Postwar El Salvador and Guatemala have undertaken to reform and democratize the state and to support the rule of law. Each country entered the 1990s hobbled by a legacy of authoritarian rule, while a corrupt and politicized judiciary offered virtually no check on the abuse of power. Because the judiciary has performed poorly as an institution of horizontal accountability, this article examines the performance of a new “accountability agency,” the Human Rights Ombudsman. The article discusses the context in which the office was established and developed in each country, perceptions of its performance, and political responses as the office began to perform its function of holding public officials accountable in their exercise of power. Unfortunately, this new office may fall prey to the same weaknesses that have plagued older institutions in both countries.

This article analyzes the relationship between ideas, interests, and institutions in the 1996 reform of the civil service in Uruguay. Beneath the appearance of a process led by technocratic principles, the reform's agenda and content were shaped by legitimating principles, strongly institutionalized interests, and the political legacy of earlier failed reform attempts. Reformers sought a strategy of a reform “without losers,” which, instead of gathering support for adoption and implementation, sought to minimize opposition. This deliberately low-profile strategy left people unaware of the reform's achievements and thereby reinforced a political culture that has made resistance to change both a political virtue and an inescapable condition.

After nearly 20 years of democratization, residents of Rio's favelas suffer high levels of civil and human rights abuse at the hands of both police and drug traffickers. The government is generally unable to guarantee the political order necessary to protect the rights of residents in these communities. Existing theories of democratization and advocacy networks offer little to explain how the types of endemic violence that affect poor neighborhoods in the developing world can be brought under control. Based on more than two years of participant observation and interviews in Rio de Janeiro, this article examines how democratic order can be extended to favelas. It argues that networks can link favela residents to organizations in civil society, and state actors can play a critical role in reducing violence and establishing democratic order.

Recent experience has made clear the importance of macroeconomic stability, and exchange rate stability in particular, in generating support for regional integration. The tensions created by exchange-rate and financial volatility are clearly evident in the recent history of Mercosur and may also hinder the development of a Free Trade Area of the Americas. This essay argues that ambitious schemes for a single regional currency are not a practical response to this problem. Nor would a system of currency pegs or bands be sufficiently durable to provide a lasting solution. Instead, countries must solve this problem at home. In practice, this means adopting sound and stable monetary policies backed by a clear and coherent operating strategy, such as inflation targeting. With such policies in place, exchange rate volatility can be reduced to levels compatible with regional integration.

This study argues that the costs associated with El Salvador's dollarization clearly outweigh the benefits and that the decision to dollarize was prompted not only by the need to promote economic growth, but also by the impluse to serve the interests of the financial sector and the large entrepreneurs who control the ruling ARENA party. Although the policy facilitates investment and international financial transactions, it has a negative effect on the poor by increasing inequality. To develop this argument, the authors discuss the socioeconomic and political situation in El Salvador at the time of dollarization, examine the Law of Monetary Integration, and analyze die effect of the dollarization policy on the poor.

This article discusses the relationship between certain institutional regulations of voting rights and elections, different levels of electoral participation, and the degree of political instability in several Latin American political experiences. A formal model specifies the hypotheses that sudden enlargements of the electorate may provoke high levels of political instability, especially under plurality and other restrictive electoral rules, while gradual enlargements of the electorate may prevent much electoral and political innovation and help stability. Empirical data illustrate these hypotheses. A historical survey identifies different patterns of political instability and stability in different countries and periods, which can be compared with the adoption of different voting rights regulations and electoral rules either encouraging or depressing turnout.

This paper analyzes the conditions in which the governments of Argentina and Brazil founded security institutions in the early 1990s, while they were democratizing. It advances the hypothesis that international cooperation in the security field is often linked to the evolution of civil-military relations. Civilian leaders in both countries established institutions and sought international participation deliberately to achieve civilian control and gain leverage over the military establishment, which they sorely distrusted. The need to stabilize civil-military relations at home was therefore the prime motivating force behind the emergence of security institutions in the Southern Cone. Three mechanisms were at work: omnibalancing, policy handling, and managing uncertainty. These mechanisms are derived from three different schools of thought: realism, organizational-bureaucratic models, and theories of domestic political institutions. Besides explaining the sources of nuclear bilateral cooperation, this argument also serves as a critique of two prominent theories in international relations that attempt to explain cooperation and peaceful relations among democracies: neoliberal insti-tutionalism and democratic peace theory.

This article examines the World Bank's role in the market policy reform experiences of Mexico and Argentina. It argues that while reform was driven by domestic elites, the bank played an important role, providing technical advice and financial support and helping to spread market reform ideas. The nature of the bank's involvement, however, differed substantially in the two countries because of their distinct political arrangements, histories, and geopolitical positions in regard to the United States. In the recent era of second-generation reforms, the World Bank's involvement in compensatory policy development has become more focused, although still more intense in Argentina than in Mexico. This involvement has important implications for the quality of democracy, insofar as the 1990s market reforms were formulated by insulated international policy networks unaccountable to the public. Recently, the bank has declared its commitment to involve civil society in its lending policies, a move that may have important implications for democratic development.

