Is it domestic politics or the international system that more decisively influences foreign policy? This article focuses on Latin America's three largest powers to identify patterns and compare outcomes in their relations with the regional hegemon, the United States. Through a statistical analysis of voting behavior in the UN General Assembly, we examine systemic variables (both realist and liberal) and domestic variables (institutional, ideological, and bureaucratic) to determine their relative weights between 1946 and 2008. The study includes 4,900 votes, the tabulation of 1,500 ministers according to their ideological persuasion, all annual trade entries, and an assessment of the political strength of presidents, cabinets, and parties per year. The findings show that while Argentina's voting behavior has been determined mostly by domestic factors and Mexico's by realist systemic ones, Brazil's has a more complex blend of determinants, but also with a prevalence of realist systemic variables.

Between 1996 and 2009, a process of struggle for and (after 2002) partial achievement of the second incorporation of the popular sectors took place in Argentina. This process involved a combination of routine and contentious political dynamics that reformulated state-society relations in the postcorporatist period. As a continuation of the first incorporation (1943–55), the second incorporation displayed some similar features; other attributes were specific to this second process, mainly that it was not corporatist but territorial and that the central agents of transformation were not trade unions but the disincorporated popular sectors, which were territorially organized into a “reincorporation movement.” This article conceptualizes these dynamics and analyzes the role played by the main political actor related to this historical process, the piquetero (picketer) movement.

This article shows that the institutional design of Argentine federalism allows for differences in the protective scope of the provincial domestic violence laws. It holds that the broad legislative capacities of subnational districts enable the working of political and social local factors, which, in turn, determine heterogeneity in these laws’ protective scope. It analyzes, compares, and measures 37 laws on domestic violence sanctioned between 1992 and 2009. It advances a methodology to measure their differences and it evaluates the impact local factors have on legal variations across jurisdictions. The article shows that the protective scope of these laws is determined by the intensity of the local electoral competition and by the strength of women's organizational capacity. Results also show that time matters insofar as it allows for the diffusion of more protective laws.

This article shows how and why the initial attempts of the Lula administration in Brazil to promote innovative counterhegemonic participatory strategies, such as those put in place by the PT in some of its subnational governments, fell by the wayside. It is argued that the implementation and scope of participatory initiatives under Lula were caught between electoral motivations and the need to secure governability. On the one hand, the need to produce quick results in order to maximize vote-seeking strategies hindered attempts to promote counterhegemonic participation, while Lula and his inner circle opted for policies that would score immediate marks with the poorest sectors or influence public opinion. On the other hand, participation also took a back seat because the PT concentrated most of its energies on reaching agreements with strategic actors, such as opposition parties or powerful economic groups.

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.

Over the last decades, indigenous movements have propelled the political empowerment of historically marginalized groups in Latin America. The Maya struggle for ethnic equality in Guatemala, however, since its reawakening during the peace process, has reached an impasse. Based on field research consisting of dozens of elite interviews, this article analyzes the patterns of and obstacles to present-day Maya mobilization. It combines movement-internal and -external factors in an overarching theoretical argument about indigenous movements' capacity to construct strong collective voices. In the Guatemalan case, organizational sectorization, the lack of elite consensus on key substantive issues, and unclear alliance strategies compromise the effectiveness of horizontal voice among Maya organizations. These problems are exacerbated by the lasting effects of the country's unique history of violence and state strategies of divide and rule, preventing the emergence of a strong vertical voice capable of challenging the Guatemalan state.

This article addresses the puzzle of heterogeneous trends in paramilitary violence on the Colombian Pacific Coast since the beginning of the disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) process in 2003. The usual explanations derived from political conflict theories are improved with insights from organized crime research. The article argues that the occasional escalation of post-DDR paramilitary violence at the subregional level cannot be explained by the weakness of the state argument. Instead, the article demonstrates the counterintuitive evidence that paramilitary violence correlates positively with the incidence of state repressive intervention against paramilitary groups. More specifically, paramilitaries challenged by the state use more violence, either to replace their nonviolent resources most affected by law enforcement activities or to respond to crackdown-related intensification of predatory tendencies within their respective organizations.

