Emiliano Zapata could well be named “man of the decade” for the 1990s in Mexico, despite the fact that he has been dead for more than seventy years. His legacy, along with the revolution he represents, has been writ large in Mexican political culture. But whose version of Zapata has been enshrined? Is he the figure inspiring the agrarian reforms introduced by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to end the government's obligation to redistribute land to the rural poor? Or is he the sacred symbol of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional's armed rebellion calling for elimination of those same reforms? How can Zapata be all these things to all these groups simultaneously? Conversely, how can any single person or group endorse both sets of cultural-political meanings that have attached to Zapata when they appear to contradict one another directly?

When citizens lack stable political attitudes, leaders cannot easily be held accountable for their record in office, party system consolidation becomes more difficult, and public opinion is unable to offer much substantive guidance about policy-making. Ultimately, democratic governance is likely to suffer. In this article, we analyze a recent four-wave panel survey to assess the stability of political attitudes in Mexico. We find that the degree of attitude stability in Mexico varies across different types of dispositions. Although citizens hold reasonably firm views about the country's main political actors, preferences over issues are less consistent. These findings suggest both possibilities and constraints for democratic governance.

It has been well documented that structural changes in the capitalist world system during the second half of the nineteenth century generated profound consequences for peripheral economies such as those in Latin America and Africa. Improvements in transportation and the increasing demand for tropical consumer goods in the industrializing countries caused unprecedented growth in the production of tropical export crops and a consequent international movement of agricultural commodities. This widespread emergence of export agriculture for Western European and North American markets is the one reason why researchers can still employ a broad concept like the “Third World” to divergent economies and cultures in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Production of such crops as cotton, cocoa, tobacco, and coffee, which had previously been grown in many regions on a limited scale, expanded enormously in the second half of the nineteenth century. The global character of these agrarian changes, however, should not obscure their regional peculiarities. Export agriculture (whether peasant-or plantation-based) arose within existing systems of social and economic relations, which had a decisive influence on the final outcome of this process of change.

The concept of sumak kawsay, buen vivir or “good life”—in Bolivia, suma qamaña, or vivir bien—has been widely diffused on an international level since the Ecuadorian Constituent Assembly in 2007–2008 and the Bolivian one in 2006–2009. Good life has been understood as an alternative to capitalist modernizing development that is based on the indigenous ideal of harmony between individual, society, and nature. Nevertheless, in the usage of the indigenous movement, which initiated the diffusion of this concept, good life is a local and territorial conception of a lifestyle. While this notion of locality is largely ignored or invisibilized by the Ecuadorian government and by nonindigenous intellectuals, and to some degree even by national indigenous organizations, local indigenous organizations integrated good life into their discourse of territorial autonomy in a pluralist state. Good life allows for local decolonialization, a concrete and local fight against the structures of “the coloniality of power” framed within a discursive panorama that includes concepts of plurality and autonomy. This text analyzes sumak kawsay as a key concept of local decolonialization, emphasizing its relation to similar concepts and the differences in its usage by different actors.

Por primera en vez Chile una mujer triunfó en las elecciones presidenciales. Sugerimos que la victoria de Michelle Bachelet se explicó, en primer lugar, por sus atributos personales. Los chilenos la evaluaron como la candidata más confiable y con mayor cercanía, valorando además sus condiciones como posible gobernante. En segundo lugar, se vio favorecida por un ambiente político y económico derivado de la reconocida gestión del ex presidente Ricardo Lagos. Un tema crucial que atraviesa todo el escrito corresponde a la solidaridad de género. Se sostiene que el apoyo de las mujeres fue determinante para el triunfo de Bachelet, cuestión que se corrobora tanto a nivel de encuestas en términos de intención de voto como de resultados electorales finales por comuna.

Most of the Latin American countries that have introduced market-friendly economic reforms during the course of the last two decades have also suffered serious increases in inequality. The systematic coincidence in timing of the two events suggests that the reforms have been one cause of the worsening distribution. The generalization that major increases in inequality have occurred in many Latin American countries over the last two decades is now widely accepted (Altimir 1994; Morley 1995). This article will add new information for a few countries (Colombia, Costa Rica, and Ecuador). Its main focus, however, is the possible causes of those increases, a complicated question because so many different currents have affected the region over this period—the economic crisis, the policy reforms, technological change, shifts in terms of trade, and still others. Samuel Morley (1995) and others have argued that much of the observed increase in inequality was related to the economic crises suffered by nearly every country in the region. This interpretation might suggest that the optimists who predicted positive distributional outcomes from the reforms (such as Krueger 1988) will eventually be vindicated, once the negative effects of the crises have played themselves out. Although I agree that this factor played a significant role, the fact that inequality appears to be significantly higher after the crisis than before (Altimir 1994) implies that other contributing factors were also at work. Of these, the reforms are suspect because of their content and implicated by the coincidences in timing with the increases.

