Why do drug gangs develop sophisticated authority functions in some places and not in others? Comparing two Brazilian cities, Rio de Janeiro and Recife, this article argues that territorially embedded informal authority structures from earlier times, coupled with sporadic and extremely violent policing, encouraged drug gangs in Rio de Janeiro to develop authoritative functions and residents to acquiesce to them. In Recife, by contrast, drug gangs inherited diffuse and territorially independent authority structures and confronted a much less lethally violent police force. Consequently, they failed to find common cause with local residents, and their organizational development was truncated.

The concept of autonomy has acquired a plurality of meanings in international relations; this article analyzes the distinct uses given to this term in Latin America and its relationship to theoretical contributions from outside the region. The authors propose a far-reaching reconceptualization of autonomy appropriate to Latin America's new circumstances in the global context. They argue that these new circumstances favor the shift from autonomy as traditionally defined to what they call relational autonomy, a construct based on contributions from classical political theory, political sociology, gender studies, social and philosophical psychology, and the theory of complex thought.

There is no other country where the division between the old and young electorate is as striking as in Chile. For older voters, turnout exceeded, on average, 90 percent in 2009; for those aged less than 30, it fell below 30 percent. Using individual survey data from 2006, 2008, and 2010, this article studies the current socioeconomic composition of the Chilean young electorate. First, it shows that the young electorate is class-biased. Income is highly correlated with both registration and turnout even after controlling for education. Second, it presents evidence that class bias for the whole electorate has been increasing over time, due to generational replacement. The results are not promising for Chile’s democracy in the years to come, since equal participation is worsening over time.

The tone of European-Latin American relations in recent years has been strongly influenced by the issue of bananas. At stake has been the future of the banana trade between the European Union (EU) and Latin America, which, even if small in relative size (constituting less than 5% of Latin America’s exports to the EU), has loomed large in international political calculations. This article seeks to make sense of a very complex, and still developing, situation by identifying the interests of the various parties directly concerned. The first part examines the background, the problem, and the solution to this issue as set out in the adoption of a new banana regime (NBR) in the EU.

This article examines the internet's potential to democratize gender equality advocacy in Latin America. Based on field research in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, it challenges the assumption that the internet's horizontal organization and widespread dissemination inherently or inevitably lead to greater democratization. It advances two interrelated arguments. First, the internet's potential to foster democratic relations and effective strategies in civil society depends on the consciousness with which advocates adopt, share, and deploy the technology. Second, the internet is a critical resource for marginalized or socially suspect groups and subjects, providing a unique means to express and transmit often ostracized ideas and identities.

Guatemala has one of the highest levels of killings of women and impunity for violence against women in the world. Despite laws created to protect women, Guatemala, like other countries, generally fails at implementation. This article examines justice system obstacles in contemporary Guatemala to processing cases of feminicide—killings of women because they are women in a context of impunity—comparing two recent feminicide cases. It argues that the sociopolitical context in Guatemala, including structural violence, widespread poverty, inequality, corruption, and normalization of gender violence against women, generates penalties, or “legal tolls,” that are imposed on victims' families and contribute to impunity through undermining victims' attempts to navigate the justice system. The analysis focuses on the tolls of fear and time: the need to overcome fear of retaliation and the extraordinary time and effort it takes to do so in a corrupt and broken system.

More than a decade after Latin America's most recent turn to democracy, unchecked police violence and torture continue and in some cases have increased. This study examines police killings in 19 Brazilian states from 1994 to 2001 and finds that democracy has not substantially reduced these types of human rights violations, for two reasons. First, underlying social conflict has continued to exert a significant impact on the lethal use of force by police officers. Second, pro-order political coalitions, generally represented by right-wing politicians, have blocked effective measures to control police violence and have implemented public safety measures that stress the use of force. The analysis emphasizes the nonteleological nature of democratization processes and demonstrates the strength of political forces working to maintain “illiberal democracy.”

