Legislators who control the congressional agenda have a significant advantage over the membership at large. Policy gatekeepers can restrict change to outcomes they prefer over the status quo and can use this prerogative to keep a legislative party or coalition unified. This article examines agenda-setting rules in 26 Latin American chambers, shows why the institutional structure is theoretically relevant, and reveals some implications for policymaking with evidence from Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. Majority leaders in the Argentine and Chilean lower chambers have successfully blocked passage of legislation opposed by most of their fellow partisans despite the lack of codified gatekeeping rights. Since 1997, none of the major Mexican parties has benefited from the gatekeeping rights established in the rules. Instead, the benefits have come from the parties' advantageous position with respect to the other parties on the steering committee setting the plenary agenda.

There is a growing scholarly consensus that Latin American regionalism has entered a new phase. For some observers, the increasing complexity of regional cooperation initiatives renders collective action ineffective. For others, the creation of new schemes signals a “posthegemonic” moment that has opened a space for collaboration on social issues. Both camps attribute this shift to the absence of the United States and the presence of left-leaning governments. By contrast, this study demonstrates that this agenda is not new, nor has the United States impeded similar initiatives in the past. In fact, the United States was instrumental in expanding regional cooperation on social issues in the early twentieth century. Instead, this article argues that agenda shifts are best explained by an evolving consensus about the role of the state. The “new agenda” is in line with historical attempts by governments to use regionalism to bolster their own domestic reforms.

The sequencing of transitions to democracy and to a market economy shaped the outcome of labor law reform and prospects for expanded labor rights in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. Argentina and Brazil experienced democratic transitions before market economic reforms were consolidated in the 1990s. During the transition, unions obtained prolabor reforms and secured rights that were enshrined in labor law. In posttransition democratic governments, market reforms coincided with efforts to reverse earlier labor protections. Unable to block many harmful reforms, organized labor in Argentina and Brazil did conserve core interests linked to organizational survival and hence to future bargaining leverage. In Chile this sequence was reversed. Market economic policies and labor reform were consolidated under military dictatorship. During democratic transition, employers successfully resisted reforms that would expand labor rights. This produced a limited scope of organizational resources for Chilean unions and reduced prospects for future improvements.

As institutions are created to engage citizens and civil society organizations more directly, who participates, and what effect does participation have? This article explores two of Peru’s participatory institutions, the Regional Coordination Councils and the participatory budgets, created in 2002. Specifically it asks, once these institutions are set up, do organizations participate in them? and what effect does this participation have on the organizations? The data show that the participatory processes in Peru are including new voices in decisionmaking, but this inclusion has limits. Limited inclusion has, in turn, led to limited changes specifically in nongovernmental organizations. As a result, the democratizing potential of the participatory institutions is evident yet not fully realized.

As part of an emerging research agenda on the political impact of remittances in high-migration countries, this article explores the conditions under which organized migrants are likely to engage in transnational public-private partnerships with their home governments through a comparison of Mexico and El Salvador. Both countries have well-organized migrants who have cofinanced community projects back home. But this collaboration has been more sustained, multifaceted, and negotiated in Mexico than in El Salvador. These outcomes are linked to four factors: the density and type of migrant organizations, the territorial distribution of state authority and resources, the extent and nature of diaspora outreach, and legacies of state-society relations. The article discusses how this framework might be applied to other high-migration countries and whether there is room for agency in creating more favorable conditions for migrant-state collaboration.

Chile presents a paradox for legislative studies. In most comparative research on the political power of presidents and assemblies in Latin America, the Chilean presidency is considered one of the most powerful in the region. The country's congress is seen, accordingly, as weak and lacking influence over public policy. Such evaluations, however, tend to be based on constitutional and legal faculties (that is, formal powers), and they overlook the substantial influence exerted by the Chilean Congress through informal political channels. This article analyzes literature on informal politics that shows the substantial influence of Chile's Congress on public policy; and, for comparison, presents an empirical study that adds several details to current accounts of congressional influence on the bureaucracy in Chile and describes two mechanisms of congressional influence not contemplated by recent research.