This article argues that descriptive representation, or demographic similarities between legislators and the public, can provide effective substantive representation of citizens’ concerns. We examine representation through the lens of opinion congruence or alignment in the policy preferences of legislators and citizens sharing various identities. Congruence may result from shared material interests or from self-selection into an identity group on the basis of policy views, but it can also be a product of networks and organizations that socialize masses and elites into a common worldview. Though political parties were historically the most important agents of political socialization, we argue that religious organizations constitute a more powerful socializing force in many new democracies. Examining the case of Brazil, we draw on three legislative surveys and fifteen mass surveys to analyze congruence across seven issue areas. Legislators and voters from underrepresented groups—women, Afro-Brazilians, evangelical Christians, and those of lower social class—are generally closer in their opinions than those sharing a party or electoral district. Evangelicals are often the most congruent. Analyzing original surveys of congregations and clergy, we argue that this finding results from the socializing role of churches.

Mexican politics has long been regarded as a closed system, with policy-making dominated by the reigning president and his circle and presidential succession (with all its possibilities for change of course) managed by an only slightly larger “Revolutionary Family” of top figures in the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). So intertwined are the Mexican state and the dominant party that scholars and opposition leaders alike have begun to speak of the “PRI state.” E. E. Schattschneider observed that in the U.S. system, 90 percent of the population never has access to the “pressure system” that directs policy choice. The percentage of the excluded is undoubtedly even larger in Mexico because the system is more decidedly “closed.” Yet in both countries, policy innovation is not uncommon. Marked changes of course have occurred at times, and opposition forces external to the system have occasionally managed to block presidential decisions and force reevaluation and sometimes painful adjustments. This article will examine the “agrarian question” in Mexico and will argue that its persistence and the ways in which it has been framed have constrained policymakers while encouraging and sustaining the development of an independent peasant movement during the 1970s and 1980s.

From mid-1980 to the present, Uruguay has experienced greater political change than during the previous seven years. This essay examines the salient political event that separates the two periods: the national plebiscite of November 1980. Its relevance, the causal conditions that might account for its unexpected results, and its probable short-range consequences will be explored. The argument assumes a general familiarity with Uruguayan politics of the last two decades, and particularly during the period 1974-80. It is also assumed that the Uruguayan political system of the last two decades fits O'Donnell's bureaucratic-authoritarian model, with the caveat that because of specific economic conditions, a feature of that model known as the “deepening” of the economy is not applicable to Uruguay, as has also been argued with respect to the case of Chile.

Attempts have been made at Latin American regional integration since the late 1950s, but on each occasion, high expectations have met with disappointing failures. In July 1986, however, a new phase began in the history of Latin American integration as Presidents Raúl Alfonsín of Argentina and José Sarney of Brazil signed the Argentina-Brazil Economic Integration Pact (ABEIP).

Numerous recent country studies demonstrate that beneficiaries of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs vote for incumbents at higher rates. It is reasonable to expect that, as a consequence, those incumbents will perform better nationally in the next election. This article warns against such an extrapolation. It analyzes an original cross-national data set with information for eighty-four Latin American presidential elections that took place between 1990 and 2010. My results reveal that CCT programs have not improved incumbents' aggregate electoral performances in the region, contradicting common speculative claims of the literature. They also confirm the classic economic voting hypothesis that incumbents are held accountable in the polls for their economic performance.

Unlike other Latin American countries, the particular mode of dependent capitalist development that has occurred in Argentina has led to the emergence of a relatively large industrial bourgeoisie. Indeed, industrialists in Argentina have constituted an extremely important pressure group, in a society where the state has not been able to control the development and activities of societal organizations. Entrepreneurial organizations both of a general type, such as chambers of commerce and industry, and of a more specialized nature, such as trade associations, began to arise autonomously by the turn of the century. The events of the Perón years were particularly important in giving impetus to entrepreneurial organization. By the early 1950s, with the passage of the Law of Professional Associations of Employers, which granted them special legitimacy and importance, such entrepreneurial organizations became the most important means by which entrepreneurs attempted to influence government policy.

A recurring theme in the study of social stability is the relation of rural conditions to political violence and revolution as well as to subtler and less violent forms of opposition and resistance. El Salvador has served as an example for study because of its recent twelve-year civil war and the participation of its rural population. Given the depth and richness of data concerning rural conditions leading up to the civil war, it is somewhat baffling to find that rural social tensions are explained away in the terms used by Mitchell Seligson in “Thirty Years of Agrarian Transformation in El Salvador.”

