This article analyzes how niche parties may utilize a strategy of policy shifting to garner additional voters. It leverages a unique opportunity in which a Costa Rican political party released two different versions of its party manifesto at different moments during a single election cycle. This rare opportunity uncovers how the party shifted from having a hard conservative stance on social issues, such as abortion, to moderating its stance and centering its focus on less contentious issues in a runoff election campaign. Understanding how a single political party may alter its strategy is important because it allows us to better gauge the effectiveness of shifting policy positions, especially for niche parties, for which a particular issue area is dominant. Moreover, this analysis opens additional avenues of research on political parties in the Latin American context, since research utilizing manifesto data in this context has been limited.

Current approaches to voting behavior in clientelist contexts either predict that clients leave their preferences aside for fear of having their benefits cut off or voluntarily support politicians they perceive to be reliable patrons. These two approaches cannot account for clients’ vote choices in the Sertão of Bahia, Brazil, where voters were free to choose among competing candidates but supported patrons they knew were unreliable. This article argues that clients voluntarily voted for bad patrons as a strategy to gain symbolic power in their negotiations with politicians. By explaining clients’ paradoxical choices in the Sertão, this article reveals how clientelism can persist without monitoring mechanisms or positive attitudes toward patrons. In addition, this study shows the importance of incorporating voters’ perspectives and their everyday survival strategies to better account for clients’ political behavior.

Mitigating climate change requires a global transition from fossil fuels to a “green economy” driven by renewable energies. This shift has fostered massive investments in mining resources, notably lithium in South America, needed to store renewable energies. These mining ventures often produce harmful externalities where lithium is located. In Argentina, a major producer, striking variation has occurred in the fortunes of lithium-mining projects. In some instances, mining companies offered concessions that mitigated environmental damage and improved local socioeconomic conditions. In others, companies made minimal concessions, and in a third set they halted projects in response to local resistance. Why do mining ventures result alternatively in negotiated, unnegotiated, or aborted extraction? The article proposes a new typology of modes of extraction together with a multilevel explanatory framework that centers on the strengths and strategies of transnational mining companies, subnational governments, and local communities in setting the terms for extracting lithium.

Racism in social media is ubiquitous, persisting online in ways unique to the internet while also reverberating from the world offline. When will racist frames activate in social media networks? This article argues that social media users engage with racist content when they perceive a threat to the in-group status, selecting frames that serve as markers to separate the in-group identity from the out-group identity. Racialized frames serve as these markers, and the perceived threats to the in-group status make racist content cognitively congruent. Evidence of this behavior is provided by examining Twitter activity during the indígena protests in Ecuador in October 2019. A novel, multistep machine-learning process detects racist tweets, and an interrupted time series analysis shows how events that can be perceived as threats to the in-group activate racist content in some social media communities.

States targeted by human rights criticism usually do something—whether ratifying treaties, passing laws, establishing institutions, prosecuting perpetrators, or shifting discourse. But how do we know how coordinated, comprehensive, and effective these actions are? This article proposes five questions to assess how willing a state is to take the steps necessary to meaningfully respond to human rights crises. It applies this approach to two human rights crises in Mexico: femicides and violence against women, and disappearances. This approach effectively differentiates state responses that initially appear similar, demonstrating that the Mexican government has been more willing to address violence against women and femicides than disappearances. An explanation for this difference in outcomes points to a combination of factors related to the underlying preferences of the government involved, the characteristics of victims, and the specific human right being violated.

Postneoliberal regionalism in Latin America has failed to live up to the expectations of its proponents and analysts in the late 2000s and early 2010s. Several causes explain its disappointing result, but a relatively understudied cause may be found in the US policy of competitive liberalization. This policy not only aimed at securing US economic and trade interests but also served as a counterweight against emerging postneoliberalism and as a tool for reaffirming US hegemony. This article presents a case study of one example of competitive liberalization in action, the US-Peru FTA, in order to assess how the policy functioned and contributed to curbing the posthegemonic moment in Latin America. It observes a combination of coercion and the political influence of beneficiaries of free trade, and it considers how these dynamics worked to strengthen US influence, both in Peru and in the wider regional political economy.