This article argues that the common narrative of a Bolivian backlash against neoliberalism should be reconsidered in light of the continuities and mutual constraints between popular mobilization and neoliberal policy reforms. The study draws on literature that conceptualizes neoliberalism as a particular construction of state and social forms; but unlike those works, it includes an analysis of International Monetary Fund policy shifts to understand how popular mobilization constrains policy implementation. Responding to popular mobilization between 1985 and 2006, the IMF came to accept divergence from orthodox policy in order to encourage political stability. The government of Evo Morales and the IMF are mutually constrained by concern for the investment climate. This study further advocates that analysts probe beyond simple binary divisions between “neoliberalism” and “alternatives” and look more seriously for pragmatic strategies for negotiating neoliberal spaces.

This article examines the relative importance of regional and national forces in shaping the behavior of Brazilian legislators at the national level. A widely held view is that national legislators respond to state pressures in making decisions, rather than pressures from the national government. Governors not only can influence national debates but also can determine outcomes by exerting control over their states' legislative delegations. This article examines a dataset of all roll-call votes in the Chamber of Deputies between 1989 and 2006 to isolate and evaluate the impact of local pressures on legislative voting. Spanning the terms of five presidents and five different congresses, the data show that the local influence is weaker than the national on the voting decisions of individual legislators and the voting cohesion of state delegations. Alternative institutional resources allow the central government to counteract the centrifugal pressures of federalism and other institutional influences.

This article examines decentralization through the lens of the local dynamics it unleashed in the much-noted case of Bolivia. It argues that the national effects of decentralization are largely the sum of its local-level effects. To understand decentralization, therefore, we must first understand how local government works. The article explores the deep economic and institutional determinants of government quality in two extremes of municipal performance. From this it derives a model of local government responsiveness as the product of political openness and substantive competition. The quality of local politics, in turn, emerges endogenously as the joint product of the lobbying and political engagement of local firms and interests and the organizational density and ability of civil society. The analysis tests the theory's predictions on a database containing all Bolivian municipalities. The theory proves robust. The combined methodology provides a higher-order empirical rigor than either approach can alone.

Based on ethnographic reanalysis and on current qualitative research on poor people's politics, this article argues that routine patronage politics and nonroutine collective action should be examined not as opposite and conflicting political phenomena but as dynamic processes that often establish recursive relationships. Through a series of case studies conducted in contemporary Argentina, this article examines four instances in which patronage and collective action intersect and interact: network breakdown, patron's certification, clandestine support, and reaction to threat. These four scenarios demonstrate that more than two opposing spheres of action or two different forms of sociability, patronage, and contentious politics can be mutually imbricated. Either when it malfunctions or when it thrives, clientelism may lie at the root of collective action.

In the mid-1990s, for the first time in the history of the Americas, truly hemispherewide collaboration among labor organizations became possible. Yet this new political opportunity structure has not brought actors together in an undisputed new labor internationalism. This article focuses on two key sources of contention among labor organizations in the context of free trade mobilizations between 1990 and 2004: the discussions about coalition building with other civil society actors and the debates about including a social clause in trade agreements. It argues that transnational collective action occurs parallel to the continued relevance of national-level claims and targets, and that this simultaneity represents a real source of challenges, for scholars and labor organizations alike. Based on social network data and qualitative interviews in Brazil, Mexico, Chile, and the United States, the article analyzes the actions taken by labor organizations, and how these changed through time.

This article argues that social democratic and orthodox Marxist conceptualizations of politics are unable to “engage in solidarity” with many new forms of Latin American popular politics. Such movements challenge the politics of representation, the market economy, and the state form by reinventing territorialized experiments in self-government, which politicize place, subjectivities, and social relations. Developing a critique of these frameworks of political analysis, this article argues that conceptual categories combining the insights of autonomist or open Marxism and poststructuralism and the critical reflections and theorizations by Latin America's newest social movements enable a deeper engagement with such movements. This critique challenges academics committed to progressive social change to reexamine long-held notions about the nature and agents of social transformation and the epistemological categories that orient our research. It argues that if we fail to do this, then we risk becoming gatekeepers of the status quo.

This article explains the twentieth-century Latin American shift from majoritarian to proportional representation (PR) electoral systems. It argues that PR was introduced when the electoral arena changed significantly and threatened the power of the dominant party. The adoption of PR was therefore an effort by the established party to retain partial power in the face of absolute defeat. Majoritarian systems remained in place when the incumbent party was strong enough to believe that it could gain a plurality of the votes despite electoral changes. An empirical analysis of 20 countries over 104 years (1900–2004) provides support for this argument.