This article examines two decades of strengthening, expansion, and diffusion of gender quota laws in Latin America. The analysis departs from studies of quotas' adoption, numerical effectiveness, or policy impacts, instead focusing on states' use of coercive power to integrate women into public and private institutions. Viewing these policies in light of feminist theories of the poststructuralist state reveals how state institutions act to restructure government and promote gender equality. In building this argument, the article presents an up-to-date empirical survey and conceptual understanding of quota evolution in Latin America, including recent developments in countries such as Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.

Using original data from the period 1999–2011 on federal infrastructure investment for all subnational units in two federations, Argentina and Brazil, and a unitary nation, Colombia, this study shows that in developing federal countries with strong governors, presidents use nonearmarked transfers as a tool to compensate governors for sizable and secure territorial political support. The study argues that in these cases, resources do not make electoral power but chase it. In the unitary case, conversely, governors do not influence distributive politics. Variation also was found in the relevance of Congress, legislative overrepresentation, and programmatic criteria across cases. The article discusses possible reasons for these results and their implications for the comparative debate on distributive politics.

In 1925 a new electoral system was introduced in Chile. This reform changed the electoral formula from a cumulative voting system to a proportional one (d'Hondt) and established new rules about district magnitude and form of voting. It has been argued that this reform was motivated by the emergence of new parties or the expansion of the electorate. This article offers an alternative explanation: in the case of Chile, the main reason for the electoral reform was the parties' need to solve problems of strategic coordination stemming from the characteristics of the Chilean cumulative voting system. In this context, the Chilean case shows that there are many routes to proportionality.

Irresponsible fiscal behavior by subnational units is a concern for federal or decentralized systems, especially in the developing world. States' expenditures in Brazil have been no different. Still, spending varies considerably among the Brazilian states, even after controlling for their financial resources. This article provides a political explanation for the variation in current spending, focusing on intergovernmental political relationships. It argues that credit claiming for pork distributed in a state plays a crucial role and that governors elevate state spending in order to make up for their loss in political credit from the pork distributed by the president. Analyzing data from the period 1996–2005, it finds that expenditures decrease as the relative number of federal deputies from the state governor's party increases compared to the number of deputies from the president's governing coalition when the national agenda encourages federal pork distribution in the states.

Before the 1980s, LGBT groups in Latin America were largely (though not entirely) excluded from the state. This article argues that a combination of factors—democratization, social movement demands, neoliberal globalization and its accompanying discourse of modernity—has led many state actors to seek to incorporate LGBT groups into the state. Considering two cases of self-proclaimed revolutionary parties, Mexico's PRI and Nicaragua's FSLN, the article examines how and why these parties incorporated LGBT organizations and what impact such incorporation had on the LGBT groups themselves. In both countries, LGBT groups benefited from clientelistic resources at the same time that they found themselves deradicalizing, often forced to accept visibility without rights. But in Nicaragua, a more recent revolutionary experience and ties to a combative, autonomous feminist movement have allowed some LGBT activists to resist the state's efforts to co-opt their movement.

More than 100 freedom of information (FOI) laws have been enacted worldwide, nearly half within the last 10 years. Yet these cross-domain, lynchpin transparency measures have received little scholarly attention. This article assesses the 16 FOI measures adopted across Latin America. Is secrecy being surrendered in a region marked by legacies of opacity? Why are some laws fulfilling their de jure potential in practice while others are not? This article aims to achieve 3 general objectives. It analyzes the de jure and de facto strength of Latin American FOI regimes; it exposes critical data-based and methodological challenges in evaluating and comparing transparency laws; and it illustrates how a causal mechanism, driven by the interactive dynamics of legislative balances of power and cabinet compositions, has had a determinate influence in shaping the strength of FOI regimes from adoption to implementation and reform.

