The victory of the FMLN in El Salvador's presidential elections of March 2009 has been considered remarkable, given the dominance of ARENA in four consecutive presidential races from 1989 to 2004. Using individual-level data, this article examines the determinants of electoral support for both parties over the past 15 years. Several statistical models illuminate some of the factors that led to ARENA's dominance and ultimate defeat. A combination of variables associated with different theoretical models of voting helps explain the choices made by Salvadoran voters over the years. The most consistent predictors of vote have been voters' self-reported ideology and their evaluation of the incumbent government's performance. The 2009 turnaround relates to fundamental changes in the national and international context, and also to the selection of candidates.

In many developing countries with weak formal institutions, the protection of state actors is essential for organized criminal activities and illicit markets to emerge and thrive. This article examines the relationship between the state’s regulation of drug trafficking and its associated violence in highly fragmented markets. It argues that political competition influences coordination among the police, generating different types of regulatory regimes. Police with greater coordination implement protection rackets that curb violence; uncoordinated police carry out particularistic negotiations with drug traffickers that exacerbate criminal violence. This argument is illustrated with a subnational comparison of two Argentine provinces that experienced a similar drug market expansion with different patterns of violence. These cases show how corrupt states can obtain relative order in highly fragmented drug markets, and illustrate police influence in shaping the evolution of drug dealing in metropolitan areas.

Implementing market-oriented reforms is often a contentious affair, especially in new democracies. It can be time-consuming when the democratic process permits many opportunities to examine (and to block) controversial proposals. Conversely, when debate is limited by various means, the pursuit of reform can undermine the democratic regime. How, then, can market-oriented reforms and democracy be consolidated simultaneously?

The attempt to classify Bolivia under Evo Morales has yielded a bewildering range of regime labels. While most scholars label it a democracy with adjectives, systematic appraisals of the regime have been scant. This article aims fill this gap by providing a more systematic evaluation, putting special emphasis on features of Bolivia’s electoral playing field. It evaluates the slope of key fields of competition (electoral, legislative, judicial, and mass media), finding abundant evidence that all four were substantively slanted in favor of the incumbent. During the MAS reign, political competition was genuine but fundamentally unfree and unfair, because the ruling party benefited from a truncated supply of electoral candidates; much greater access to finance; a partisan electoral management body; supermajorities in the legislature, used to dispense authoritarian legalism; a captured and weaponized judiciary; and a co-opted mass media ecosystem. Contrary to most extant characterizations, the regime is best categorized as competitive authoritarian.

Contrary to the predictions of “power sharing” to mitigate ethnic conflicts, multicultural rights recognition can actually increase the frequency of local postelectoral mobilizations. This article demonstrates that the adoption of an ethnic rights regime for electing local government representatives may actually increase conflict if these multicultural laws are not carefully circumscribed to avoid violating human rights. Focusing on the 1995 multicultural rights reforms in Oaxaca, it presents evidence that legal changes purportedly implemented to recognize indigenous rights actually increased postelectoral disputes due to conflicts between county seat communities and peripheral population hamlets over access to funding by the central government. Based on this finding, the article addresses normative implications of “power-sharing” multiculturalism, recommending that multicultural laws be implemented only together with legal mechanisms to solve postelectoral disputes.

Latin America is a region of sharp ethnic inequalities. Uruguay has usually been considered an exception to this pattern, although no data were available to confirm this assumption until recently. This article uses the Household Survey of 2006 to analyze the wage gap between Afro-descendants and whites through OLS equations, decompositions, and quantile regressions. The analysis finds that discrimination explains approximately 50 percent of the racial wage gap for men and 20 percent for women. Discrimination operates partly through occupational segregation. Differences in schooling are the most important explanatory factor for the rest of the gap. Quantile regressions show that discrimination declines across percentiles for men.

What happens to a country's system of labor laws when its government embraces market-oriented reforms? In a twist on the prediction that labor regulations will be repealed, researchers find that laws remain in place but are not faithfully enforced, a phenomenon known as de facto flexibility. This article examines the case of Brazil to understand its near-opposite; namely, resilience and renewal in the enforcement of labor regulations. It finds that labor unions have combined the corporatist authority they gained under state control with the autonomy they acquired under democratization to devise new modes of action and to safeguard existing regulations. Meanwhile, labor inspectors and prosecutors rely on existing laws to combat precarious work conditions and promote formal employment relations, which strengthen the unions. This mutually supportive arrangement is neither perfect nor free of tension, but it shows how workers can be protected even when employers are subjected to global competition.

