An emerging consensus holds that Cuba's communist regime is moving away from Fidel Castro's brand of orthodox Marxism-Leninism and toward — something else. Cuban officials now publicly profess their indifference to labels such as “socialism” and “communism,” referring, instead, to some vague “Cuban way” of social and economic organization. Even Castro himself claims that his hostility to multiparty politics stems less from an adherence to Marxism and owes more to the calls of José Martí, Cuba's national hero, for national unity of purpose and organization.

All of this may point to a growing belief in Havana that communism cannot long endure as a legitimizing factor for the regime and a corresponding attempt to locate a new source of legitimacy in the alleged uniqueness of Cuba's socialist system. The implication of such an attempt would be: (1) that the Cuban regime differs fundamentally from the collapsed Eurasian communist regimes, and (2) that its future is therefore likely to differ also — and fundamentally. In other words, it has a future.

How do peacebuilding institutions affect political behavior? This article studies the historic victory of the Colombian left in the 2022 presidential elections in light of the implementation of local peacebuilding programs through the 2016 Peace Accords. Using a quasi-experimental design, we show that the Development Plans with a Territorial Focus (PDET), a central component of the 2016 Peace Accords between the government and the FARC, increased the vote share for the leftist coalition, Pacto Histórico, in the 2022 elections by increasing voter turnout in PDET regions. In a departure from existing literature, we find that the explanatory effect of violence on vote share is significantly reduced when we include an indicator for PDET implementation and additional covariates. While there is a substantial body of work examining the effects of conflict violence and the presence of armed actors on elections, there has been relatively little focus on how the peacebuilding has affected vote choice and political behavior. We see our project as a bridge to fill this gap in the literature.

This article studies voter behavior in Argentina. Do voters vote based on issues? Do they vote based on economic performance? What segments of the population are more or less likely to do so? What is the relative impact of issues and the economy in vote choice? To provide a reliable answer to these questions, this study uses a mixed-logit model of spatial voting with nonpolicy components. Contrary to the common belief, the analysis finds that issue voting is a statistically significant and important factor. Economic voting is prevalent in the middle and upper classes, but not among poor voters.

Despite repeated conflict with organized labor, the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari (1988–94) pushed an aggressive divestment agenda that transformed Mexico into Latin America's leading privatizer. Explanations of Salinas's achievements typically emphasize centralized presidential power (including control over the ruling party) and autonomy; technocratic and political savvy; and weak labor opposition. This article questions such a pure “capacity-outcome” approach. Of equal importance are the learning effects of repeated interaction between the state and labor, which changed the course of divestment struggles and thereby influenced their outcomes. Lessons learned in successive confrontations led to patterns of interaction conducive to widescale privatization. The article develops this argument through comparative analysis of major divestment episodes in the aviation, mining, steel, and telecommunications sectors.

This article analyzes the campaign of Nicaraguan president Arnoldo Alemán (1997–2002) against organized competitors, what has been called his war against the nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs. Alemán's attacks on the NGO sector are shown to be consistent with the logic of the new populism in Latin America. At the same time, his choice of targets—prominent NGO figures who were often foreign-born and always female—must be explained with reference to the specifics of Nicaraguan civil society and its evolving relationship with the political parties. This study argues that by choosing to respond to the challenges of international neoliberalism and local feminism through the anti-NGO campaign, Alemán helped to weaken democracy in Nicaragua.

Regional integration blocs are subject to the admission of new members, which must be approved by domestic institutions. This article analyzes how the incorporation of Venezuela and Bolivia into Mercosur passed in the Paraguayan Congress. While the first case lasted from 2007 to 2013, demonstrating parliamentary opposition, the second episode took place between 2015 and 2016, suggesting convergence between the executive and legislative branches on the issue. Using process tracing, the unveiled mechanism shows how government and opposition forces act to alter the duration of the bill in Congress and that political parties have a pendular behavior according to political cleavages. Moreover, the findings of this study suggest the existence of a parliamentary veto power in foreign affairs and the importance of having homogeneous coalitions to achieve faster approvals.

