Free-market reforms in the last quarter of the twentieth century weakened the point of production—labor unions—as the source of effective nonparty political countermovement to liberal capitalism. Has another significant source of societal resistance arisen in association with the resurgence of market economics? Building on the work of Karl Polanyi, this article argues that circuits of exchange—the commodification of labor, land, and money—can be powerful sources of movement against contemporary forms of free-market capitalism. It draws on the cases of Argentina, Bolivia, and Ecuador to explore how Polanyi's exchange-based approach helps to elucidate three phenomena: the great variety of identities behind the myriad movements against free-market capitalism, the emergence of community as a powerful locus for organizing, and the proliferation of new forms of transgressive and highly disruptive direct action to reinforce the debilitated effectiveness of the strike.

This article examines key ideological, economic, and institutional preferences of the Brazilian political elite in the first 25 years of the country's present democratic regime. Introducing the unified dataset of the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, it examines several crucial dimensions of politicians' attitudes, including elite placement on a traditional left-right scale, preferences concerning the fundamental economic model, direct comparisons of the recent Cardoso and Lula governments, and orientations toward Brazil's global and regional projection. On many of the central issues, attitudes have remained stable, but on the dimensions that have seen notable change, nearly all the change has been in the direction of decreasing polarization. In contrast to the experience of some neighboring countries, the Brazilian case demonstrates that the sustained practice of democracy can lead to attitudinal convergence and macro-political stability, even when the initial political and socioeconomic conditions appear daunting.

This article examines the challenges and opportunities of indigenous justice for women in Ecuador. The legal recognition of indigenous justice is a major component of democratization in the region. Yet it also raises the risk of institutionalizing detrimental gender biases within indigenous forms of law. Taking the Remache case as a point of departure, this article identifies some of the fault lines in legal pluralism and women's conflicted relationship with it. Rather than rejecting customary law, however, women advocate for their rights within it—lobbying for gender parity within indigenous justice in the 2008 Constitutional Assembly. As women's support for indigenous justice relocates legal authority, it also challenges conventional practices of state sovereignty. To understand the attractiveness of legal pluralism for women and its impact on the state, this study explores the confines of feminist alliances, the accessibility of indigenous justice, and its implications for state sovereignty.

This study explains the erosion of conservative rule and the rise of leftist opposition at the subnational level in the Northeast of Brazil in recent electoral cycles. Compared with explanations based on economic modernization, social spending, and fiscal reform, the data best support the hypothesis that the organizational and spatial dimensions of leftist mobilization in these states have shifted to the detriment of conservative machines. Specifically, urban mobilization of leftist supporters has determined the electoral success of these oppositions. The study also explains where conservatives maintain a floor of support based on the continuation of clientele networks.

This article argues that Spain has been the driving external force in the advancement of LGBT rights in Latin America, from marriage in Argentina to the regional recognition of “sexual diversity rights” as human rights. Acting as “norm entrepreneurs,” Spanish activists and organizations, relying on development aid, have promoted their perspectives through two approaches: strategic consulting and resource transfer. Their diffusion is illustrated primarily by the Argentine case. There, activists underwritten by Spanish resources have borrowed Spanish strategies to achieve “the same rights with the same names.” Besides broadening our understanding of the struggle for LGBT equality in Latin America, this article deepens the explanation of norm diffusion, focusing on emergence. In this stage, specific individuals and organizations deliberately select appropriate “targets” for and moments of intervention. But norm “receptors” must also be ready for action.

Reliable data on Protestant and Catholic membership in 18 Latin American nations show that Protestants have recruited a larger percentage of the population in many nations than previously estimated. Analysis of these data shows that, as predicted by the theory of religious economies, the Catholic Church has been invigorated by the Protestant challenge: Catholic mass attendance has risen to unprecedented levels, and is highest in nations where Protestants have made the greatest gains.

Robert Putnam extolled the virtue of social capital by arguing that social networks, civil society, and trust contribute to democracy. Subsequent research, however, identified a weakness in the social capital “model” in its underspecification of the mechanisms by which social capital affects political systems. This article proposes the concept of political capital as a likely product of social capital that links civil society participants to the political system. The article tests this two-stage model of social capital and political capital and their effects on democratization using survey data from eight Latin American nations. Results find that civil society engagement in 2004 affected political capital variables, which, in turn, had positive effects on system-level democracy measures in 2010. The article thus shows that political capital serves as an intervening variable between social capital and democracy and democratization.

Through the in-depth ethnographic study of one squatter neighborhood in Montevideo and its leader’s political networks, this article illustrates a successful strategy through which some squatter neighborhoods have fought for their right to the city. This consists of opportunistic, face-to-face relationships between squatter leaders and politicians of various factions and parties as intermediaries to get state goods, such as water, building materials, electricity, roads, and ultimately land tenure. Through this mechanism, squatters have seized political opportunities at the national and municipal levels. These opportunities were particularly high between 1989 and 2004, years of great competition for the votes of the urban poor on the periphery of the city, when the national and municipal governments belonged to opposing parties. In terms of theory, the article discusses current literature on clientelism, posing problems that make it difficult to characterize the political networks observed among squatters.

