Almost every day our newspapers feature accounts of student ferment on one or another of the university campuses in both the “developed” and “developing” nations around the globe. University students appear to have become extremely active in recent years in attempting to influence policy decisions taken by both administrators of higher education and government officials. In Brazil, however, such student political activism is clearly not just a recent phenomenon. While Brazilian university students have played an increasingly important role in national politics since World War II, most recently in their outspoken opposition to the military-dominated governments of the late Castello Branco and that of President Artur Costa e Silva, they enjoy an important tradition of student political activism that cannot be overlooked. In fact, accepting the suggestions made with real insight by E. Wight Bakke regarding the causes of student activism, we find that an examination of the student tradition in Brazil helps to explain current student agitation.

During the late Empire in Brazil, Rio de Janeiro society felt the stirrings of a new process, one which would seriously alter—and threaten—the traditional way of life in the city. In imitation of Europe, well-to-do citizens began forming voluntary associations for mutual aid and protection. The trend soon reached the middle and upper levels of the proletariat, whose organizations became labor unions. Most sectors of the urban society gradually organized around interest groups, and as the city surged into the new century with over a half-million people, occasional conflict marred the society of “conciliation and reform.” By the 1920s, with the sobering experiences of Europe, Russia, and Mexico in mind, thoughtful Brazilians called for conservative social policy to contain class conflict. Many blamed the excessive liberalism of republican government since 1889 and harked back to medieval institutions for bringing social peace.

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.

This article examines post-earthquake aid to agriculture and food security in Haiti. It argues that the much-heralded increase in assistance to rural development is likely to fall short of expectations because it comes with a superficial rebranding of a not very useful approach. Macroeconomic policy content remains largely nonnegotiable, full trade liberalization is still favored, and a reliance on free market forces that tend to favor relatively well off, export-oriented farmers still lingers. Furthermore, conflicting approaches to addressing food insecurity highlight an already severe democratic deficit. It appears that the contours of agricultural and food security policy, and hence the destinies of rural Haitians, stand to be shaped from the outside yet again. While new aid resources may offer some modest relief, they hold out only limited opportunities for addressing the profound deprivations and disparities that afflict the rural hinterland.

On 5 April 1992, Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori dissolved the Congress and suspended all constitutional guarantees, thus rendering Peru the first, among the seven leading countries of Latin America, to initiate a formal break away from the trend toward legally-elected civilian regimes which has been sweeping the region since the early 1980s. Peru's rupture of democratic rule occurred during a wave of domestic violence that evolved from, and is the consequence of, at least three major developments.

There are many ways of dealing with events that are perceived by a government as threats to the stability of the existing political system. Two contrasting ways will be discussed in this study of Mexico, and an attempt will be made to evaluate their relative efficacy in controlling activities regarded as subversive by the government in question. The first method to be discussed will be referred to as the legal approach to subversion. Focus will be on both the latent and manifest functions (in Mertonian terms) of the letter, intent, and implementation of the Mexican law.

The ley de disolución social (law of social dissolution) forms part of the Mexican Federal Penal Code, which is applicable throughout the entire republic.

This article examines whether conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs have had a significant effect on reducing murder rates in Mexico and Brazil, using time-series municipal-level data on murders in both countries. The findings, over the period 2005–8, show that the greater the proportion of beneficiaries enrolled in a CCT program in each municipality, the lower the number of murders. There are, however, important differences between the two countries, with a much larger effect in Brazil than in Mexico. This holds even when controlling for GDP and levels of development.

Any examination of the Cuban involvement in Africa should take into consideration the political conditions surrounding such involvement. Only by analyzing the objectives and motivations of those involved, while disregarding any arguments in justification, can one adequately demonstrate the complexity of the relations between Cuba and its African allies. An analysis of Cuba's assessment of its own political and ideological function in Africa or of the objectives of the Soviet Union in Africa is not as important as an examination of the African expectations arising from Cuban military and development aid.

During the 1890s, the young Brazilian republic suffered from almost constant political and economic turbulence. Various civilian and military groups contended for power, while rapidly rising prices aggravated urban unrest. At the same time, increasing numbers of European immigrants entered Brazil, and, as in other Latin American countries, became a source of controversy (see Solberg, 1970). Some immigrants, such as Italian or Spanish anarchists, were themselves radical, and some opposition to immigrants came from conservative elements of Brazilian society. But the most vehement anti-immigrant outbursts of the inflation-ridden 1890s issued from radical nationalist sectors. The Portuguese, members of the largest foreign colony in Rio de Janeiro, became targets for virulent attacks by a little-known group who styled themselves Jacobinos. Both the ultranationalistic Jacobinos and the Portuguese, or Galegos, as they were scornfully termed, viewed each other as the most dangerous enemy they faced. After examining some aspects of Portuguese immigration to Brazil and the origins of Lusophobia, this article will focus on Jacobino criticisms and activities, which can best be understood within the specific economic and political context of the 1890s.

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.

Does social background affect legislators’ behavior in office? Do individuals with specific social ties tend to be mainly concerned with representing their group of reference, beyond partisanship? This article deals with these questions by analyzing bill-drafting patterns by representatives in the Argentine Congress who belong to an understudied group: workers. The wide presence of a broad, populist party (Peronism) that historically incorporated organized labor, along with other groups, provides consistent variation for empirical assessment. Evidence demonstrates that only labor-based representatives in general, regardless of party membership, tend to use legislative resources to target workers, while every other member of the populist party does not consider labor issues at all in their legislative tasks. Such findings open new directions for analysis of representation, legislative performance, and strategies developed by dissimilar groups in broad political organizations.

