According to conventional wisdom, closed-list proportional representation (CLPR) electoral systems create incentives for legislators to favor the party line over their voters’ positions. However, electoral incentives may induce party leaders to tolerate “shirking” by some legislators, even under CLPR. This study argues that in considering whose deviations from the party line should be tolerated, party leaders exploit differences in voters’ relative electoral influence resulting from malapportionment. We expect defections in roll call votes to be more likely among legislators elected from overrepresented districts than among those from other districts. We empirically test this claim using data on Argentine legislators’ voting records and a unique dataset of estimates of voters’ and legislators’ placements in a common ideological space. Our findings suggest that even under electoral rules known for promoting unified parties, we should expect strategic defections to please voters, which can be advantageous for the party’s electoral fortunes.

States targeted by human rights criticism usually do something—whether ratifying treaties, passing laws, establishing institutions, prosecuting perpetrators, or shifting discourse. But how do we know how coordinated, comprehensive, and effective these actions are? This article proposes five questions to assess how willing a state is to take the steps necessary to meaningfully respond to human rights crises. It applies this approach to two human rights crises in Mexico: femicides and violence against women, and disappearances. This approach effectively differentiates state responses that initially appear similar, demonstrating that the Mexican government has been more willing to address violence against women and femicides than disappearances. An explanation for this difference in outcomes points to a combination of factors related to the underlying preferences of the government involved, the characteristics of victims, and the specific human right being violated.

In the Broadest historical and technical sense recognition in international relations refers to the acknowledgment by a nation of any change in a situation in a foreign country. The authority to extend recognition is an attribute of sovereignty by which a nation, government, or people fixes its relations with other nations, governments, and peoples, thus establishing or reestablishing a legal continuity which has, for one reason or another, been broken. Decisions on recognition are usually restricted to the recognition of new states, the recognition of belligerency or insurgency, and the recognition of new governments. They involve such questions as the following: When does a state acquire juridical personality and become entitled to enjoy the rights and incur the obligations of a state under international law? What cognizance can or should governments take of the domestic situation within another state? When does a new government begin to function formally in international relations?

Trade policy has played a larger role in the internal and international relations of Canada than of the United States, certainly in the last half century. There are many reasons for this: The Canadian economy is more open than that of the United States (e.g., merchandise exports as a percentage of gross national product were 30% in Canada and 7% in the United States in 1982); the United States is far more dominant in Canada's trade than any single country or group of countries such as the European Economic Community is in U.S. trade (in recent years about 70% of Canada's exports have been sent to the United States and more than 70% of its imports came from the United States; for the United States, about 15% of its exports in recent years went to Canada, its major trading partner, and between 15% and 20% of its imports have come from Canada); and with this double dependence on trade and on a single market, a selfinterested foreign policy must concentrate on trade policy (Grey, 1981: 3-4).

Latin Americanists must be prepared for sudden shifts in the winds of circumstance. Less than ten years ago a gathering of scholars at the Newberry Library in Chicago lamented the lack of support for their disciplines, and drew up an impressive list of tools and monographs needed to advance the field. Presumably the specialists returned to their campuses refreshed by this heady and cathartic experience of thinking adventurously, but they found no change there in the attitudes of their university administrators or the majority of their colleagues, who still believed that Latin America was an area of peripheral value; the professors were not discharged, of course, for they had tenure, but the promise of the early flurry of Latin American area developments that had occurred in the 1940's was not fulfilled.

Big Metrópole, América Do Sul é um estudo de urna metrópole que consta entre as maiores na América do Sul, e é fácilmente identificável. Foi entáo, por insistencia do autor em por énfase na universalidade dos processos que frequentemente observa no desenvolvimento rápido da urbanização, industrialização e comunicação moderna, é que foi dado o nome de Big Metrópole, América do Sul ao estudo feito sobre a cidade de Sao Paulo. É interessante notar que foi só com a urbanização, industrialização, e comunicação, moderna que Big Metrópole, América do Sul se enquandra dentro de padroes que se encontram em quase todas as novas grandes metrópoles em qualquer parte do mundo. O trabalho tambem nao tem a pretensáo de ser pioneiro no campo e o autor está cíente de trabalhos feitos com o mesmo espirito e é por causa disto que pode-se afirmar urna certa aceitagáo das hipóteses levantadas.

Despite the growing interest in the theme of corruption, one cannot yet speak of a body of research and analysis sufficient to the creation of inductive theory. This is not to say that there has not been interesting empirical and theoretical work done. However, most of this work has dealt with variations to the legal definition of corruption as being the illegal use of public office for private gain or, as V. O. Key, Jr. put it, the uninstitutionalized influence of wealth in a political system. The relationship between “power” and corruption has been a subject of analytical speculation since Plato posed, and Machiavelli revived, the “dirty hands” dilemma.

The 1994 presidential election presents a paradox for students of Mexican politics in particular and democratization in general. The year witnessed many numerous and far-reaching changes, both planned and unplanned. An uprising in the state of Chiapas; the assassination of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio; a sweeping electoral reform; and a hotly contested presidential race marked the unprecedented year in Mexican politics. The election results, however, were the same as in every previous presidential election for more than sixty years: a victory by the PRI candidate, in this case Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León. How to explain this? What significance does the outcome have for understanding the process of regime democratization?

Representative government in Venezuela is in its infancy. Experience with the techniques of political competition within a democratic framework has until recently been almost non-existent. Yet the vigor and determination with which strides toward economic development and political legitimation are being executed suggest that perhaps the nation may be able to accomplish the task of creating a stable and effective polity without the sacrifice of respect for human dignity that has been so commonplace elsewhere. Political parties have had a key role in this process; they have, in effect, been instruments of transition.

