In many Latin American countries, corruption and administrative inefficiency have emerged as significant threats to democracy and governability. This case study employs McCubbins and Schwartz’s U.S.-centered model of “fire alarm” and “police patrol” oversight to analyze how effectively Chile’s Congress has conducted its oversight functions. Chile’s experience with authoritarian rule, the weakening of Congress, and changes in the relationships between citizens and state institutions have undermined its tradition of fire alarm oversight, forcing Congress to rely on less-effective police patrol activities.

It is difficult to argue with success. Brazil’s public steel firms—once the crown jewels of a state-led model of development—were, by the late 1980s, heavily indebted, unproductive, and dependent on the financial support of a state in fiscal crisis. As if by a wave of the proverbial magic wand, their privatization in the period 1990–94 made them exponentially more productive, financially sound, and competitive. Of the eight major Brazilian steel enterprises, seven were returning profits by the end of 1994. One of the seven, Usiminas, became the most profitable private firm in Brazil in 1993, two years after it was privatized.

This article shows how and why the initial attempts of the Lula administration in Brazil to promote innovative counterhegemonic participatory strategies, such as those put in place by the PT in some of its subnational governments, fell by the wayside. It is argued that the implementation and scope of participatory initiatives under Lula were caught between electoral motivations and the need to secure governability. On the one hand, the need to produce quick results in order to maximize vote-seeking strategies hindered attempts to promote counterhegemonic participation, while Lula and his inner circle opted for policies that would score immediate marks with the poorest sectors or influence public opinion. On the other hand, participation also took a back seat because the PT concentrated most of its energies on reaching agreements with strategic actors, such as opposition parties or powerful economic groups.

Reliable data on Protestant and Catholic membership in 18 Latin American nations show that Protestants have recruited a larger percentage of the population in many nations than previously estimated. Analysis of these data shows that, as predicted by the theory of religious economies, the Catholic Church has been invigorated by the Protestant challenge: Catholic mass attendance has risen to unprecedented levels, and is highest in nations where Protestants have made the greatest gains.

Party identification is a central concept in studies of parties and elections. Drawing from an extensive literature linking the concept of party identification to the understanding of Mexico's electoral politics, this article explores how the Mexican experience informs the understanding of party identification in general, especially in emerging democracies. There, voters' attachments to political parties are usually seen both as essential to and a positive sign of democratic development. This study finds evidence consistent with these arguments in the Mexican case but also identifies aspects of Mexican party identification that are not so clearly supportive of democratic politics; that indeed may delay or even undermine democratization. These findings illustrate the relevance of the Mexican experience to the wider literature on parties and elections, particularly the well-documented relationship between party identifications and democratization.

For the past twenty years the South American republic of Colombia has suffered from a social phenomenon of such magnitude that it has defied not only the contemporary jargon of sociologists and political scientists but even the time-honored terminology of insurrection, rebellion, riot and revolution. Perhaps because the only element of this phenomenon that all observers can agree upon is the fact that it is and has been eminently violent, it has come to be called simply “la violencia,” or “The Violence.”

The phenomenon known as la violencia never has been completely absent from Colombia since 1946, but it has had two periods of particular virulence, the first between 1948 and 1953 affecting the departments of Tolima, Boyacá, Cundinamarca, Antioquia, Valle, Caldas, Cauca, Santander del Sur, Arauca, Huila, Chocó, Caquetá, Meta, Casanare, Vichada and Bolívar, that is, the entire country with the exception of parts of the Atlantic coast and the southernmost department of Nariño.

That indigenismo — in the sense of a sympathetic awareness of the Indian by social scientist, essayist, and creative writer – came into full flower in the two decades following the Mexican Revolution is amply confirmed by the most cursory survey of Mexican intellectual and artistic activity of this period. Interest in the Indian and in his halfbrother, the mestizo, is well-attested by the activities of José Vasconcelos as Minister of Education during the early twenties; by the appearance of Vasconcelos’ popular essays, La raza cósmica (1925) and Indoiogía (1927); by the anthropological and ethnological investigations of Manuel Gamio and Alfonso Caso, by the strikingly nativist orientation of the graphic arts; and finally, by the creation of the Indianist novel in the thirties.