In 1970, Dr. Salvador Allende, presidential candidate of the Unidad Popular coalition, won a plurality — but not a majority — of votes from the Chilean electorate. Consequently, and in accord with Chilean electoral laws and constitution, the Chilean Congress was called upon to vote for the president, and it selected Dr. Allende as the country's new president. Soon thereafter a wave of opposition to his administration developed among business and middle-class sectors: Rightist political movements and parties, entrepreneurial associations, some white-collar unions, as well as groups representing both commercial interests and those of small business. Eventually this opposition determined that “the government of Allende was incompatible with the survival of freedom and private enterprise in Chile, (and) that the only way to avoid their extinction was to overthrow the government” (Cauce, 1984).

Students of the drug abuse problem may begin their analyses either at home or abroad. One observer might view the importing nation as the source of the problem, arguing that without its demand/ profit structure there would be no need for another country to grow, or to ship, illicit drugs. A second analyst might, with equal logic, contend that demand is a given, hence the producing country has the obligation, as a member of the family of nations and as signatory to international narcotics conventions, to eliminate domestic trafficking in, and production of, illegal narcotics. Regardless of whether one approaches the problem from the standpoint of either the chicken or the egg, the unassailable fact is that the illicit narcotraffic carries multiple impacts for the source countries.- social, economic and political.

Venezuela's contemporary politics poses a problematic different from those predominating in the literature on democratization. Scholarly research in the last decade focused first on the crisis of authoritarian rule and the ensuing transition to civilian governments, with the reestablishment of electoral procedures, and, more recently, on the problems of the consolidation of a democratic regime, including alternation in power, universal acceptance of the rules of the game, and generation of a democratic political culture.

The challenges confronting Venezuela are not those of transition or consolidation but, rather, the decomposition — or deconsolidation — of an established democratic regime. In other Latin American countries in recent decades, longstanding models of statist development developed crises that led, in turn, to complex transformations in the economy and in society. One consequence of these changes was that authoritarian regimes began a transition to more democratic forms of governance.

Proponents of social service decentralization often claim that transferring service administration to lower levels of government facilitates increases citizen participation and governmental accountability while improving allocative efficiency and equity in service distribution. Using the cases of health and education decentralization in Chile, this article evaluates whether and under what conditions social service decentralization programs are likely to deliver on these promises. It discusses the tensions between equity and efficiency goals and how these may play out given different accountability mechanisms in local public choice, principal-agent, and real-world “hybrid” decentralization models. The case studies illustrate the difficulty of balancing the need for central standards and funding with local autonomy, but suggest that accountability mechanisms that emerged following Chile's transition to democracy in 1990 led to improvements in both equity and efficiency in decentralized service administration.

The ascendance of the left in Latin America has sparked new interest in the politicization of social class. What factors should scholars consider in choosing and constructing measures of social class in survey research? To what degree can measurement affect results? This article evaluates several common measures in terms of validity and reliability. It then shows that alternative measures produce strikingly different results when examining class voting in Venezuela’s 2006 presidential election. Simple measures of household income or wealth, which fare poorly in validity assessment, suggest minimal levels of class voting. Various socioeconomic scales that also incorporate data on education and, in some cases, weights for household composition, suggest very high levels of class voting. The article provides guidelines for evaluating measures and illuminates the debate on class voting in Venezuela. Scholars have reached contradictory conclusions while using different measures, but the decisive role of measurement has gone unrecognized.

This article examines the prospects for an interamerican “paradigm of democratic solidarity.” Although the region has seen genuine progress in the promotion and defense of democracy, a significant deficit in collective and national leadership hinders the consolidation of hemispheric prodemocracy activism. As illustrated by a number of recent cases, including the controversy over Peru's May 2000 election, these impediments are not only situational but structural. This article concludes with a discussion of ways to move beyond these problems and to buttress the democratic solidarity doctrine.

Nowhere on the crisis-ridden latin continent were hopes raised as high as they were in Peru with the 1985 election of Alan Garcia. Nowhere were hopes dashed as dramatically by the onset of an economic, social, and political crisis of unprecedented severity. There is no single explanation for the dismal performance of the APRA government. Indeed, the APRA's performance in power was in keeping with Peru's age-old paradox: an extremely poor record of social reform despite the longterm presence of a strong reformist party. This raises the question of why reform is so difficult to implement in Peru, and why APRA, in particular, proved so inept once in power. While external conditions were largely responsible for Peru's decade-long economic crisis, yet they were far less important than domestic political factors in explaining the APRA's disastrous performance.

During the radical period of the Forbes Burnham era in Guyanese politics, from 1970 to 1985, the country appeared to have won respect for its foreign policy in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and in the British Commonwealth, as well as in the broader Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The general perception was that Guyana was one of a select few small Third World states with a coherent revolutionary foreign policy, for which it paid a high price through superpower retaliatory efforts to destabilize its society.

Amounting number of studies have shown striking relationships between mass communication development and various economic, political and social aspects of national growth. Although these studies generally have been based on available data from countries throughout the world, similar relationships also can be found within regional groups of countries. Among the twenty Latin American countries, we find newspaper circulation per capita correlated .89 with urbanization, .82 with literacy, .80 with per capital income, and a negative .88 with percentage of population employed in agriculture.

Such studies, of course, do not establish causal relations. Is mass communication merely a reflection of other more basic factors of development such as urbanization and industrialization, literacy and political participation? Or does mass communication play a functional role in the development process: can the communication of facts and opinions through the mass media actually influence people to move to the cities, take up new skills, learn to read and write, and become involved in politics?