Ethnodevelopment is a relatively new type of participatory policy that targets the poverty of marginalized ethnic groups with a focus on identity and self-management. While observers have recognized the empirical significance of this new paradigm, little has been done to conceptualize ethnodevelopment. This article argues that national-level ethnodevelopment implementation is a form of corporatism. Examining ethnodevelopment institutions in Ecuador, it shows that the state has structured, subsidized, and partially controlled the indigenous sector through ethnodevelopment policies and agencies. However, certain components of classical corporatism, such as monopolies of representation, do not characterize this paradigm. This article therefore classifies ethnodevelopment as a diminished subtype of corporatism. It challenges corporatism's long association with a particular historical period in the region and finds that Latin American states and social groups have called on historical institutional repertoires in responding to the newly salient ethnic cleavage in the region.

The following pages examine the relationship between the transactions that constitute systems of patronage and clientage and politics as it operated in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais in the mid-1960s. The objective will be to show how the asymmetrical exchanges of patronage and the political-electoral system served to articulate local communities with the institutional systems of the larger society.

The data and analysis will be presented through an examination of the activities of individuals in two small municίpio communities in the Zona da Mata of the State of Minas Gerais during the critical election campaign for governor in the year 1965. By examining some of the activities of a local doctor and a lawyer involved in politics, we shall be able to make explicit the transactional process by means of which segments of local communities in the region were articulated, through the political-electoral process, to the state and national level institutions of Brazilian society.

For years, nongovernmental terrorism in Latin America was considered an epiphenomenon of the Cold War. The persistence of this type of political violence in the 1990s, however, not only belied many assumptions about its causes but also led scholars to reexamine the phenomenon. This article investigates the validity of a number of hypotheses by applying a pooled time-series cross-section regression analysis to data from 17 Latin American countries between 1980 and 1995. Findings indicate that nongovernmental terrorist acts in Latin America are more likely to occur in poorly institutionalized regimes characterized by varying degrees of political and electoral liberties, a deficient rule of law, and widespread human rights violations. The analysis also shows that nongovernmental terrorism in the region tends to surface in cyclical waves; but it finds no association between economic performance or structural economic conditions and the incidence of nongovernmental terrorism.

What explains the remarkable resilience of pension regulation in postauthoritarian Chile, even after decades of majoritarian voter discontent and growing international and domestic criticism of Pinochet’s pioneering private capitalization system? This puzzling outcome can be understood only by looking at the combined effect of the pension industry’s long-term power-building investments and its short-term political actions to outmaneuver state and societal challengers. Engaging new theoretical developments in political economy and historical institutionalism, this study examines the long-term process by which the previously nonexistent Chilean pension industry expanded and leveraged its power during key episodes of open contestation. The analysis of pension regulation in Chile between the 1980s and the 2010s illustrates the importance of placing business power in time, motivating new rounds of theory building in the quest to address the perennial question of how business gets what it wants in the political arena.

This article challenges the conventional wisdom that enthusiastic state support is a prerequisite to building strong participatory institutions. Through an analysis of Colombia’s planning councils, this study develops the concept of the societydriven participatory institution, in which civil society actors, rather than the state, undertake the core tasks involved in implementing participatory institutions. The article argues that while state neglect limits their involvement in decisionmaking, society-driven participatory institutions can still develop important policymaking roles in agenda setting and in monitoring and evaluating public policy.

The process of political coalition building surrounding trade reform in Mexico had implications for the 1994-95 peso crisis. This article traces the formation of a free trade coalition between state and business elites across several episodes of trade opening, focusing on the NAFTA negotiations. The consolidation of this powerful but narrow coalition helped to cement the Salinas government’s neoliberal reform agenda, boost investor confidence, and restore moderate levels of low-inflation growth in the early 1990s, but it also gave rise to the macroeconomic imbalances and political instability that led to the 1994 crisis. Since then, the economic basis of the neoliberal coalition may have recovered, but its political viability may be questionable.

This article examines whether there is gender segmentation in civic participation in Latin America, and whether such segmentation is related to gender differences in political participation. Confirming the findings of other studies, this analysis indicates that there is gender segmentation in civic associational activities, and that men are more involved than women in political activities, except for voting. Among those involved in civic activities, however, women attend meetings more often than men or about equally in all types of activities under consideration, except for sports and recreational pursuits. This highlights the need to differentiate between type and intensity of civic participation and provides empirical evidence that Latin American women have strong community ties through a variety of organizations. The regression analysis shows that civic engagement has a positive effect on political participation but that the magnitude of that effect varies by gender depending on the activity.