This Article addresses some of the key issues involved in understanding current trade negotiations between Mexico and the United States, as well as their significance for the process of economic integration in North America. These issues derive from the new setting produced by (a) Mexico's trade and investment liberalization in the 1980s, (b) the incentives which underlie the drive towards integration, as well as (c) those factors which will condition the final content of the current negotiating process.

A free trade agreement (FTA) with the United States could be seen as the logical conclusion of the process of trade and investment liberalization carried out by the Mexican government ever since the mid-1980s. At the same time, it also represents a shift in Mexico's initial trade strategy, from multilateralism to bilateralism, or from globalization to regionalization, as a consequence of the global trend, toward the end of the 20th century, to create large regional economic blocs.

Do Caribbean Basin states influence U.S. immigration policy? Although the terrorist attacks of September 2001 eventually derailed migration talks, before that time Mexico and the United States appeared poised to negotiate a major bilateral agreement, largely on Mexico's terms. Drawing on 88 detailed interviews conducted with Mexican and other Caribbean Basin elites, this article examines sending-state preferences for emigration and their capacity to influence policy outcomes. The informants considered migration to be the most problematic issue on the bilateral agenda, but also saw migration policy as relatively open to source-state influence. A case study of Mexican emigration policymaking details the national and transnational changes that make migration increasingly an inter-mestic policy issue.

The liberal reform programs that developed in Spanish America following independence almost invariably included as one of their major objectives radical changes in the educational system. An outstanding example of this is the educational program proposed by Dr. Mariano Gálvez, Chief-of-State of Guatemala. Protected from foreign problems by virtue of the existence of the Central American Federation and its Liberal leader, Francisco Morazán, Gálvez had seven years (1831–1838) to develop far-reaching reforms. While the lack of Gálvez papers makes discussion and analysis of his domestic reforms difficult, it is possible to assess his role by an analysis of his public speeches, decrees, laws, archival records, and similar materials.

When delegating governing tasks to a coalition partner, the president would like to give a minister ample administrative powers to be able to effectively accomplish the political mission. Due to information asymmetries, the president runs the risk that this discretion might be used to pursue policy outcomes that may harm the president's preferences. This trade-off between delegation and control is key to understanding governance strategies the president chooses to minimize agency risks and coordinate public policies. With Brazil as a case study, this article demonstrates that presidents have strategically made frequent use of junior ministers as watch-dogs of coalition partners, especially when coalition allies are ideologically distant from the president's preferences. Yet neither the portfolio salience nor the president's decision to share powers with coalition partners proportionally seems to interfere in such strategic decisions.

This article assesses how much the emergence of civil society and private market activities are challenging Cuba's ruling communist regime. The assessment is based on a conceptualization of a “civil sphere,” constituted by civil society and private market activities (or the “second economy”), and how this affects democratic transitions from state-socialist societies, using Cuba as a case study. Examining the multiple sectors at play reveals an increasingly organized and vocal opposition, but one hampered by continued government repression. Considering several theoretical and historically possible scenarios, this study concludes that under current conditions, the civil sphere's significant challenge is still not enough for a regime change in the Cuban state.

Although it is of importance for any understanding of the Peronist regime as a whole, little is known in detail about the social character of the popular support upon which the regime was based. This state of affairs is not as paradoxical as it might at first seem. In part it is a reflection of the fact that the continued political importance of the Peronist movement has meant that until recently the debate over Peronism has been polemical in nature and that opportunities for dispassionate analysis have been correspondingly restricted. For example, to apologists for Peronism, the popular support that it enjoyed is evidence merely that it represented a profound revolution in social and economic priorities which was fully understood and appreciated by the people themselves. To its detractors it is evidence of little more than the manipulation of the ignorant, corruption of the venal, and coercion of the educated. To both groups it has been a premise for further argument rather than an object worthy of study in its own right.

Using original data from the period 1999–2011 on federal infrastructure investment for all subnational units in two federations, Argentina and Brazil, and a unitary nation, Colombia, this study shows that in developing federal countries with strong governors, presidents use nonearmarked transfers as a tool to compensate governors for sizable and secure territorial political support. The study argues that in these cases, resources do not make electoral power but chase it. In the unitary case, conversely, governors do not influence distributive politics. Variation also was found in the relevance of Congress, legislative overrepresentation, and programmatic criteria across cases. The article discusses possible reasons for these results and their implications for the comparative debate on distributive politics.