Many democratic governments in Latin America have implemented broad judicial reforms, some of which are aimed at making criminal law and legal institutions more transparent and modern. Although such reforms are important for democratic development, scholars debate whether the reforms result in more rights for defendants and whether they jeopardize citizens' perceptions about security. Using two original datasets and a fixed-effects model, this study shows that groundbreaking criminal law reforms in Chile have improved certain aspects of defendants' rights by decreasing the number of individuals in pretrial detention. Chileans' perceptions about crime and violence in regions where the reforms were implemented also have improved. Chile's success appears to be due to the government's commitment to the reforms, as well as to concerted and consistent efforts by the police to fight crime. These results have implications for other countries implementing similar significant reforms.

Despite weak partisanship and considerable political change in the wake of the 2002 election, three-quarters of Brazilian voters supported a presidential candidate in 2006 from the same party they had backed in 2002. This article assesses the factors causing both electoral stability and electoral change with a transition model, a model testing whether the effects of respondents' evaluative criteria depend on their initial vote choices. Social context—personal discussion networks, neighborhood influences, and the interactions of social networks and municipal context—is the major force promoting stability and change, while the impact of partisanship is limited to a small share of voters.

Political alternate positions (otherwise known as substitutes) can have important effects on women's abilities to enter politics. Using the case of Nicaragua, this study assesses whether these alternate positions are being used to increase women's political representation or as a tool to undermine women's advancement into positions of power. By examining patterns of women's representation as candidates in the 1996, 2001, and 2006 elections for the National Assembly and as elected officeholders (as both alternates for those assembly members and titleholders), the article analyzes how various political parties are utilizing these alternate positions. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this study finds no evidence that these alternate positions are used to undermine women's political progress.

Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), founded in 1980s Los Angeles by Salvadoran immigrant youth, is today one of the largest street gangs in North and Central America. In recent years the group has acquired a reputation for extreme brutality and has ostensibly mutated into a fast-expanding, transnational organized crime network with possible ties to international terrorists. Drawing on key concepts in gang research and multiple methodological tools, this article seeks to sharpen understanding of MS-13’s structure and activities. While the group is active in many countries, it is transnational only in a symbolic manner, not in its configuration or span of authority. Impelled largely by Central American gang-suppression policies, MS-13 has evolved from a traditional street gang into a group with organized crime characteristics, but it remains a social phenomenon rooted in urban marginality. Ultimately, a more nuanced picture of Mara Salvatrucha can inform the search for more effective gang policies.

Throughout Latin America, democratic political structures reflect liberal conceptualizations of democracy. Since the election of Hugo Chávez, Venezuela has emerged as an exception, with President Chávez sponsoring initiatives designed to foster participatory democracy. This article draws on the Venezuelan case in an effort to gain insight on the malleability of citizens' definitions of and attitudes toward democracy. Two key findings emerge. First, in data gathered ten years into the Chávez presidency, the vast majority of Venezuelans still define democracy in liberal terms, whereas relatively few have embraced participatory conceptualizations. Second, although Venezuelans as a whole are highly supportive of democracy as a form of government, no evidence is found that either support for Chávez or defining democracy in terms of participation corresponds with higher favorability toward democracy. Together, these findings suggest that Venezuela's political transformation has produced little or no discernible effect on mass sentiment regarding democracy.

The Concertación lost the recent presidential elections in Chile after 20 years in office. This article proposes three explanations for this result. First, the Concertación's candidate selection process through primaries was exclusionary, without opening up participation to all potential applicants. This combined with a deep erosion of the coalition, reflected in the resignation of deputies and senators from parties that compose it. The process was accelerated with the emergence of an independent candidate, formerly from the Concertación. Second, the candidate from the right increased his vote in the poorest sectors and expanded the right's constituency to middle-class segments, traditional Concertación electoral strongholds. Third, the right achieved greater electoral consistency than the Concertación by reducing the number of voters who split their tickets. Its presidential candidate obtained almost the same percentage as its list of deputies.

Established with the reform of 1993, Argentina’s private pension funds became crucial sources of credit for the national government. They purchased large amounts of sovereign bonds defaulted on in 2001 and hence were key to the success of the debt restructuring of 2005. The private pillar was always vulnerable to political maneuvering; the nationalization of private pension funds in 2008 was only the last stage in an iterated process of state intervention, a function of public debt dynamics. This article argues that the financial pressures associated with Argentina’s sovereign debt burden systematically shortened the temporality of pension policy decisions, taking those away from long-term concerns about the stability of the social security system and toward the immediacy of debt-financing imperatives. Therefore, the politics of pension reform reversal in Argentina were determined by the increasingly strong and inextricable link between debt and pensions.

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.