This study evaluates the role played by the legislature in one of Argentina's most important economic reforms of recent decades: the reform of tax incentives for regional development. As implemented by the last military government, this sytem of tax incentives provoked sharp distributive conflicts among provinces. Although a majority of legislators favored reform after the return to democracy in 1983, interprovincial conflicts created bargaining problems that prevented the passage of reform legislation through regular channels. Pro-reform legislators decided instead to delegate reform authority to President Raúl Alfonsín because he shared their interest in containing the fiscal cost of tax incentives. Subsequent uses of this delegated authority by two presidents promoted the interests of the enacting coalition that supported delegation. These findings support the usefulness of delegation models when carefully applied to Latin America and challenge theories that neglect the different ways that legislators shape economic reform.

In 1975 the Trilateral Commission published Crozier, Huntington, and Wantanuki's Crisis of Democracy, which questioned the compatibility of stable capitalist development and traditional democratic freedoms in the advanced capitalist nations, a theme echoed in Lindblom (1977), Lindberg et al. (1975), Nisbet (1975), and Huntington (1981). Living in capitalist societies whose recent experience is strikingly nondemocratic, Latin American scholars have felt most urgently the need to assess critically this contradiction and its implications for general political tendencies within the process of capitalist development. In the 1970s, directly in response to events in the major industrialized Latin American nations (especially Brazil, Argentina, and Chile), theoretical and empirical research has reformulated the terrain of debate regarding the relationship of political, economic, and social relations in peripheral capitalist nations. This new vocabulary and new set of hypotheses about state structure and state intervention suggest explanations for the nondemocratic political structure and the increasingly expansive and intensive role of the state in the process of capital accumulation in Latin America.

This article discusses the sustained and increasingly institutionalized transnational practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their hometowns in Mexico. Far from being a strictly private transnational practice, migrants' desire for a posthumous return and burial in their homelands is popularly expressed in the memories, music, and everyday exchanges of the Mexican diaspora. Drawing on transnational ethnographic research in Los Angeles, California, and Zacatecas, Mexico, this article documents how the Mexican state has institutionalized this process at the transnational, national, state, and municipal levels of governance. Last, the article discusses the role of migrant family and social networks in these repatriations. The goals of this article are to provide a preliminary cultural and institutional understanding of the practice of repatriating cadavers from the United States to Mexico and to discuss the implications of this process for the scholarly debate on migrant transnationalism.

Electoral theories of governmental accountability assume that competitive elections produce responsive governments because they allow voters to punish or reward the performance of incumbent politicians at the ballot box. This research note investigates whether the increasing competitiveness of municipal elections in Mexico during the 1990s has improved the performance of local governments by focusing on the provision of potable water and drainage. The empirical evidence does not seem to support the electoral accountability hypothesis, but rather suggests that municipal governments are more responsive to the influence of socioeconomic modernity, as well as to the direct pressure of politically mobilized citizens. The findings cast doubts on the idea that competitive elections, by themselves, will significantly improve the quality of local governments in the country.

Social spending by central governments in Latin America has, in recent decades, become increasingly insulated from political manipulation. Focusing on the 3×1 Program in Mexico in 2002-2007, we show that social spending by local government is, in contrast, highly politicized. The 3×1 Program funds municipal public works, with each level of government—municipal, state, and central—matching collective remittances. Our analysis shows that 3×1 municipal spending is shaped by political criteria. First, municipalities time disbursements according to the electoral cycle. Second, when matching collective remittances, municipalities protect salaries of personnel, instead adjusting budget items that are less visible to the public, such as debt. Third, municipalities spend more on 3×1 projects when their partisanship matches that of the state government. Beyond the 3×1 Program, our findings highlight the considerable influence that increasing political and economic decentralization can have on local government incentives and spending choices, in Mexico and beyond.

There has been much controversy over the nature of the institution of slavery, the relative humanity or lack of it in those slave holding nations which practiced it, and its benign or baleful effects upon the blacks on whom it was inflicted. Much has been said about the harshness of Anglo-American slavery and the relatively mild nature of Spanish American slavery, which respected a slave's basic humanity and rights of person, property, and family. Yet little has been done to quantify and document how those attitudes applied in practice. We have had little precise information about the slave family as it existed in the Spanish American colonies and the extent or use of slave property, or about the slaves' access to the legal system that might protect and defend his person, his property, or his family. New sources and methodology have begun to challenge long-held assumptions about both Anglo-American as well as Spanish American slavery. If any conclusion is warranted, it may be that slavery varied widely from place to place and was influenced perhaps as much by differing economic circumstances as by differences in cultural attitudes.