A growing body of literature has focused on how different states continuously “make race” by legitimizing certain racial categories while invisibilizing others. Much less has been written on the actual processes of transforming race into a bureaucratic category when implementing antiracist public policies. This article focuses on the recent use of verification commissions to validate the racial self-identification of potential beneficiaries of racial quotas at federal higher education institutions in Brazil. We argue that through their choices, particularly through their definition of what race is, of who can see race, and of how to see race, these commissions are transforming not only understandings about affirmative action’s aims but also understandings of race. The study focuses on three potential consequences of commission practices for Brazilian racial boundaries: the disciplining of racial identifications, the decontextualization of race, and the individualization of racial injustice.

This research note assesses participatory health governance practices for HIV and AIDS in Brazil. By extension, we also evaluate municipal democratic governance to public health outcomes. We draw from a unique dataset on municipal HIV/AIDS prevalence and participatory health governance from 2006–17 for all 5,570 Brazilian municipalities. We use negative binomial regression and coarsened exact matching with treatment effects to estimate the influence of community health governance institutions on HIV/AIDS prevalence. Municipalities with participatory health councils experience 14% lower HIV/AIDS prevalence than other municipalities, all else equal. Family Health Program coverage, municipal state capacity, and municipal per capita health spending are also associated with systematically lower HIV/AIDS prevalence. We conclude that participatory health governance may combat HIV and AIDS through municipal spending, education, and community mobilization. Municipal health councils can facilitate these strategies and offer opportunities for improving well-being around the world.

Extant literature concurs that fiscal transfers affect local democracy when they grant subnational governments nontax revenue. Yet there is nonetheless a mismatch between this concept and existing measures, which consider the whole transfers local governments receive, including both tax and nontax revenue. This article studies the Fondo Común Municipal (FCM), the most important intergovernmental grant in Chile, and provides a novel measure of nontax revenue. It uses this measure alongside the whole FCM transfer to test the rentier hypothesis. On the one hand, it shows that both measures increase the incumbent party vote share, although the effect of our measure is smaller. On the other hand, it finds that the FCM transfer has an impact on the probability of reelection and the competitiveness of elections, but this effect disappears when using our measure. Overall, the findings suggest that rents from transfers do not lead to strong electoral dominance in unitary states.

Could an individual’s perception of the possibility of a future ecological crisis be linked to their level of political trust? Studies of environmental attitudes have identified political trust as an important predictor of support for environmental taxation or risk perceptions surrounding specific local environmental hazards, but less is known about its role when environmental risks are perceived as diffuse and distant. Using original survey data from Ecuador, this article finds that political distrust predicts heightened ecological crisis perceptions and that higher educational attainment intensifies this relationship. A follow-up analysis of the AmericasBarometer’s Ecuador survey shows that political distrust also predicts higher concern about climate change. These findings suggest that when evaluations of political institutions reflect perceptions of environmental risks, individuals blame the government for environmental failures. The implications of this study are particularly relevant for political institutions in developing economies, where the public sector often spearheads development efforts.

Two competing narratives characterize the role of race in Brazil’s 2018 election. Journalists observe that Jair Bolsonaro “entranced” nonwhite voters while “insulting them.” Scholars argue that Bolsonaro politicized race, costing him nonwhite support. In contrast, this article argues that racialized patterns of voter behavior were not distinct from those in recent general elections, and that voters’ electoral choices varied within as well as between racial categories. This study incorporates recent findings on racial subjectivity in Brazil, which emphasize the interaction of racial identification and educational status in shaping racial consciousness. Survey data show that racial differences are driven by highly educated black voters, who are least likely to support Bolsonaro compared to educated white voters and more likely to support leftist candidates. By incorporating findings on racial subjectivity into theoretical predictions and leveraging the 2018 election, this study identifies conditions in which racial identification operates to shape electoral behavior.