Are party switchers successful at furthering their careers? Most research on party switching focuses on the decision to switch and with which party to affiliate. Less attention is paid to the costs and benefits of switching parties. Moreover, previous research examining the electoral success of party switchers has often ignored how costs vary between the candidate selection process and the general election. This study addresses this gap in the literature by using original data on the careers of Mexican federal deputies to examine the costs and benefits of switching parties at the candidate selection stage and during general elections. The results suggest that party switchers are more successful at winning ballot access than nonswitchers but are less likely to win office. These results help explain why ambitious politicians would switch parties, given the known risks of changing party affiliation.

The literature on the origins of democratic institutions is split between bottom-up and top-down approaches. The former emphasize societal factors that press for democracy; the latter, rules and institutions that shape elites' incentives. Can these approaches be reconciled? This article proposes competitive political parties, more so than degrees of modernization and associationalism, as the link between the two. Competitive political parties enhance society's bargaining power with the state and show dominant elites that liberalization is in their best interest; the parties are thus effective conduits of democracy. In the context of party deficit, the prospects for democratization or redemocratization are slim. This is illustrated by comparing Cuba and Venezuela in the 1950s and 1990s.

In the United States, an important literature shows that legislators use interest groups, courts, and budgets to assert political control over bureaucrats. Similar theories can be applied to study the scores of new democracies that have emerged in recent decades. In Argentina, politicians in the first administration of Carlos Menem (1989-95) rewrote administrative procedures and relied on both “police patrol” and “fire alarm” oversight to realign the behavior of tax bureaucrats in conformance with their own policy preferences. Whereas U.S. legislators generally prefer complex administrative procedures, different electoral incentives led their Argentine counterparts to support reforms that significantly streamlined those procedures. This finding challenges theories that attribute legislators' bureaucratic preferences to the separation or fusion of powers between the executive and legislative branches.

This article asks whether economic liberalization, under certain institutional conditions, is indirectly related to drug violence. Focusing on Mexico’s drug trade, where violence was historically limited by politicoinstitutional arrangements, this study examines how trade liberalization shapes social exclusion in key trafficking regions and, in turn, shapes the industry. It argues that the change in development strategy has increased the flow of workers into the drug trade by reconfiguring the agricultural sector in regions where drugs are produced while failing to absorb surplus labor in manufacturing centers containing key smuggling routes. Through both mechanisms, workers enter an illicit market with new institutional settings that allow for fierce competition and the use of violence. Using panel data on drug violence from 2007 to 2011, the study finds that exposure to trade is associated with violence in both drug-producing and -smuggling regions, but with a more sizable effect in the former.

When President Reagan Declared his “war on drugs” in the early 1980s, the United States entered a new era of drug diplomacy in its foreign policy toward Latin America.Control of drug trafficking currently ranks higher than immigration, foreign debt, and communist expansion in Central America as a priority issue in US-Latin American relations. In a March 1988 New York Times/CBS News poll, 48% of the respondents indicated that drug trafficking was the most important foreign policy issue facing the nation compared to Central America (22%), arms control (13%),terrorism (9%), and Palestinian unrest (4%). Equally revealing, when asked whether it was more important to stop the drug trafficking of Central American leaders or to support them in the fight against communism, 63% gave top priority to halting the drug traffic, compared to only 21% who felt that stopping communism was more important (Sciolino with Engelberg, 1988: 10y).

Over the last decades, indigenous movements have propelled the political empowerment of historically marginalized groups in Latin America. The Maya struggle for ethnic equality in Guatemala, however, since its reawakening during the peace process, has reached an impasse. Based on field research consisting of dozens of elite interviews, this article analyzes the patterns of and obstacles to present-day Maya mobilization. It combines movement-internal and -external factors in an overarching theoretical argument about indigenous movements' capacity to construct strong collective voices. In the Guatemalan case, organizational sectorization, the lack of elite consensus on key substantive issues, and unclear alliance strategies compromise the effectiveness of horizontal voice among Maya organizations. These problems are exacerbated by the lasting effects of the country's unique history of violence and state strategies of divide and rule, preventing the emergence of a strong vertical voice capable of challenging the Guatemalan state.

