This article takes up the question of whether civil society organizations (CSOs) can and do act as mechanisms of representation in times of party crisis. It looks at recent representation practices in Argentina, Bolivia, and Brazil, three countries where political parties have experienced sharp crises after several decades of mixed reviews for their party systems. At such moments, any replacement of parties by CSOs should be especially apparent. This study concludes that the degree of crisis determines the extent that CSOs' representative functions replace partisan representation, at least in the short term. Where systems show signs of re-equilibration, CSOs offer alternative mechanisms through which citizens can influence political outcomes without seeking to replace parties. Where crisis is profound, CSOs claim some of the basic party functions but do not necessarily solve the problems of partisan representation.

Latin Americans have been voting for a surprisingly large number of ex-presidents and newcomers in presidential elections since the late 1980s. This article looks at both the demand and supply sides of this phenomenon by focusing on economic anxieties and party crises as the key independent variables. Sometimes the relationship between these variables is linear: economic anxieties combined with party crises lead to rising ex-presidents and newcomers. At other times the relationship is symbiotic: the rise of ex-presidents leads to party crises, economic and political anxieties, and thus the rise of newcomers. This article concludes that the abundance of ex-presidents and newcomers in elections—essentially, the new face of Latin America's caudillismo—does not bode well for democracy because it accelerates de-institutionalization and polarizes the electorate.

This article offers a critical assessment of the first postneoliberalism development framework that emerged in Latin America after 1990. The ability of neostructuralism to present an attractive narrative about a twenty-first-century “modernity with solidarity” is based on abandoning key tenets of ECLAC's structuralism and the thinking of Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado; namely, a focus on the distribution and appropriation of economic surplus and a framing of Latin American development problems in a world capitalist system. This article argues that Latin American neostructuralism's discursive strengths, as well as its analytical weaknesses, stem from the marginalization of power relations from key dimensions of the region's political economy. Since 2000, neostructuralism has exacerbated its descriptive, short-term perspective, further dulling its analytical edge, by focusing on policies that promote social cohesion and state intervention in the cultural and the socioemotional realm.

Democratizing states began in the 1980s to hold individuals, including past heads of state, accountable for human rights violations. The 1984 Argentine truth commission report (Nunca Más) and the 1985 trials of the juntas helped to initiate this trend. Argentina also developed other justice-seeking mechanisms, including the first groups of mothers and grandmothers of the disappeared, the first human rights forensic anthropology team, and the first truth trials. Argentines helped to define the very term forced disappearance and to develop regional and international instruments to end the practice. Argentina thus illustrates the potential for global human rights protagonism and diffusion of ideas from a country outside the wealthy North. This article surveys Argentina's innovations and proposes possible explanations, drawing on theoretical studies from transitional justice, social movements, and norms cascades in international relations.

This article examines the incidence of liberal and “illiberal” democracy in Latin America from 1978 through 2004. It demonstrates, first, that illiberal democracy—which combines free and fair elections with systematic constraints on citizens’ rights—became the norm throughout the region. Second, it shows that regime transitions most often ended not in liberal democracy but in illiberal democracy. Third, rare events logit analysis reveals that two variables, hyperinflation and presidential elections, had significant impact on movement toward fuller democracy. As a form of short-term economic shock, hyperinflation generates widespread discontent; given the opportunity to vote, citizens elect reformist opposition candidates who, once in office, remove controls on civil liberties. This scenario substantially increases the likelihood of transition from illiberal to liberal democracy.

This article provides a theoretical framework for analyzing the recruitment and selection of legislative candidates in Latin America. It argues that political recruitment and candidate selection are undertheorized for Latin America yet have determinative impacts on political systems, often overriding the influence of more commonly studied institutional variables. The article elucidates a typology of legislative candidates based on the legal and party variables that lead to the emergence of particular selection methods, as well as the patterns of loyalty generated by those methods. It analyzes the recruitment and selection processes as independent and dependent variables, underscoring the significant effect these procedures have on the incentive structure and subsequent behavior of legislators. Those factors, in turn, have important consequences for democratic governability and the performance of presidentialism.

Despite a strengthening of collective labor rights in Latin America over the last 15 years, most labor movements in the region have lost power because neither the content nor the enforcement mechanisms associated with the labor reforms fully took into consideration the challenges presented by economic restructuring. Reforms facilitating union formation did not strengthen unions but instead increased union fragmentation. Collective bargaining structures did not respond to the exigencies of international outsourcing; and the initial round of reforms in the 1990s did not contemplate the need to strengthen labor law enforcement mechanisms at a time when heightened international competition created a need for greater state vigilance of labor standards. Recent reforms or proposed reforms hold more promise for labor, but truly union-friendly labor relations regimes require deeper changes. A review of several Latin American cases is followed by a closer examination of Brazil and El Salvador.

Examining the popular uprising against the privatization of electric service in Arequipa and other revolts against foreign direct investment in Peru, this article explores the changing basis of antigovernment mobilizations against economic liberalization. It suggests that the transition from Fujimori to Toledo led to a major shift in the political opportunity structure, creating a more conducive environment for greater levels of mobilization while increasing the leverage of challengers, along with their chances to achieve positive goals. These new forms of collective resistance are geographically segmented or territorialized; they present concrete demands; and they often involve unexpected actors, yet they resonate at the national level. These results confirm the expectations from recent repoliticization literature insofar as collective actors remain acutely responsive to market reforms in more democratic settings.

