as the point of analysis, leaving us uncertain as to how opinion evolves. This study uses polling data to examine Mexicans’ attitudes toward NAFTA over a ten-year period. Results from regression analyses show an association between Mexicans’ support for the United Nations and their support for NAFTA, and a weaker relationship for other types of cues (presidential, the United States), than other studies have found. The data also reveal an association between Donald Trump’s arrival in the presidency and increased support for NAFTA.

After more than a decade of leftist governments in Latin America, the left turn began to reverse course, giving way to the rise of rightist political forces. Even moderate right-wing governments undertook reforms to reduce public spending. This agenda, however, encountered important obstacles. Focusing on the 2017 Argentine pension reform and based on extensive qualitative research, including in-depth interviews with key players, the findings here uphold previous work on the strength of policy legacies in opposition to promarket reforms. This study contributes to the existing theory by showing that protests against retrenchment favor the formation of opposition coalitions only in places where left-leaning governments had established inroads with organized popular sectors, maintaining relationships of coordination and collaboration. In these cases, the cost of specific reforms can jeopardize the broader project of retrenchment.

The literature on comparative partisanship has demonstrated the low rates of party identification in Latin America. Such low rates are commonly interpreted as a sign of citizens’ disengagement with parties and democracy in the region. This article revisits this interpretation by considering voters’ adverse affection toward a party, or negative partisanship. It shows that examining the negative side of partisanship can help us develop a clearer perspective on the partisan linkages in the electorate. To support this claim, this study analyzes an original conjoint experiment in Argentina and Mexico, as well as two other public opinion surveys fielded in Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador. The study presents empirical evidence indicating that negative partisanship helps voters without an attachment to a party to distinguish themselves from nonpartisans, is independent of positive partisanship, and is different from a general distrust of the democratic system.

Scholarship on Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) increasingly recognizes that even weak states targeted by TANs may respond, and subvert, transnational norm socialization campaigns. It examines both the conditions conducive to such responses and the range of policy instruments available to these states. Yet this emerging work lacks a robust, contextualized account for how states devise the strategy and the content of their responses. This article builds on the policy-learning literature to elucidate the process through which states construct their antiTAN approaches. It suggests that states’ policy paradigms in the field of domestic security largely shape those responses, with different paradigms offering distinct priorities and instruments. The comparison of the divergent impact of the Guatemalan state’s contrasting responses to two similar legal-political challenges, undertaken in the context of the same anticorruption TAN campaign, illustrates the argument.

Why hasn’t Uruguay enfranchised emigrants yet? This study examines an underresearched case of nonenfranchisement and engages with debates on external voting, diaspora politics, and citizenship beyond borders. Building on qualitative and participatory methods, the analysis unveils the obstacles to franchise reform despite significant progress from 2004 to 2019. Although external voting was not enacted legally, emigrants’ voting rights were debated, formally acknowledged, and encouraged. It is not the lack of norm entrepreneurs but the cumulative effect of indecisive actions that perpetuates a counterproductive dynamic and de facto uneven access to this right. An unresolved debate simultaneously advances conversations but precludes compromises, turning resolution deferral into an implicit form of regulating emigrants’ political inclusion or exclusion. Presenting original evidence, this study expands existing accounts, highlights the interaction between institutional and social drivers of change, and invites further research on the role of policy diffusion, domestic politics, and timing.