Peru is a Priority Theater in The US War against drugs in that it produces more coca for export to the United States than any other Latin American country. The Huallaga Valley, a remote area about 200 miles northeast of Lima on the eastern Andean slopes, is one of the world's most fertile coca-growing regions. This article focuses on what is known about Peru's coca industry, and the anti-drug efforts that have been undertaken by the US and Peruvian governments. Under President Alan Garcia, elected in 1985, the Peruvian government has been usually cooperative with US anti-drug programs; some explanations for this collaboration will be suggested.

Despite the Garcia government's cooperative stance, the results of Peru's war against drugs have been similar to results elsewhere: governments have won some battles, but they are losing the war. Perhaps the most important question raised by the ' Peruvian case is whether the United States should give a higher priority to anti-drug efforts or to counterinsurgency; US policy regarding Peru has appeared to do the latter.

In the mid-1990s, for the first time in the history of the Americas, truly hemispherewide collaboration among labor organizations became possible. Yet this new political opportunity structure has not brought actors together in an undisputed new labor internationalism. This article focuses on two key sources of contention among labor organizations in the context of free trade mobilizations between 1990 and 2004: the discussions about coalition building with other civil society actors and the debates about including a social clause in trade agreements. It argues that transnational collective action occurs parallel to the continued relevance of national-level claims and targets, and that this simultaneity represents a real source of challenges, for scholars and labor organizations alike. Based on social network data and qualitative interviews in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and the United States, the article analyzes the actions taken by labor organizations, and how these changed through time.

This article studies the development of informal bargaining tables to mitigate postelectoral conflicts in some 15 percent of Mexico's local elections between 1989 and 2000, even as formally autonomous electoral commissions and courts were being constituted. By documenting the dual institutions that resulted, the study qualifies theories of institutional design that take actor consent for granted. It argues that in the Mexican case and perhaps others, elections, particularly subnational elections, are focal points for informal bargaining over rules that are the true motors of protracted transitions. It finds electoral institutions to be critical to democratization, but for reasons beyond those given by most institutionalists.

El Paso, Texas, and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, share a common border divided by the channeled and weakly flowing Rio Grande. The twin cities, with a combined population of over a million, are located in a valley between two mountain ranges. They share a common air shed, mutual sources of water supply, and the ever-present threat of disease which, of course, does not recognize the artificial national boundary dividing the two cities.

How have the sister cities and their respective governments at the local, state, and federal levels attempted to solve their common health and environmental problems? This paper will briefly review the efforts to resolve and to solve common health and environmental problems between the two cities. What is necessary at the outset is some type of analytical framework to better understand the relations between the two cities.

Comparing the Aylwin and Frei administrations, this article probes the question of why civilian authorities did not always use the legal and political tools they had acquired to respond to the military’s institutional and political demands. Actors’ preferences, leadership style, and strategic decisions influence the way civilian leaders use those tools. Civilian responses have important and sometimes unintended consequences for the stabilization of the civil-military relationship in new democratic regimes.

This article presents an analysis of the use of populist framing mechanisms by grassroots right-wing organizations. It brings together the social movement literature on framing and the populist literature to understand how actors build an emergent field of activism in a highly contentious context. Based on the analysis of a sample of 4,574 Facebook posts published by 5 civil society organizations during the campaign to oust Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, it argues that two mechanisms, reductionism and antagonism, enabled actors to focus on similar targets and diagnostics while maintaining relevant differences when seeking to motivate followers and present prognostic frames. These were key mechanisms used by all the actors, albeit with different contents, depending on the frame task. This article contributes to filling gaps in the framing and populist literatures and sheds light on the relevance of populist communication in the rise of right-wing activism.

This article seeks to determine the main predictors of political participation in a newly democratic regime: Mexico. Compared to other nations, Mexico fills a moderate position in terms of the volume of political participation. Following the literature on participation, this study develops a set of participant modes—voting, communal activity, petitioning, direct action, and political organization membership—and then seeks to determine the socioeconomic, demographic, attitudinal, and social capital factors that best explain participation. Distinct resource inequalities limit the participation of the less educated, the poor, women, and workers, although peasant participation is robust. The strongest determinant of political participation of all kinds is involvement in social capital–generating activities: belonging to nonpolitical organizations and engaging in charitable work, activities typically dominated by the middle class. Building social capital is essential to promoting robust rates of political participation in Mexico.