Brazil is among the few countries where income distribution has become fairer in recent decades. Its Gini coefficient fell significantly in the 2000s while the left-wing Workers’ Party government approved key equity-enhancing reforms in Congress. By analyzing hundreds of news pieces, legislative documents, and secondary sources, I show the strategies that incumbents from the left adopted to build and manage cross-party coalitions that allowed structural changes to materialize. This research is the first systematic effort to detail how three consequential redistributive policies in the areas of conditional cash-transfer programs, education, and minimum wages found their way through a fragmented legislature where the chief executive’s party was minoritarian. Findings add nuance to social policymaking and reveal that partisanship-based approaches to how inequality declined in Latin America require deeper complexification. In the Brazilian case, leftist presidents improved redistribution by investing in multiparty cooperative arrangements while ideology got diluted in the process.

We estimate how asset prices respond to a range of political shocks, including changes in a country's economic stewardship, national elections, coup d'états, wars, and terrorist attacks. Using an event study approach and daily prices from the Buenos Aires exchange (Argentina) between 1967 and 2020, we find that stock-market volatility increases in the days immediately following major policy-shifting events. These results hold irrespective of whether returns are measured in nominal terms, in local consumption units, or in US dollars. The most significant increase in post-event risk is associated with irregular government turnovers. Volatility also increases in the days immediately following a defeat in an international war, national elections, and changes in the country's economic stewardship. No changes in stock-market volatility occur, however, after terrorist attacks or when the date of a new administration's inauguration is publicly known and determined sufficiently far in advance.

The reform approved in Peru in 2009 during a right-wing government deviates from similar attempts in the region to expand access to healthcare. Left-wing parties in Peru were extremely weak during the policy-making process and the political parties were non-programmatic. Based on original field research, this article demonstrates how parties that lacked core values uniting their leaders and had no commitment to the health reform did not care for the definition of specifications regarding funding and implementation. Instead, technocrats dominated the process of policy formation, which, accompanied by the lack of commitment from key political actors, led to poorly specified policy and deficient implementation.