Colombia and Peru made significant progress in reducing the institutional prerogatives of their respective militaries in the 1990s and 2000s while reforming their economies in a neoliberal direction. They accomplished this despite internal armed threats to state authority and stability. The end of the Cold War, U.S. promotion of “market democracies,” and the international centrality of free markets and formal democratic governance coincided with the rise to power in Peru and Colombia of “neoliberal policy coalitions.” The internal insurgency mitigated the emergence of antiglobalization or antidemocratic reform factions in the military and civil society. The armed forces unified behind their counterinsurgency mission, and opposition in civil society was weakened, creating greater space for neoliberal elites to reform their economies and reduce military prerogatives.

Has democracy promoted poverty alleviation and equity-enhancing reforms in Brazil, a country of striking inequality and destitution? The effects of an open, competitive political system have not been straightforward. Factors that would seem to work toward this goal include the voting power of poor people, the progressive 1988 Constitution, the activism of social movements, and governance since 1995 by presidents affiliated with center-left and left parties. Yet these factors have been counterbalanced by the strong political influence and lobbying power of organized interests with a stake in preexisting arrangements of social protection and human capital formation. An analysis of four key federal sectors, social security, education, health care, and public assistance, illustrates the challenges for social sector reforms that go beyond raising basic living standards to enhancing socioeconomic inequality.

Brazil has an “African-origin” population that is proportionally more than four times larger that of African Americans in the United States, but white Brazilians mostly dominate electoral politics. How do ordinary citizens explain this phenomenon? Drawing on a large-sample survey of public opinion in the state of Rio de Janeiro, this article explores perceived explanations for nonwhite underrepresentation in the political arena. It also examines attitudes toward a particular black candidate, Benedita da Silva, to discern the state of negro identity politics. Most Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro cite racial prejudice to explain nonwhite exclusion, although whites do this less than nonwhites. Indicators of a racial undercurrent in political preferences suggest the importance of allegiances based on perceived common racial origins. Class is robustly associated with voting preferences, suggesting that, in contrast to the United States, class differences among nonwhites in Brazil could attenuate the success of negro identity politics.

The postmaterialist thesis has spurred a large body of literature and debates, yet postmaterialism has not been studied among political elites. Empirical studies of the legislatures and legislators of Latin American nations in general and Puerto Rico in particular, moreover, are sorely lacking. This article examines postmaterialist values among Puerto Rican legislators. It finds that Puerto Rican legislators have high levels of postmaterialism and that they order the components of the postmaterialism scale in ways similar to those of the mass publics of other countries, including those of Latin America. More important, the postmaterialist scale proves of little use in explaining the positions legislators take on a host of issues, many of which are closely associated with postmaterialism. An alternative explanation is that the scale really measures attachment to democratic norms.

In 2003, the Argentine executive promoted a process of Supreme Court reform that entailed limiting presidential attributions in the selection of justices. Then the renewed court implemented changes to its internal procedures that increased its own accountability mechanisms. The literature on the politics of institutional judicial independence in Latin America has developed two explanatory models: one presents reforms as an insurance policy, the other as a consequence of divided government. Both perspectives conceive of reforms as a result of political competition and as a way to limit other actors, the future government in the first case, the party in power in the second. This study, by contrast, explains the Argentine reforms as movements of strategic self-restriction, designed to build legitimacy and credibility, for the government and the court, respectively, in a context of social and institutional crisis and pressure from civil society.

This article seeks to determine the main predictors of political participation in a newly democratic regime: Mexico. Compared to other nations, Mexico fills a moderate position in terms of the volume of political participation. Following the literature on participation, this study develops a set of participant modes—voting, communal activity, petitioning, direct action, and political organization membership—and then seeks to determine the socioeconomic, demographic, attitudinal, and social capital factors that best explain participation. Distinct resource inequalities limit the participation of the less educated, the poor, women, and workers, although peasant participation is robust. The strongest determinant of political participation of all kinds is involvement in social capital–generating activities: belonging to nonpolitical organizations and engaging in charitable work, activities typically dominated by the middle class. Building social capital is essential to promoting robust rates of political participation in Mexico.

Urban popular movements that organize illegal land invasion communities present an intriguing puzzle. When most invasion organizations acquire land titles, their participation levels plummet and their agendas stagnate; yet some neighborhoods achieve land titles, sustain high participation, and acquire other services, such as piped-in water. Why do these organizations achieve movement resilience? The more typical trajectory of movement collapse is explained by the disappearance of the key selective incentive, property security. Some organizations, however, evade this “security trap” through mixed motives: their basic material agenda is supplemented by a nonmaterial and often altruistic agenda, which sustains participation in the face of reduced selective incentives. Examining three neighborhood case studies in Lima and Quito, this article argues that a new, “innovator” type of invasion organization is more likely to exhibit sustained participation and movement resilience due to tactical innovation, democratic governance, and mixed motives.