Brazilian diplomats and academics alike have long regarded regional leadership as a springboard to global recognition. Yet Brazil's foreign policy has not translated the country's structural and instrumental resources into effective regional leadership. Brazil's potential followers have not aligned with its main goals, such as a permanent seat on the UN Security Council and Directorship-General of the World Trade Organization; some have even challenged its regional influence. Nevertheless, Brazil has been recognized as an emergent global power. This article analyzes the growing mismatch between the regional and global performance of Brazilian foreign policy and shows how both theoretical expectations and policy planning were “luckily foiled” by unforeseen developments. It argues that because of regional power rivalries and a relative paucity of resources, Brazil is likely to consolidate itself as a middle global power before gaining acceptance as a leader in its region.

Despite the recent shift to democratic regimes and market-based economies, in many Latin American countries the military retains important economic roles as owner, manager, and stakeholder in economic enterprises. Such military entrepreneurship poses a challenge to the development of democratic civil-military relations and, by extension, to the development of liberal democracy in the region. While scholars have noted this situation with concern, they have given little attention to distinguishing the different types of military entrepreneurship, which reflect distinct historical patterns and implications. This article identifies two major types of military entrepreneurs in Latin America: industrializers, determined to build national defense capabilities and compete for international prestige; and nation builders, seeking to promote economic development that can foster social development and cohesion. Case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Ecuador demonstrate important differences between these two types in their origins, paths, and political consequences.

This article extends the analysis of political parties in electorally volatile and organizationally weak party systems by evaluating two implications centered on legislative voting behavior. First, it examines whether disunity prevails where weakness of programmatic and electoral commonalities abound. Second, it analyzes whether inchoate party systems weaken the ability of government parties to control the congressional agenda. The empirical analysis centers on Peru, a classic example of a weakly institutionalized party system, and how its legislative parties compare to those of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States. The results lend support to the view that lower unity characterizes weakly institutionalized settings. The agenda-setting power of government parties, however, appears to be influenced more by the majority status of the government than by the level of party system institutionalization.

Like many new democracies, Argentina has struggled with contentious movements that have challenged its precarious stability. Two very different sectors have led particularly powerful opposition movements: the military—associated historically with the abuse of power—and the unemployed workers, with important support from prestigious human rights organizations. This article looks both at how the political standing of the sector (military versus civil society) influences policy choices and at how these policy choices influence whether opposition movements remain mobilized and contentious. It argues that situation-alleviating policies—those that successfully address interests of the sector as a whole—tend to be more successful in defusing contentious movements than policies relying on coercion, concessions, or co-optation of mobilized opposition groups. Situation alleviation depletes the contentious groups of possible recruits, while policies targeting the mobilized opposition may inadvertently motivate those actors to remain mobilized.

This article studies voter behavior in Argentina. Do voters vote based on issues? Do they vote based on economic performance? What segments of the population are more or less likely to do so? What is the relative impact of issues and the economy in vote choice? To provide a reliable answer to these questions, this study uses a mixed-logit model of spatial voting with nonpolicy components. Contrary to the common belief, the analysis finds that issue voting is a statistically significant and important factor. Economic voting is prevalent in the middle and upper classes, but not among poor voters.

The term competitiveness is widely applied as a catch-all for investor-friendly policies and institutions. This article argues that sloppy applications of the term ignore the possibilities of policy tradeoffs and varieties of institutional choices. Popular conceptualizations of the term describe three discernible clusters of economic policies and institutions. One cluster captures openness to international trade; a second gauges regulatory impediments to private sector competition; a third refers to public sector investments in human capital, security, and infrastructure. This essay develops three empirical indexes to operationalize these clusters and shows that these concepts are not only theoretically but also empirically distinct. In particular, the correlation between these measures is not especially high in a sample of Latin American countries. The larger economies in the region tend to be more competitive on the regulatory and public goods dimensions but fall well behind smaller economies in terms of external competitiveness, broadly conceived.