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.

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.

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.

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.

Legislative allies are widely recognized as key to social movement success, but the emergence of their alliance with activists remains understudied. This article proposes a strategic approach to this phenomenon based on the cases of the environmental, labor, and LGBT+ movements in Chile and their allied legislators. According to this approach, an alliance emerges due to two necessary conditions. Movement organizations must display tactical capacity, which signals their adaptability and competence to participate in Congress. And a socially skilled leadership creates the trust required for movement leaders and legislators to cooperate during the lawmaking process. This approach emphasizes that alliances emerge from activists’ strategic efforts to build a social tie, whose effectiveness is mediated by legislators’ expectations and congressional norms. By specifying the strategic dimension of an alliance, this study highlights the capacity of activists to foster cooperative relations with state actors.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This article describes the process of legal contention between civil society, political parties, and state institutions for the baldíos lands in the Colombian Altillanura region in the last two decades, a region considered the country’s “last agricultural frontier.” The article focuses on the dual and sometimes contradictory roles of the state institutions, both as facilitators of baldíos grabbing and as guarantors of the peasants’ legal land rights. It analyzes the different attempts by the Colombian government to remove the legal limitations to land accumulation and the resistance put up by civil society and the political parties, which resorted to the existing legal mechanisms to deactivate those attempts. The results reveal the two-sided role of the state: while the government introduces legal changes to facilitate baldíos grabbing, state bodies are actively denouncing and sanctioning illegalities or ruling in favor of peasants deprived of their lands.

Because conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) can address the deep roots of violence, many scholars and policymakers have assumed them to be an effective and innocuous tool to take on the issue. I argue that while CCTs may have positive economic effects, they can also trigger social discord, criminal predation, and political conflict and, in doing so, increase violence. To test this claim, I take advantage of the exogenous shock caused by the randomized expansion of Mexico’s flagship CCT, PROGRESA/Oportunidades. I find that the experimental introduction of the program increased rather than decreased violence. Then, I analyze all the data compiled by LAPOP on the issue over the years. I find that, other things constant, Latin Americans are more exposed to violence and insecurity when they participate in CCTs than when they do not. These findings urge us to reconsider the effects of social programs on violence.

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.

Earlier empirical research on party list proportional representation systems shows that women spend less on campaigns than men, particularly when quotas are applied. An analysis of the candidate campaign expenses for the 2014 and 2018 Colombian Lower Chamber elections provides a novel test of this gender gap and its underlying causes. The research design leverages Colombia’s unique context of electoral institutions, with interdistrict variation in terms of quota rules, and the availability of detailed information on campaign spending and funding. The regression models show that the gender gap in campaign spending is limited to districts with quota rules and disappears among incumbents and candidates listed first on the ballot. As for funding, women candidates are most disadvantaged with regard to personal funds and corporate donations but attract as many individual donations as men do.

Studies show that cash transfer programs increase incumbent approval through their financial impact and clear association with the executive. But does this effect hold when it is the legislature rather than the incumbent proposing the program? Amid the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, more than 60 million Brazilians received an emergency assistance payment that was proposed by Congress against resistance from the executive. This study leverages this unique case to examine if cash transfer programs affect presidential approval under circumstances of unclear responsibility. Survey results showed that while approval ratings increased, the public was divided about who was responsible for the program. Moreover, a survey-experiment that informed respondents about the negotiations between the president and Congress found that information improves views about Congress but does not affect presidential approval. The results suggest that even cash transfer programs may promote limited vertical accountability in contexts of unclear policy responsibility.

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.

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.

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.

In decentralized systems, citizens struggle to identify which level of government provides local goods. This problem is particularly salient in weakly institutionalized party environments, where politicians at different levels of government are less likely to benefit from partisan coattail effects. This article asks how citizens attribute credit for local public goods. I argue that citizens have a strong tendency to attribute credit to local politicians. As a result, citizens will respond differently to credit-claiming behavior by local and national politicians. Local politicians experience a ceiling effect, in which credit claiming has no effect on how citizens attribute credit. However, national politicians have no such ceiling and can claim credit to increase the likelihood that citizens will attribute credit to them. As a result, both political actors can receive credit for the same local goods. The article tests and supports these theoretical predictions using a vignette survey experiment in Colombia.

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.