This essay analyzes the evolution and growth of one of these parties — the Christian Democratic party — an organization which, ranking second in size only to Rómulo Betancourt's Acción Democrática, stands today in a pivotal position in the nation's distribution of political power.

In view of Latin America's growing bargaining power within the international system, the Chilean Heraldo Muñoz (1981) has assessed the power potential of several Latin American states, basing his calculations on abstract statistics. According to this categorization, Colombia has a power potential comparable to that of Mexico, Argentina, and Venezuela. Colombians would probably be very surprised at such an analysis. As they see it, their country does not figure in international politics. Hence, the idea of a nation with a foreign nonpolicy (Drekonja-Kornat, 1982b) seems justified.

However, countries must adapt to new situations, and growing tensions in the Caribbean Basin are forcing Colombia to examine the apparent contradiction between its potential and its real capacity. This is particularly important when one considers that Colombia's low profile in foreign policy is not a product of abstentionist or neutral doctrines (as in the case of Canada, Switzerland, or Austria) but is the result of historical developments occurring after the secession of Panama.

Sectarian religious groups in Brazil, not of Afro-Brazilian origin, have been formed primarily in the backlands of the Northeast. There they have flourished during two approximate time periods, 1815 to 1840 and 1870 to the present. This paper will examine the religious groups of the Brazilian backlands as social phenomena.

The locale of the sects, the backlands sertão, is both a geographical and cultural subregion of the Northeast. The latter area is generally defined as comprising the states of Piauí, Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Sergipe, Alagôas, and northern Bahia. Geographically the sertão is an area subject to recurrent drought, lying back of fertile coastal plains from Salvador in Bahia to Natal in Rio Grande do Norte, touching the coast in Ceará, and again retreating inland in Piauí.

Traditionally most North Americans look upon the English-speaking Caribbean primarily as a place for tourists to pursue their quest for the three S's: sun, sand and surf— a perspective which generates little, if any, concern for the region's political dynamics. Indeed, the prevailing attitude seems to be that these countries, known collectively as the CARICOM states, are not politically important because they are so small and thus not worth the time of US officials or political analysts. However, in the early 1980s this attitude began to change as the Reagan administration elevated the entire Caribbean Basin to the status of a major global trouble spot, on the grounds that the US had vital interests there which were being threatened by Leftist-inspired subversion and which required major economic/security initiatives in order to pacify the area. Although most of Washington's energies and resources were focussed on Central America, the English-speaking territories (e.g., Jamaica and Grenada) also came under close scrutiny.

The founding of the Argentine National Observatory and much of its later development were the results of unusual inter-American cooperation. In 1870 the noted American astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould had realized his dream of inaugurating a major observatory in Argentina in order to extend to the Southern Hemisphere the kind of detailed examination of the stars already undertaken by the great observatories of the Northern Hemisphere. After a few false starts Gould was able to begin work in Córdoba thanks to the enthusiasm of President Domingo F. Sarmiento and the wholehearted support of his minister of public instruction, Nicolás Avellaneda. The Argentine government appropriated funds for the construction of an observatory and the purchase of a modest but adequate inventory of instruments.

La inestabilidad política y los azares de la suerte han hecho frecuente en nuestra América el tipo humano del intelectual emigrado, que encuentra amistad y medios de vida en otros países del continente.

Entre los que corrieron esa suerte en la segunda mitad del siglo , pasado está el doctor colombiano, Florentino González, quien emigró a Chile y de este país a la Argentina, donde terminó sus días como profesor de la flamante cátedra de Derecho Constitucional en la Universidad de Buenos Aires.

De su personalidad, de su obra y de su pensamiento vamos a ocuparnos en este trabajo, dando especial relevancia a sus ideas sobre el gobierno y la administración municipal como gran resorte de la vida social y política en los países americanos.

The Argentine military emerged as a major political force with its overthrow of the Irigoyen government in September, 1930. It remains an active political force to this day. The role the military has played during this period has varied in terms of the specific objectives sought, the methods used, and the intensity of its action, but at no time did it cease to be a political force, at no time have the governing authorities whether military or civilian been able to discount its desires or demands. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the nature of the role the military played between 1930 and 1958 and to attempt an assessment of its more recent activities. As used in this paper, the term “military” will refer to the officers, active and retired, of the three armed services. The oneyear conscripts who have comprised the bulk of the enlisted men in the army and a substantial part of those of the navy and air force have never been initiators of political action.

Irresponsible fiscal behavior by subnational units is a concern for federal or decentralized systems, especially in the developing world. States' expenditures in Brazil have been no different. Still, spending varies considerably among the Brazilian states, even after controlling for their financial resources. This article provides a political explanation for the variation in current spending, focusing on intergovernmental political relationships. It argues that credit claiming for pork distributed in a state plays a crucial role and that governors elevate state spending in order to make up for their loss in political credit from the pork distributed by the president. Analyzing data from the period 1996–2005, it finds that expenditures decrease as the relative number of federal deputies from the state governor's party increases compared to the number of deputies from the president's governing coalition when the national agenda encourages federal pork distribution in the states.

The potential democratizing effect of political decentralization reforms has been a matter of substantial theoretical and empirical debate. This article analyzes the effect of local democratic institution building on the political attitudes and behavior of citizens living in small towns in Uruguay. More specifically, using a natural experiment design, this research seeks to establish the causal impact of recently established elections of local authorities on individuals' political engagement. It develops a comparative case study analyzing the consequences of this institutional innovation in two towns. It shows that individuals from the town where citizens have the opportunity to elect their local authorities have more positive attitudes toward politics than those from the town without such elections.