This article assesses the contributions of studies in the rational choice (RC) tradition to scholarly understanding of Latin American politics. It groups some representative works according to their use of RC assumptions, and also reviews some of the major works in the institutionalist tradition. It argues that works in the RC tradition have neither forced a major rethinking of established theories nor filled major lacunae, although they have illuminated some phenomena that were only partly understood. The RC approach works best for narrow questions in which power relations and structural constraints are stable, whereas its essential assumptions become untenable in questions that involve shifting power relations among social groups and the state over time.

This article offers an analysis of the changes in mass-level ideological polarization in Latin America. It provides a cross-national, region-wide assessment of polarization dynamics using survey data on left-right ideological identities. A novel indicator for measuring ideological polarization at the individual level is proposed, which is more compatible with theoretical conceptualizations of ideological polarization than other existing indicators. The indicator is applied to data from the AmericasBarometer surveys to measure degrees and changes in mass-level ideological polarization in 19 Latin American countries between 2006 and 2019. The study reveals a substantial process of mass-level ideological restructuring, accompanied by a region-wide increase in ideological polarization in Latin America taking place during the second decade of the twenty-first century. We also find that ideological polarization, albeit varying in intensity from country to country, is clearly present at the mass level in the majority of countries in the region.

Scholarship on Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) increasingly recognizes that even weak states targeted by TANs may respond, and subvert, transnational norm socialization campaigns. It examines both the conditions conducive to such responses and the range of policy instruments available to these states. Yet this emerging work lacks a robust, contextualized account for how states devise the strategy and the content of their responses. This article builds on the policy-learning literature to elucidate the process through which states construct their antiTAN approaches. It suggests that states’ policy paradigms in the field of domestic security largely shape those responses, with different paradigms offering distinct priorities and instruments. The comparison of the divergent impact of the Guatemalan state’s contrasting responses to two similar legal-political challenges, undertaken in the context of the same anticorruption TAN campaign, illustrates the argument.

“Far, far away!” For the romantic imagination of Americans living in the second decade of the nineteenth century, these words identified, from the geographical viewpoint, Spain. To the average American, indeed to all but a few, Spain was as close to a terra incognita as there could exist in the Western World, a legendary land of old castles and beautiful landscapes inhabited by lovely dark-eyed maidens, engulfed by a warm climate, religious bigotry, and ignorance. But it was “far, far away,” and to the complacent inhabitants of a new and prosperous country which was politically stable and economically secure, Spain symbolized romantic adventure.

The most remarkable development in Latin America during the economically “lost decade” of the 1980s is the regionwide process of redemocratization. Close to 90% of the people of the region are ruled by civilian governments. The flowering of democratic, pluralistic, and participatory systems is still a noble aspiration, but it is radically different from the bleak political landscape of the 1960s and 1970s, when military governments prevailed. Nor is the appurtenance of civilian government equal to democracy. There is a large variety of civilian-military coalitions possible in a democratic setting.

Planning is often analogous to weather in that everyone discusses it but little is really done. Such, at least, is the case in Guatemala where individuals, groups, and the government espouse a need for development planning in eloquent terms but produce few positive results. In Guatemala, however, it is increasingly recognized that planning can be a logical and relatively scientific method of improving resource utilization. The purpose of this paper is to appraise a few general aspects of development planning in Guatemala and to characterize its organizational structure and the political constraints imposed upon the process.

Governments are assuming a more dominant role in development, particularly in the less advanced areas. Public opinion has generally supported this trend by criticizing development programs or blaming the lack of development on the government.

The Brazilian Negroes must be viewed in the context of Brazilian history and civilization and of the forces of social change operating throughout Brazilian society. In this article I intend to point out some of the historical factors that significantly influence the social mobility, or lack of it, of Brazilian Negroes, to analyze the present status of Negroes in Brazilian society, and to suggest some possible ways of dealing with this largely ignored, but very serious, racial situation that contains the seeds of a potential social crisis.

After the discovery of Brazil by Pedro Alvares Cabral in 1500, the Portuguese exploited its coastal territories for more than fifty years with little help other than that of the enslaved Indians.