Electoral contests in Latin America are often characterized by attempts by political parties to sway the outcome of elections using vote buying—a practice that seems to persist during elections throughout the region. This article examines how clientelist parties’ use of vote buying is jointly shaped by two voter traits: poverty and partisanship. We hypothesize that clientelist parties pursue a mixed strategy, broadly targeting their core voters but also poor swing voters. While most of the existing evidence comes from single-country studies, this study adds cross-national evidence from multilevel regressions of survey data from 22 Latin American countries. Empirically, we find that poverty matters mainly for swing voters. For partisans, the effect of poverty on vote buying is weaker. These results suggest that poverty plays an important role in vote-buying strategies—but also that partisanship moderates clientelistic parties’ vote-buying strategies during electoral campaigns.

In environmental politics, social movements play a crucial role, promoting participatory rights and confronting injustice, inequality, and the interests of the powerful. This article examines an underexplored topic in the literature on social movements, especially in Latin America: the use of litigation to force decisionmakers to comply with participatory formats, specifically in the course of opposition to hydroelectric dams. These projects often are destructive to the local environment and communities. This study examines four cases of environmental litigation that halted dam construction in Brazil and Chile, singling out causal pathways for successful collective action. It focuses on two dimensions of movement success: the implementation of participatory formats and the resulting cancellation of dam projects. In line with the joint effect model of social movement theory, the cross-case comparison of legal disputes shows that pursuing legal strategies in parallel to broad social mobilization and the support of institutional allies, can lead to successful outcomes.

Firms should be considered as actors that potentially mediate between social movement pressures and policy outcomes. This article shows that at the mining project level, social mobilization can generate important changes in corporate practices toward nearby communities, and that these practices can undermine the cohesion of social movement coalitions advocating for regulatory intervention or reform, thus limiting their ability to make compelling claims on the state. In this way, company interpretations of and responses to protest are an important mediating process that conditions civil society efforts to activate state institutions in their favor. This argument extends recent work on the social foundations of regulation in Latin America by including corporate actors. The article is based on a comparative case study of the Pascua Lama/Veladero mining projects in both Argentina and Chile, using both secondary sources and primary field research.

Latin American countries experienced a significant reduction in income inequality at the turn of the twenty-first century. From the early 2000s to around 2012, the average Gini coefficient fell from 0.51 to 0.47. The period of falling inequality coincided with leftist presidential candidates achieving electoral victories across the region: by 2009, 11 of the 17 countries had a leftist president—the so-called Pink Tide. Using a difference-in-differences design, a range of econometric models, inequality measurements, and samples, this study finds evidence that leftist governments lowered income inequality faster than non-leftist regimes, increasing the income share captured by the first 7 deciles at the expense of the top 10 percent. The analysis suggests that this reduction was achieved by increasing social pensions, minimum wages, and tax revenue.

Are Latin American presidents at greater risk for removal in remittance-dependent countries? Departing from the debate about whether remittances produce democratic or autocratic outcomes, this article asks whether remittances contribute to presidential removals, which are an important characteristic of Latin American democracies since the Third Wave. It uses questions about supporting a military coup under high corruption and crime scenarios to gauge remittance recipients’ support for early removal of a president. It finds that remittances create a constituency that tolerates military coups. Using data from Martínez (2021), the analysis also shows that remittances increase the risk of removal for presidents who face a greater number of scandals; but remittances do not pose this threat under poor economic performance.

How does the execution of horizontal accountability mechanisms affect cabinet members’ instability? This article analyzes distinct features of no-confidence motions (NCMs) in presidential systems, using a mixed-method research design that identifies elements of legislative control mechanisms in Peruvian and Colombian polities. Although the congress in presidential systems rarely approves NCMs, high salience policy shocks trigger their proposal, resulting in the dismissal or resignation of the cabinet member in question. Those results are subtle opportunities for opposition legislators to indicate the incompetence of the incumbent government in particular policy areas. This study contributes to understanding how contextual factors affect the effectiveness of the check and balance principle in presidential systems.