In many Latin American countries during the 1980s, domestic elites joined with international development institutions to advocate structural adjustment policies as the solution to the region's “lost decade.” Proponents of such policies sought economic rejuvenation based on export-led growth (ELG) strategies. The new ELG programs were to replace importsubstituting industrialization (ISI) schemes and complement traditional primary commodity exports with new agricultural and industrial exports (nontraditionals). It was hoped that these Latin American nations would replicate the spectacular growth patterns of the East Asian “dragons” by exploiting comparative advantages to build nontraditional export industries.

Whereas ELG strategies have proven to be sustainable over the long-term in East Asia, research on the evolution of such policies in Latin America is only beginning. The problem of sustainability bedevils all ELG programs, particularly in those countries which relied on external actors to design the new policies and fund supporting institutions.

As new political institutions provide Brazilians with unprecedented access to policymaking and decisionmaking venues, politicians and activists have undertaken reform efforts to promote institutional arrangements partly designed to expand accountability. The expansion of participatory decisionmaking venues may grant citizens greater authority, but these institutions could also undermine municipal councils’ ability to curb the prerogatives of mayors. This article analyzes participatory budgeting in São Paulo, Recife, and Porto Alegre to illustrate that mayors have differing capacities to implement their policy preferences, and this greatly affects how accountability may be extended.

After seven decades of Mexican judicial subordination, President Ernesto Zedillo in 1994 introduced judicial reforms that increased the independence and judicial review powers of the judicial branch. The willful creation of a judiciary capable of checking the power of the president and the ruling PRI appears to counter political logic; but it makes sense as a political “insurance policy” to protect the ruling party from its rivals. PRI politicians, newly unable to control political outcomes at state and local levels and unsure if they would continue to dominate the national government in the future, opted to empower the Mexican Supreme Court as a hedge against the loss of office. This article argues that the likelihood of the reforms' producing an empowered judiciary increases as the ruling party's probability of reelection declines.

During the mid-1990s, Brazil experienced a rapid intensification of protest for land reform. Official land reform efforts also accelerated, and the issue became a central topic of public concern and debate. This article seeks to account for the abrupt intensification of collective action and to explain its relationship to the other changes, focusing on the political impact of two massacres of landless protesters in 1995 and 1996. These incidents forced authorities to accelerate land reform and to exercise somewhat greater caution in repressing the movement. The shifts in state behavior then helped to accelerate collective action. This argument lends weight to the idea that state repression against a social movement can sometimes serve to engender even greater protest. It also identifies a previously undescribed causal mechanism, political opportunity, linking repression to protest.

Rising levels of crime and insecurity affect the quality of life. A fundamental question for the prospects of democracy is whether voters, in hopes of reaching better solutions to conditions of prevailing insecurity, can hold their elected officials accountable for such situations. This article argues that electoral accountability amid criminal violence requires voters to be able to assign responsibility for crime, and that partisan alignment across levels of government facilitates this task. Recent Mexican elections are examined to test this argument. Relying on both aggregate electoral data and individual survey evidence, this study shows that voters hold politicians accountable for crime in the narrow circumstances of organized crime–related violence and political alignment. This evidence not only provides additional caveats to issue voting models, but also opens new avenues of research on electoral accountability.

Problems of unity can affect an armed opposition group at many stages of its existence—during the war, in peace negotiations, and in its transition to political party. This article assesses how internal divisions affected the performance of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. It finds that while the FMLN suffered significant internal divisions in the early years of the war, it remained remarkably unified from 1983 on. Significant divisions began to appear during the later war years but were not exacerbated until after the war's conclusion, when repeated fracturing occurred. The FMLN began to present itself as a programmatically coherent party only in 2005, and this ideological homogeneity allowed it to establish a series of partnerships with moderate, non-revolutionary sectors of Salvadoran society and to achieve victory in the 2009 presidential elections.