In a global context in which authoritarian regimes often hold elections, defeating dictators at the polls can play a key role in transitions to democracy. When the opposition is allowed to campaign for votes in such elections, there are strong reasons to believe that its efforts will be more persuasive than those of the authoritarian incumbent. This article examines the effect of televised campaign advertising on vote choice in the 1988 plebiscite that inaugurated Chile's transition to democracy. Using matching to analyze postelectoral survey data, it shows that the advertising of the opposition's no campaign made Chileans more likely to vote against dictator Augusto Pinochet, whereas the advertising of the government's yes campaign had no discernible effect. These findings suggest that the no campaign played an important causal role in the change of political regime.

The experiences of communities in Rio de Janeiro under threat of removal through gentrification or mega-event construction present an opportunity to review the process and impact of urban community mobilization. This article assesses the determinants of community strategies, the challenges to implementation, and the impact of mobilization on outcomes for such communities. It reviews the case of Vila Autódromo, detailing the dynamic influence of both rational expectations and the “right to the city” ideology in developing resistance strategies and providing evidence to confirm the importance of social capital and civic capacity for community efficacy. The analysis updates theorizing beyond the politics of clientelism and contributes to understanding how the urban regime approach may apply to the Latin American context, while demonstrating the continued relevance of the political opportunity structure for determining policy outcomes.

Import substitution industrialization was the postwar development policy of choice in Latin America, and the diagnosis of its weaknesses heavily influenced subsequent policy recommendations. Yet few attempts have been made to test the predominant sectorally based explanation of ISI's failings against alternatives. This article develops a model of direct (clientelistic) linkages between politicians and their supporters and tests it against the standard sectoral model based on indirect linkages. Examining three features of process (economic sector influence, legislative voting, and exchange rate policy) and analyzing the distributional implications of the overall policy in Brazil, this article demonstrates that a clientelist model provides a more complete and coherent account of the empirical record. By demonstrating that variation in linkage type alters the political constraints on policy choice, the analysis also provides new insight into enduring puzzles, including the better performance in East Asia.

This article outlines the factors that explain changes in the rules of the game in Chile after the restoration of democracy in 1990. It looks particularly at the reasons why the right-wing parties—strong defenders of the constitution imposed by General Augusto Pinochet in 1980—accepted reforms that eliminated many of what the literature has termed authoritarian enclaves. The article explains this shift by observing significant changes in the political context that, in turn, affected the priorities of veto players. In this context, short-term strategic calculations by the right-wing parties, aiming to achieve a new balance of power less detrimental to their interests, opened a window of opportunity that led to congressional approval of important reforms. Particular institutional features of the Chilean political system—party discipline and a balance of power in favor of the executive—also helped the political actors to reach agreement.

After a decade of civil war and four consecutive conservative administrations, El Salvador's leftist FMLN won its first presidential election in 2009. How has public policy changed under this New Left government, and why? This article addresses the question in the area of public health care. An alliance of health sector leaders with both technocratic and diplomatic abilities capitalized on the policy window opened by the FMLN's electoral victory and worked within the parameters set by President Mauricio Funes, the FMLN, and civil society to universalize health care. The new minister of health, a professional highly esteemed inside and outside the country, was able to engage both a large social movement protesting neoliberal policy and an energetic health diplomat sent by the Pan American Health Organization. In designing its reform, this alliance benefited from international as well as “bottom-up” policy diffusion.

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.

The potential democratizing effect of political decentralization reforms has been a matter of substantial theoretical and empirical debate. This article analyzes the effect of local democratic institution building on the political attitudes and behavior of citizens living in small towns in Uruguay. More specifically, using a natural experiment design, this research seeks to establish the causal impact of recently established elections of local authorities on individuals' political engagement. It develops a comparative case study analyzing the consequences of this institutional innovation in two towns. It shows that individuals from the town where citizens have the opportunity to elect their local authorities have more positive attitudes toward politics than those from the town without such elections.