Research on executive-legislative relations in Latin America has focused on the impact of minority presidents and multiparty legislatures on legislative productivity. But an additional deadlock scenario, the blocking of a majority president by a minority through filibustering, has been understudied. This article analyzes filibustering in Costa Rica and explains the legislative paralysis in the wake of the nation's transition to a multiparty system in 2002. Legislative paralysis is seen as a product of the interaction between increased legislative fragmentation and polarization and the legislature's preexisting rules of procedure, which enable legislators easily to block bills they oppose, even when those bills are supported by supermajorities. This argument is tested through a comparison of major economic reforms in the 2000s to the reforms tackled in the 1990s. The role of filibustering, well acknowledged in U.S. politics, should also be studied in comparative politics.

This article examines candidate favorability among Colombian expatriates and Colombians in the home country in the 2010 Colombian presidential elections. It analyzes the influence of several socioeconomic, migratory, mobilizing, and contextual factors on candidate appraisal using a large exit poll conducted at Colombian consulates in five cities in the United States and Europe and five cities with high emigration rates in Colombia. Aside from differences in candidate favorability stemming from socioeconomic variables (education, income, and religious affiliation), Colombians living abroad largely evaluate candidates in ways similar to Colombians living in the country.

Luna, Murillo, and Schrank (LMS) do our field a very valuable service by raising questions on the state of research on the political economy in Latin America and where it should be going. They cover a lot of ground in a short space, leaving a smorgasbord of issues to mull over, question, or endorse. To my mind, some of the most promising critiques in the memo are that there are gaps in the field and that those gaps are due in part to methodological fashion. Yet the discussion of gaps in LMS is somewhat ungrounded and underspecified. Closing the essay with a call for more research on democracy, development, state formation, inequality, and international linkages seems to miss the fact that most recent research is actually related to these five topics. Many readers probably would react by saying to themselves that they have been conducting some research in one or more of these areas.

Although numerous scholars have analyzed the effects of natural resource extraction at the national level, few have explored it systematically at the local level. Focusing on Peru, where both mining production and local social protests have greatly increased in recent years and where a new tax has required mining companies to transfer revenue to subnational governments, this study explores the resource curse at the local level. In particular, why do protests arise mostly in the areas of natural resource extraction? Employing subnational data for Peru for the period 2004–9 and LAPOP survey data from 2010, the research confirms previous findings that social conflict is provoked by both the negative externalities of mining and the revenues from the new tax. The article further demonstrates that local bureaucratic capacity is a significant independent variable. Greater subnational bureaucratic capacity can ameliorate the pernicious societal effects of a local resource curse.

The essay by Murillo, Shrank, and Luna constitutes a much-needed and welcome wake-up call for those of us who study Latin America—and for political scientists more generally. The authors make a plea for “a rigorous, comparative, and empirically grounded” study of Latin American political economy. I fully agree with their diagnosis of this field and their recommendations. I also praise the authors for defining political economy broadly—rather than narrowly, through a focus on research methods. They understand political economy to encompass all the economic, social, and political factors that are either contextual conditions or consequences of major macroeconomic transformations. Thus the authors lay out an important research agenda for the study of Latin American political economy that includes not only issues of economic development and inequality, but also patterns of democratic politics, state capacities, the rule of law, identity politics, and international linkages, among others. For the authors, the major political and economic transformations that the region has undergone since the start of the twentyfirst century—in its postneoliberal era—cry out for a contextualized research agenda and, I would add, open a host of opportunities for theoretical and conceptual innovation.

The proliferation of nongovernmental organizations across the developing world has sparked discussions of the “NGOization” of civil society and concern that NGOs have become increasingly uniform and internally homogenous. This article explores the evolution of NGOs in Guatemala since the 1960s and finds that NGOs historically and currently respond in diverse ways to external pressures—adjusting their strategies and actively attempting to shape their environment. Comparing two microcredit NGOs, it finds in addition that old and new models combine in unique organizational contexts in distinct ways. These two findings suggest that diversity is likely to persist among NGOs.

A new generation of social policies in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America are being read by scholars as first and foremost the result of top-down initiatives by state elites and technocrats. This article explores what role, if any, middle-class professionals have played and how this role might be framed in analytical terms. The article examines the trajectory of two of the most important new social programs that target the poor in the city of São Paulo, Brazil: the family health program PSF and Renda Mínima. It compares the city-level reform dynamics that have shaped the trajectory of the programs over 18 years. It finds that networks of reformist middle-class professionals that traverse public and private institutions played a substantial role in the creation and evolution of the new programs.

Brazil's conditional cash transfer program Bolsa Família (Family Allowance) has gained a worldwide reputation as an effective antipoverty program. However, studies applying the dominant headcount poverty measure, which counts the percentage of households falling below a given poverty line, only credit the program with a first-order reduction in poverty (and extreme poverty) of 0.15 to 1.88 percentage points. This raises the puzzle of how such a modest impact could lead to Bolsa Família's political popularity. This article argues that Bolsa Família does dramatically reduce poverty, but measuring this impact requires thinking of poverty as how far a household is from meeting its basic human needs; choosing a continuous variable; and using income gap, intensity, and ordinal measures that reflect this conceptualization. The more substantial reduction of poverty intensity helps explain the program's reputation.

This article analyzes the conditions that facilitate the ousting of Latin American presidents and the mechanisms that prevent their downfall. Drawing lessons from the impeachment of Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo, it extends previous arguments about the “legislative shield” to show that the same forces that sometimes conspire to terminate an administration at other times work to resist its demise. The argument underscores the interaction between legislators and social movements, two prominent actors in the literature on presidential instability. The article presents a two-level theory to identify possible configurations of mass and legislative alignments, and tests some implications of the theory with data for 116 Latin American presidents over 28 years. Multiple comparison tests based on random effects logistic models show that popular protests can be neutralized by strong support in Congress, and hint at the possibility that legislative threats can be neutralized by loyal demonstrators in the streets.