This article attempts to examine the set of propositions loosely known as the dependency model of Latin American underdevelopment. The dependency model attributes such underdevelopment to the economic expansion of highly developed capitalist countries, particularly the United States. The model was first elaborated by Latin American economists and has subsequently acquired numerous adherents in the United States, especially among younger political scientists.

The basic premise of the dependency model is that the economic development of Latin America has been determined and limited by the needs of the dominant economies in the world capitalist market. Because they are thus conditioned and limited, the Latin American economies are described as “dependent.”

Chile’s return to democratic rule with sustained economic growth provided the opportunity for some much-welcomed political space that, it was hoped, would permit the country to attend, at long last, to a number of pressing issues which had been long deferred, if not ignored, by the previous military government. Some of those issues, such as the consolidation of democracy, poverty, and human rights, had been the subject of considerable study by scholars. Much less studied, however, although also on the agenda, was the promise to address Chile’s environmental problems, which had become much exacerbated under the laissez-faire economic model favored by the military regime. Because the new democratic administrations have followed through on that promise, the Chilean example lends support to that hypothesis which holds that environmental concerns in developing countries can be addressed more effectively under economically stable democratic regimes than by authoritarian political systems.

At the Vatican, on 2 May 1985, representatives of Chile and Argentina signed a treaty to end the Beagle Channel dispute, the last major territorial conflict between the two nations. The treaty was a tribute to the professionalism of the negotiators of both countries as well as of the Vatican mediators, and it represented a major foreign policy triumph for President Raúl Alfonsín, head of Argentina's democratically-elected civilian government. Alfonsin's position on key issues, such as sovereignty over the islands within the channel, contrasted sharply with those of his military predecessors. According to Vatican officials, it was Alfonsin's flexibility that laid the groundwork for resolution of the issue (New York Times, 1984a). Chilean willingness to accede to fundamental Argentine demands was also crucial to resolution.

This article analyzes the relationship between clientelism and citizens' political orientation in Latin America. Consistent political perceptions in the citizenry are central in traditional theories of political competition. This article argues that clientelism hinders the development of consistent political orientation by reducing the utility of information cues, such as left-right labels. More specifically, clientelistic parties generate indifference among their supporters toward the left-right divide by offering them an alternative voting rationale, and increase uncertainty in the political realm by making left-right labels less meaningful. Both arguments are tested with multilevel regression analyses using cross-sectional data covering 18 Latin American countries. The results indicate that clientelistic party supporters are more likely to show indifference toward the left-right dimension and, to a lesser extent, that their left-right orientation corresponds less with their political attitudes.

Despite major attempts by the three governments of the post-Pinochet era, the promised reform of the labor legislation inherited from the military regime remains essentially incomplete. This study attempts to explain why, and addresses some of the consequences of this delay for Chilean organized labor, examining particularly the variables of consensus politics and employer concessions.

The literature studying the behavioral effects of political corruption is rapidly growing. While some studies explore the contextual and institutional factors that can neutralize the effects of corruption, this article addresses a different mechanism for weak electoral accountability for corruption: citizen (de)mobilization. It uses a vignette experiment embedded in a nationally representative AmericasBarometer survey in Colombia to isolate the causal effect of political corruption on electoral participation. The results suggest that receiving credible information about the corrupt behavior of politicians running for office decreases the likelihood of participation in elections. It also shows that corruption demobilizes voters even when corrupt politicians are able to provide public works to their constituencies, which casts doubt on the idea that citizens exchange integrity for favorable policy outcomes.

Institutional effectiveness varies widely across Chile's 346 municipalities. Whereas some local governments seem to work with impeccable precision, others struggle to deliver basic services and welfare benefits to the population. This article seeks to explain why such variation exists; it combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to show how mayors can play a crucial role in building institutional effectiveness. The study focuses on the administration of Chile's municipal job placement offices. It finds that municipalities where mayors have held office for three or more consecutive terms exhibit stronger institutional capacity than those localities where electoral turnover is the norm. The analysis, therefore, underscores an interesting finding: electoral competition has the potential both to improve and to undermine administrative capacity.