Racial politics in Brazil have changed dramatically: the nation-state that once denied racism now enacts racial policies for Afro-Brazilians. The discourse of race has also changed: it is now common for the media to discuss Afro-Brazilians as a voting bloc. Using qualitative methods, this article tests the hypothesis that Afro-Brazilian politicians seek a racial vote from the Afro-Brazilian electorate. Analyzing campaign advertisements from select candidates in Salvador and São Paulo, this study finds that most Afro-Brazilian politicians use racial cues, and interviews show that most Afro-Brazilian politicians address racial issues during their campaigns. Not all of them seek racial votes, however: at the federal level, Afro-Brazilian politicians believe that this strategy would not get them elected. Many use campaigns nevertheless to raise racial consciousness among the electorate.

Few political transformations have attacked social inequalities more thoroughly than the 1959 Cuban Revolution. As the survey data in this article show, however, sixty years on, structural inequalities are returning that echo the prerevolutionary socioethnic hierarchies. While official Cuban statistics are mute about social differences along racial lines, the authors were able to conduct a unique, nationwide survey with more than one thousand respondents that shows the contrary. Amid depressed wages in the state-run economy, access to hard currency has become key. However, racialized migration patterns of the past make for highly unequal access to family remittances, and the gradual opening of private business disfavors Afro- Cubans, due to their lack of access to prerevolutionary property and startup capital. Despite the political continuity of Communist Party rule, a restructuring of Cuban society with a profound racial bias is turning back one of the proudest achievements of the revolution.

“Rarely In History has an innovation in economic and financial policy caught on as quickly in as many different countries as privatization,” trumpeted the Financial Times (1987) recently. In Europe and the United States in the 1980s, victorious conservatives led an assault on the state (both its welfare and productive arms), but the movement included more than just conservative free marketeers. Spanish socialists were privatizing, and Communist party leaders in China and the Soviet Union introduced farreaching market reforms. Privatization also became a constant theme in policy debates in the Third World, though the ratio of discussion to implementation was low except in cases such as Chile and Togo.

If a medal were to be struck in commemoration of Latin America's successful survival of the 20th century, la cava might bear a representation of democracy and el sello that of authoritarianism. These alternatives have characterized all attempts to arrive at political consensus for the past hundred years and more.

The current version of the region's perpetual dichotomous nature has been called (re)democratization. In South America it has replaced professional militarism, the most recent representation of authoritarianism, and threatens to affect traditional democratic practices in countries spared the military incursions of the 1964-1989 quarter-century. To the north, (re)democratization challenges both traditional authoritarianism and Marxism-Leninism.

(Re)democratization is a transitional process in which the polity shifts from one with minimal partisan and popular participation back to one based on (ever more maximized) pluralistic participation, usually characterized by meaningful elections, separation of state powers, constitutional order, rule of law, respect for human rights, and civilian regulation of armed force.

One of the more recent and interesting contributions in the field of development has been the theory of dependence. This theory seeks to explain the most pressing problems of the less-developed world in terms of the relations between the developing and developed areas. Stagnation, unemployment, income inequality, and regional disequilibria are all seen as directly related to a less-developed country's position vis-à-vis the developed and capitalist world. Unfortunately, the theory of dependence has become something of a cause célèbre. It is either eagerly accepted or scornfully rejected as a matter of faith—primarily because of its political implications and overtones. Those who accept it embrace it willfully and rally to defend it against any possible detractors. Those who reject it generally choose to ignore it as either not serious or unworthy of careful attention and consideration.

Emphasis today is on the political and economic factors in social change in undeveloped countries. This approach, combined with the wholehearted acceptance of the role of the middle class as a psychological leavening agent in such countries, tends to obscure the presence of other factors. Especially are there other categories of human beings who are responding to the forces put into play by world changes and by the increasing pressures exerted upon the social systems of which they are a part. Recently, some of these groups have been given more notice, such as students, intellectuals, labor union members, etc. Another such important category is the servant class which for the most part has been ignored and yet which appears significant, even though not as a political group, in terms of both the effects it has on changes being attempted in social organizations and on the personality development of nationals in such countries.