In his article “Taming the Tiger: Voting Rights and Political Instability in Latin America,” Josep Colomer proposes to go beyond the “singlecountry stories… typical… of the existing historiography” on Latin American elections and politics and to develop instead “an explicitly comparative, theory-driven analysis, which is more characteristic of the social sciences literature.” I am all for such comparative analysis, although I would guard myself from belittling the achievements of historians who have examined national experiences in painstaking detail or the merit of a highly analytical comparative history such as that presented in Eduardo Posada-Carbó’s recent work (2000). But theory-driven comparative analysis is difficult to do well. One has to know the historical experiences one is comparing very thoroughly, and one has to know how to develop the concepts that will build the theoretical argument in a dialogue with the evidence. The result should be to provide a better understanding of the evidence in ways that even those who know the histories well will find both useful and illuminating.

Structural reforms, institutional arrangements, and the dominant mode of political party-base linkage all militate against effective popular participation in Chilean local democracy. Structural reforms have constrained local leaders' resources as well as their policymaking prerogatives; institutional arrangements limit public officials' accountability to their constituents and citizens' opportunities for input in decisionmaking. The parties of the center-left Concertación have reinforced this vicious cycle by pursuing a mode of linkage with civil society designed to promote their electoral success with only minimal organization and participation by their grassroots constituents. Such conditions fit well with the desire of elites of the Concertación and the right to depoliticize civil society in order to preserve macroeconomic and political stability. Yet they leave in doubt the efficacy of popular participation and the strength of local democracy in Chile.

For social movements, coverage in the media is a mixed blessing; but like many movements, the Brazilian Landless Farmworkers' Movement (MST) actively seeks it out. Treatment of the MST in the Brazilian media is analyzed here using the concept of frame. That treatment is determined by a complex interaction between media producers and movement activists. The frames adopted by those on each side influence public perception of the movement. This study identifies five such underlying frames (mostly in print media but with attention to a television soap opera based on the MST's activities) and examines the images of the movement that they present. Though the coverage often presents the MST in a favorable light, it does not necessarily encourage the goal of mobilization that the movement seeks to promote.

Venezuelan Evangelicals' responses to candidates in that country's 1998 presidential election seem to confirm the view that their political culture is inconsistent, contradictory, and paradoxical. Not only were they just as likely to support nationalist ex–coup leader Hugo Chávez as was the larger population, they also rejected Venezuela's one Evangelical party when it made a clientelist pact with the infamous candidate of Venezuela's discredited Social Democratic party. This article uses concepts from recent cultural theory to analyze qualitative data from these two cases and make sense of the contradictory nature of Evangelical politics.

I am very pleased to start a dialogue with Samuel Valenzuela, although, because he reveals that he was one of the anonymous reviewers of my article, I have to point out that he was the only one out of five who disagreed with the editor’s decision to publish it. I hope that the dialogue might extend to other interested readers who can find my approach more helpful and challenging from the beginning.

This paper examines the process of reform in the Mexican telecommunications sector and makes comparisons with similar processes in the United States, New Zealand, and Brazil. Differences in policy responses are explained by the structure of the political institutions and the policy context in any given country. The policy lessons to be drawn from the regulatory experiences examined are that the sequence and the pace of reform influence policy outcomes. The speed with which the Mexican reform was carried out led to a lack of the institutional and legal support necessary to create a level competitive playing field. The permanence of a vertically integrated firm in the Mexican market, moreover, introduced consequential costs to the regulation of the industry. The results of this paper support the theoretical argument that privatization, in itself, does not guarantee the development of the sector and point to the need to attain a more effective regulation of competition in telecommunications.

Do Caribbean Basin states influence U.S. immigration policy? Although the terrorist attacks of September 2001 eventually derailed migration talks, before that time Mexico and the United States appeared poised to negotiate a major bilateral agreement, largely on Mexico's terms. Drawing on 88 detailed interviews conducted with Mexican and other Caribbean Basin elites, this article examines sending-state preferences for emigration and their capacity to influence policy outcomes. The informants considered migration to be the most problematic issue on the bilateral agenda, but also saw migration policy as relatively open to source-state influence. A case study of Mexican emigration policymaking details the national and transnational changes that make migration increasingly an inter-mestic policy issue.

This study aims to explain the victory of Hugo Chávez and his party in the 2000 Venezuelan elections, to analyze the factors that made this victory possible, and to examine the consequences for future developments in the Venezuelan political system. The decay of traditional party loyalties without the emergence of new parties deeply rooted in society (dealignment without realignment); underdevelopment; and an institutional setting dominated by a president elected by a plurality electoral system have opened the door to personality-centered politics and weak parties, which are the main features of the current political situation. Compared to the 1993 and 1998 elections, the 2000 elections once again confirm an increase in personality politics and the decay of parties as instruments for articulating interests, representation, and governance. As a consequence, this article argues, instability is likely to remain a feature of Venezuela's party system for some time.