Twenty years after governments across Latin America began implementing neoliberal reforms in earnest, concern is growing about their impact on the quality of democracy in the region. This article examines this issue in the case of Mexico by exploring how patterns of political participation, especially among the rural and urban poor, have changed since the implementation of free market reforms. It asks whether the institutional innovations associated with free market reforms make it easier or more difficult for the poor to participate in Mexico's political process. The answer is not encouraging. Despite democratic openings, the new linkages between the state and citizens established as a result of the transition to a free market development model stifle the voice of the poor not through the threat of force or coercion, but by creating obstacles and disincentives for political mobilization that affect the poor more severely than other groups.

The Literature on democratic transitions suggests two opposite sorts of dangers that the successful democratizer must avoid: too much uncertainty on the one hand, and too little on the other. The first can lead to conflict, violence, and abortive transitions (Karl and Schmitter, 199D; while the second means there is no democracy at all, but leads to something less which has been variously called: "tutelary democracy," "electoralism," or "democradura."

Before the government of Patricio Aylwin took office in Chile in March 1990, most observers anticipated that the return to democracy would bring considerable social conflict and political instability. Expressing a widely held view, one expert wrote: "Any return to democracy in Chile would entail vocal demands, from a variety of social groups and movements, to reverse the policies instituted by the regime since 1973" (Loveman 1986-87:29). The need to confront human rights abuses during the military government was another potentially explosive political issue.

To fight criminal organizations effectively, governments require support from significant segments of society. Citizen support provides important leverage for executives, allowing them to continue their policies. Yet winning citizens' hearts and minds is not easy. Public security is a deeply complex issue. Responsibility is shared among different levels of government; information is highly mediated by mass media and individual acquaintances; and security has a strong effect on peoples' emotions, since it threatens to affect their most valuable assets—life and property. How do citizens translate their assessments of public security into presidential approval? To answer this question, this study develops explicit theoretical insights into the conditions under which different dimensions of public security affect presidential approval. The arguments are tested using Mexico as a case study.

In 1973 Alfred Stepan published an article with the descriptive title “The New Professionalism of Internal Warfare and Military Role Expansion.” In this article, he used the cases of Brazil and Peru to discuss “how the ideology of new professionalism arose and how it contributed to the expansion of the military's role in politics.” He proposed to do this by identifying “some of the institutional and political variables that are peculiar to Brazil and that help account for some of the special characteristics of the present military regime” (1973). He then set out the paradigms of the “old professionalism” as formulated in the carefully constructed analysis of Samuel P. Huntington (1957) and compared these to the stated missions and observed activities of the Brazilian army in the 1960s. This comparison led him to conclude that because the army's missions and activities were clearly different from those in the Huntington model they must flow from a different definition of the military profession rather than merely being lapses from the “old professionalism” (Stepan, 1973: 48).

This article examines decentralization through the lens of the local dynamics it unleashed in the much-noted case of Bolivia. It argues that the national effects of decentralization are largely the sum of its local-level effects. To understand decentralization, therefore, we must first understand how local government works. The article explores the deep economic and institutional determinants of government quality in two extremes of municipal performance. From this it derives a model of local government responsiveness as the product of political openness and substantive competition. The quality of local politics, in turn, emerges endogenously as the joint product of the lobbying and political engagement of local firms and interests and the organizational density and ability of civil society. The analysis tests the theory's predictions on a database containing all Bolivian municipalities. The theory proves robust. The combined methodology provides a higher-order empirical rigor than either approach can alone.

This article takes up the question of whether civil society organizations (CSOs) can and do act as mechanisms of representation in times of party crisis. It looks at recent representation practices in Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil, three countries where political parties have experienced sharp crises after several decades of mixed reviews for their party systems. At such moments, any replacement of parties by CSOs should be especially apparent. This study concludes that the degree of crisis determines the extent that CSOs' representative functions replace partisan representation, at least in the short term. Where systems show signs of re-equilibration, CSOs offer alternative mechanisms through which citizens can influence political outcomes without seeking to replace parties. Where crisis is profound, CSOs claim some of the basic party functions but do not necessarily solve the problems of partisan representation.