Among the policy changes associated with neoliberalism in Latin America, tax reform has played a leading role as it has been crucial not only to price stabilization but also to managing economic liberalization. But it also has a larger significance, since it involved a reconstitution of core state powers, and these could prove useful to any future government that seeks to expand the state's economic role. This paper seeks to determine its causes more precisely by analyzing data from fifteen Latin American countries from 1977 to 1995. Findings show that the definition of “tax reform” has been remarkably similar across the region with less progressivity, fewer exemptions, a new leading role for the value-added tax (VAT), and the strengthening of tax administration. The data analysis then finds reform is predicted by (in roughly descending importance) past inflation, explicit IMF performance conditions, new administrations, more authoritarian-elected governments, the dominance of the president's party in the legislature, established electoral systems, closed-list proportional representation, less polarized party systems, and more numerous parties. Little or no support exists for the causal importance of past changes in gross domestic product (GDP), the constitutional powers of the president, party institutionalization, or partisan balance. The analysis concludes by placing these results in historical context, referring to theories of state formation and the building of institutions in exchange for resources.

Conceived as a contribution to debates about the role of state institutions in perpetuating racial inequality in modern Brazil, this article explores the relative importance of social and racial characteristics in determining defendants' treatment in Rio de Janeiro's criminal courts between 1930 and 1964. Focusing on rarely noted aspects of defendants' class and citizenship status, and emphasizing the importance of judicial procedure, it argues that social discrimination was open in Rio de Janeiro's courts, but that race alone was a relatively poor predictor of defendants' fates. At the same time, it suggests that racial and social characteristics ought not to be seen as separate and competing categories, both because “social' language had important racial meanings and because ”social“ discrimination had significant racial implications. Institutionalized social prejudice may thus go far in explaining the stubborn persistence of racial inequity in an age when ”racial democracy“ became a national hope and mantra.

By analyzing the Brazilian government's surprise endorsement of affirmative action in 2001, this article explores how the state constructs race in society and how ideas drive policy change. After decades defending the myth of “racial democracy,” the state admitted to racism and endorsed an extreme form of affirmative action—quotas—for Afro-Brazilians in government service and higher education. Based on fieldwork conducted in 2002, this article explains the recent policy turnaround as a dialectic between social mobilization and presidential initiative framed within unfolding international events. The presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso nurtured a transformation in political action on race at the same time that the president himself initiated major shifts in official discourse; later, preparations for the World Conference on Racism, held in Durban, South Africa, in 2001, provoked national soul-searching on racial inequalities. The conference itself provided an occasion, and a moment of reckoning, for Brazil to jettison past policies and embrace a new approach. I conclude that ideas emerging from social networks, made salient by presidential interest, and legitimized by international agreements may account for discursive policy change, but that implementation of affirmative action will require attention to material interests and electoral incentives.

In response to the growing salience of re-centralization in several Latin American countries that decentralized in the 1980s and 1990s, this paper examines presidential efforts to re-centralize fiscal power in the 1990s. In our study of re-centralization in Argentina and Brazil, we assess the utility of four common political economy explanations: the presence of economic crisis; the partisan powers of the president; the division of formal powers between the branches; and the extent of intra-bureaucratic conflict. We find that the success of economic stabilization measures facilitated re-centralization in both countries, though the pathways connecting the two phenomena were partially distinct. In Argentina, key re-centralization measures were rapidly achieved after stabilization as the result of the president's strong partisan powers and in the form of political deals within the Peronist party. Subsequently, the dissipation of President Carlos Menem's powers over the course of his second term facilitated the “return of the governors.” In Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso re-centralized despite weak partisan powers, largely by using his reputation as a successful stabilizer to build a broad reform coalition. In Cardoso's Brazil, strong partisan cohesion in important cabinet posts also served as a partial substitute for the lack of partisan power in the legislature. These findings suggest the need for a closer examination of re-centralization efforts, particularly in the wake of macroeconomic stabilization and economic reform.

This essay analyzes the complexity and contradiction of resource-tenure regimes on tropical forest frontiers by drawing on a case study carried out in the department of Río San Juan, southeastern Nicaragua. The main attention is given to competing claims over productive resources and to contradictory relationships between the diverse modalities of resource control. The resource struggles emerging in Río San Juan are analyzed in the context of larger political-economic and socio-legal processes to understand the wider relations of politics and power that affect local resource access. The main goal is to reveal how control over resources is defined and contested in the everyday reality of legal pluralism where multiple legal orders intersect in people's lives, and where the conflicts over whose law applies, and who gets what resources and why, have increasing significance.

In presidential systems such as those of Latin America, the institutionalization of legislatures as autonomous representative bodies able to constrain executives and check abuses of power is an important aspect of democratization. Drawing on the experiences of Mexico's state governments, this paper seeks to explain differences in legislative institutionalization. It argues that pluralism within the legislature, rather than electoral competition in itself, provides the best explanation for institutionalization. A process-tracing analysis of the state legislature of Michoacán supports this argument, and a statistical analysis of Mexico's thirty-one states confirms that pluralism in the electorate does shape legislative pluralism—and so indirectly the extent of pressures for institutionalization—but reveals that differences in state electoral laws also play an important role.

Although there exists a significant body of literature documenting the under-representation of black Cubans in the island's most important governing institutions throughout the forty-four years of Fidel Castro's rule, these analyses have emphasized limited access to political power as the sole factor responsible for this state of affairs. However, this comprehensive analysis contends that with the aging of the Cuban Revolution, other factors such as low holdover and high replacement rates for blacks during periodic reshuffling of the political elite have become crucial, albeit unacknowledged, explanatory variables for the paucity of blacks among the country's leadership. An important determinant for this pattern is the existence of inter- and intra-institutional stratification among blacks, the reasons for which remain unknown. Nonetheless, the presence of this factor increases the vulnerability of nonwhites as decisions are made about which individuals should be retained or replaced in key government institutions.

This paper derives from a LARR-sponsored forum at the LASA 2003 Congress held in Dallas in March 2003. Targeted at younger scholars, a panel of leading researchers whose early work was shaped by marginality and dependency thinking of the 1960s were invited to reflect cross-generationally about how paradigms analyzing poverty in Latin American cities have shifted from that time to the present. Specifically, each of the authors compares “marginality” as it was construed more than three decades ago with contemporary constructions of poverty and social organization arising from their more recent research. While there are important continuities, the authors concur that the so-called “new poverty” today is very different, being more structural, more segmented and, perhaps paradoxically, more exclusionary than before. Moreover, the shift from a largely patrimonialist and undemocratic state towards one that, while more democratic, is also slimmer and downsized, thereby shifting state intervention and welfare systems ever more to local level governments and to the quasi-private sector of nongovernmental organizations. If earlier marginality theory overemphasized the separation of the poor from the mainstream, today's new poverty is often embedded within structures of social exclusion that severely reduce opportunities for social mobility among the urban poor.