The article argues that preauthoritarian institutions have strongly influenced postauthoritarian labor politics in Chile and Uruguay. The nature of preauthoritarian labor administration—state corporatist in Chile, pluralist in Uruguay—had a strong impact on postauthoritarian collective outcomes, whether or not they were modified by the dictators or the ideological disposition of the postauthoritarian governments. Variation in preauthoritarian labor politics between Chile and Uruguay gave historical foundation to different union fortunes in the postauthoritarian era. That result points to the contemporary influence of preauthoritarian institutions, with or without authoritarian modifiers.

Government-initiated referendums (GIRs) have so far been neglected by the debate on the effects of institutions on policymaking in presidential systems. The literature on Latin American politics has focused on isolated cases of GIRs, which are largely interpreted as epiphenomenal to a regional trend toward personalistic neopopulism. This article provides a conceptual framework for the systematic comparative study of GIRs. It argues that presidents' propensity to promote legal changes through referendums and their concomitant capacity to dominate policymaking are subject to the interaction of two institutional variables (constitutional rules regulating the competences of elected officials in GIR processes and minimum turnout requirements) and two political variables (preference distribution in the legislature and the position of the median voter). These propositions are tested through a comparative analysis of referendum experiences in Colombia and Bolivia, two cases with similar political settings and significant variation in each of the institutional variables.

The article synthesizes contributions from the recent comparative research on civil war and the case-specific literature on Colombia to argue that too often, commentators on this conflict overlook some of its key dimensions. A comprehensive analysis shows that no fewer than six factors are fueling violent conflict in Colombia: economic forces, state weakness, landscape, U.S. policies, long-duration and spin-off violence, and malicious opportunism by non-combatants. The first three are the ones that matter most. The case made here is that when analysts disregard the range and interrelatedness of the factors involved, the result is a distortion of reality and a tendency to support policies that will not enhance the prospects for peace.

This article presents both a theoretical framework and a methodology that attempt to capture the complex interactions among labor markets, families, and public policy that currently constitute Latin American welfare regimes. Drawing on cluster analysis based on available data for 18 countries, the study identifies three welfare regimes. Two are state welfare regimes: protectionist (e.g. Costa Rica) and productivist (e.g. Chile); one is nonstate familiarist (e.g. Ecuador and Nicaragua). In a region where people's well-being is deeply embedded in family relationships, closer scholarly attention to how social structures interact with public policy bears not only academic interest but also policy implications, particularly for adapting particular welfare regimes to the local welfare mix.

The administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso enacted measures to constrain subnational politicians in a newly democratized and highly decentralized federal system. Lacking sufficient accountability at the subnational level, the central government attempted to increase its control of educational funding and minimize local discretion over educational spending. These reforms constrained the distribution of intergovernmental transfers, but entrusted the disbursement of educational spending to local oversight. This article argues that while the constraints protected the federal treasury from predatory practices, the local oversight did not protect educational spending from mayoral discretion. This argument is based on an analysis of initial reform implementation in four municipal school systems. The mayors responded to the federal initiatives in a variety of ways, but these were based on the requirements of their own political survival. The four cases thereby become studies in how one effort to recentralize democracy is working in Brazil.

Using a case study of a controversial mine in an indigenous area of Guatemala, this article explores the transnational dynamics of development and regulation of large-scale extractive industry projects in the developing world. It examines the roles played in the Marlin mine dispute by national law, international law, international financial institutions, and corporate social responsibility. It concludes that these legal regimes have a role in protecting human rights but have not addressed the fundamental questions of democratic governance raised by this case.

Through the application of an analytical model categorized as “missionary,” this article examines the cultural and political-religious frames that sustain the leadership of Hugo Chávez. It demonstrates that missionary politics is a forceful presence in today's Venezuela, and should be understood as a form of political religion characterized by a dynamic relationship between a charismatic leader and a moral community that is invested with a mission of salvation against conspiratorial enemies. The leader's verbal and nonverbal discourses play an essential role in the development of such a missionary mode of politics, which seeks to provide the alienated mass of underprivileged citizens with an identity and a sense of active participation in national affairs. This study argues that purely utilitarian and materialistic explanations of Chávez's leadership fail to capture these soteriological dynamics in his movement.

Chile presents a paradox for legislative studies. In most comparative research on the political power of presidents and assemblies in Latin America, the Chilean presidency is considered one of the most powerful in the region. The country's congress is seen, accordingly, as weak and lacking influence over public policy. Such evaluations, however, tend to be based on constitutional and legal faculties (that is, formal powers), and they overlook the substantial influence exerted by the Chilean Congress through informal political channels. This article analyzes literature on informal politics that shows the substantial influence of Chile's Congress on public policy; and, for comparison, presents an empirical study that adds several details to current accounts of congressional influence on the bureaucracy in Chile and describes two mechanisms of congressional influence not contemplated by recent research.