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.

Banning political parties is an extreme institutional measure that democracies tend to use sparingly. Nevertheless, Latin American countries frequently proscribe their parties through rules that activate dissolution for not reaching a certain number of votes or seats in an election. Such rules are expected to stabilize and simplify party systems. However, a competing theory suggests that such rules instead promote electoral volatility by injecting political uncertainty into the party system through cyclical refoundation of extinct parties and the mechanical effects of parties’ exits. Attempting to resolve this paradox, this analysis tests the effect of dissolution thresholds on electoral volatility in all Latin American democratic elections since 1980. Party bans based on dissolution thresholds are found to promote electoral volatility, which bears implications for democratic governance.

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.

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.

How do sequences of upward and downward socioeconomic mobility influence political views among those who have “risen” or “fallen” during periods of leftist governance? While existing studies identify a range of factors, long-term mobility trajectories have been largely unexplored. The question has particular salience in contemporary Brazil, where, after a decade of extraordinary poverty reduction on the watch of the leftist Workers’ Party (PT), a subsequent period of economic and political crises intensified anti-PT sentiment. This article uses original data from the 2016 Brazil’s Once-Rising Poor (BORP) Survey, using a 3-city sample of 822 poor and working-class Brazilians to analyze the relationship between retrospective assessments of prior socioeconomic mobility and anti-PT sentiment. The study found that people who reported a “stalled” mobility sequence (upward mobility followed by static or downward mobility) were more likely to harbor anti-left sentiment than other groups, as measured by this study’s anti-PT index.

Drawing on ethnographic research in El Oasis, a highly precarious self-built settlement in Medellín, Colombia, this article examines the illegal practice of autoconstruction as a material expression of hope. It focuses on the multilayered, symbolic meaning of self-built housing, as it represents the pursuit of dignity, permanence, and agency—as opposed to poverty, uncertainty, and lack of agency—and an active and material form of hoping for a better future in the city. The state plays an ambiguous role in residents’ perspectives, who conceive of it, simultaneously, as a threat to and a guarantor of their future in the city. This ambiguity becomes materialized in the physical form of residents’ self-built housing, as residents either embrace or refrain from making improvements to their houses in response to shifting perceptions about the state’s intentions regarding the future of the settlement.

Studies of futurity typically privilege licit economies and assume that the lines between licit and illicit institutions are largely clear to the actors involved. But what happens to those actors, and their grip on the future, when such lines blur? This article explores the epistemic crossroads of futurity and legality by focusing on ambiguity. From 1986 to 2009, the Stanford Financial Group reaped billions of dollars selling fraudulent investment products to thousands of Venezuelans. During this span, Venezuelans suffered successive governments’ shambolic currency schemes, bureaucratic dysfunction, judicial corruption, political upheaval, and worsening street crime. As crises became routinized, middle-class Venezuelans faced “normative ambiguity,” a loss of familiar legal and moral certainties, undercutting their sense of futurity. Drawing on 54 interviews with defrauded investors and others linked to the case, this article shows how such ambiguity left investors vulnerable to a fraud that promised to restore that threatened futurity.

Drawing on longitudinal ethnographic research carried out over two-and-a-half decades in barrio Luis Fanor Hernández, a poor neighborhood in Managua, Nicaragua, this article explores how legal and illegal economic activities are socially legitimized, and more specifically, how certain illegal economic activities can end up being seen as legitimate, and certain legal ones perceived as illegitimate. The first part of the article explores the variable morality surrounding different types of criminal activities that local gang members engaged in during the 1990s and 2000s. The second part considers my experiences running a local market stall, describing the contrasting reactions I faced when I resorted to first legal, and then illegal, strategies to boost my revenue levels. Taken together, these examples showcase how the social legitimization of an economic activity has less to do with whether it is legal or illegal, but rather the future aspirations it embodies.