The relation between elections and the economy in Latin America might be understood by considering the agency of candidates and the issue of policy preference congruence between investors and voters. The preference congruence model proposed in this article highlights political risk in emerging markets. Certain risk features increase the role of candidate campaign rhetoric and investor preferences in elections. When politicians propose policies that can appease voters and investors, elections may have a limited effect on economic indicators, such as inflation. But when voter and investor priorities differ significantly, deterioration of economic indicators is more likely. Moreover, voter and investor congruence is more likely before stabilization, when an inverted Philips curve exists, as opposed to following stabilization, when a more traditional Philips curve emerges.

This study challenges the common view of authoritarianism as an unambiguously centralizing experience by investigating the subnational reforms that military governments actually introduced in Latin America. It argues that the decision by military authorities to dismiss democratically elected mayors and governors opened a critical juncture for the subsequent development of subnational institutions. Once they centralized political authority, the generals could contemplate changes that expanded the institutional, administrative, and governing capacity of subnational governments. This article shows how cross-national variation in the content and consistency of the generals' economic goals led to quite distinct subnational changes; in each case, these reforms profoundly shaped the democracies that reemerged in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the late 1990s, the Workers' Party (PT) government of the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul introduced participatory budgeting, a process in which citizens establish annual investment priorities in public assemblies. This innovation was one of several attempts by incumbent parties to structure political conflict using budget institutions. The character of participatory budgeting is most evident in its policymaking processes and policy outcomes. The process circumvented legislative arenas where opponents held a majority, privileged participation by the PT's voter base, and reached into opposition strongholds. The outcomes favored the interests of potential supporters among poor and middle-class voters. The political project proved vulnerable to its own raised expectations: it failed to sustain the image of clean government; brought tax increases along with fiscal insecurity; and left unfulfilled the participants' expectations for targeted investments. This article highlights the role of participatory budgeting, indeed all budgeting, in partisan actors' institutional choices.

Scholars believe that mass partisanship in Brazil is comparatively weak. Using evidence from a 2002 national survey, however, this study finds that the aggregate level of party identification actually falls only slightly below the world average and exceeds levels found in many newer democracies. Yet this finding is misleading, because the distribution of partisanship is skewed toward only one party, the PT. This trend results from a combination of party organization and recruitment efforts and individual motivation to acquire knowledge and become involved in politicized social networks. Partisanship for other parties, however, derives substantially from personalistic attachments to party leaders. This finding has implications for current debates about the status of parties in Brazil. Also important is the impact of the 2005 corruption scandal implicating the PT and President Lula da Silva's administration.

What determines how judicial institutions perform? Prominent theoretical approaches, such as international political economy, institutional rational choice, social capital, and structural theories, suggest that international economic actors, political competition, political participation, and poverty may all be important forces driving institutional behavior. This study analyzes these various theoretical approaches and uses qualitative and statistical analysis to compare judicial performance in the Mexican states. It provides evidence to support the institutional rational choice hypothesis that political competition generates judicial independence. Poverty, political participation, and an export-oriented economy seem to influence judicial access and effectiveness.

This article analyzes how market reform policies already in place affect social interests, and the feedback effects of those interests on reform processes. The variety of societal responses includes the creation of new societal organizations, reflecting the variable content and asymmetrical distribution of costs and benefits of the policies implemented. Because of this variety even in Peru, where the disorganizing effects of neoliberal reform appear to be strongest, it would seem that the societal impact of economic reform elsewhere in Latin America would also warrant more careful examination.

How can policymakers reduce public fear of crime in Latin America? This study compares the effectiveness of “zero tolerance” and community-based policing strategies in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. At the micro level, it assesses the links between fear of crime and social identity characteristics, contextual factors, the media, community participation, and other insecurities. It finds that citizens' economic, political, and social insecurities are the main determinants of their fear of crime. At the macro level, the study compares levels of public insecurity and finds that cities that employ community-based strategies to fight crime register lower levels of public fear of crime.

Does the conventional wisdom about the relationships between economic, cultural, and political party variables and democracy stand up in the Latin American experience of the 1990s? This study, utilizing new data sets for the region, finds that some traditional hypotheses are upheld better than others. It sustains the conventional wisdom that economic development, economic growth, democratic values, and (with a two-year lead) education correlate positively with the level of democracy. Surprisingly, however, neither social trust nor the number of political parties is significantly correlated with the level of democracy. The study suggests various possible explanations for the weak or nonexistent relationships for social trust and number of parties, in the hope that these surprising results will stimulate further research.

A widely accepted argument among scholars of Latin American presidential regimes is that interbranch cooperation is impaired when the president's party falls short of a majority of seats in the legislature. This argument fails to consider three factors that affect the performance of minority presidents: the policy position of the president's party, the president's capacity to sustain a veto, and the legislative status of the parties included in the cabinet. This article argues that the greatest potential for conflict in a presidential regime occurs when the president's party lacks the support of both the median and the veto legislator and no cabinet coalition holding a majority of legislative seats is formed. This hypothesis is supported using data on executive-legislative conflicts and on interrupted presidencies in Latin America during the period 1978–2003.

This article asks whether democratization, under certain historical conditions, may relate to the deteriorating rule of law. Focusing on Mexico City, where police corruption is significant, this study argues that the institutionalized legacies of police power inherited from Mexico's one-party system have severely constrained its newly democratic state's efforts to reform the police. Mexico's democratic transition has created an environment of partisan competition that, combined with decentralization of the state and fragmentation of its coercive and administrative apparatus, exacerbates intrastate and bureaucratic conflicts. These factors prevent the government from reforming the police sufficiently to guarantee public security and earn citizen trust, even as the same factors reduce capacity, legitimacy, and citizen confidence in both the police and the democratically elected state. This article suggests that when democracy serves to undermine rather than strengthen the rule of law, more democracy can actually diminish democracy and its quality.

This article examines the politics of how drug traffickers resolve disputes and maintain order in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Much popular discourse and some scholarly studies argue that drug traffickers play a major role in controlling crime and minimizing conflicts there. This article shows that traffickers enforce community norms under a variable political calculus in which well-connected and respected residents are less likely to be punished for rule violations than are individuals who are marginal to the life of the community. This allows many favela residents who conform to local norms to feel a degree of control over their own safety, a “myth of personal security” in otherwise violent neighborhoods.

During the mid-1990s, Brazil experienced a rapid intensification of protest for land reform. Official land reform efforts also accelerated, and the issue became a central topic of public concern and debate. This article seeks to account for the abrupt intensification of collective action and to explain its relationship to the other changes, focusing on the political impact of two massacres of landless protesters in 1995 and 1996. These incidents forced authorities to accelerate land reform and to exercise somewhat greater caution in repressing the movement. The shifts in state behavior then helped to accelerate collective action. This argument lends weight to the idea that state repression against a social movement can sometimes serve to engender even greater protest. It also identifies a previously undescribed causal mechanism, political opportunity, linking repression to protest.

This article examines the functions of the “dual discourse” about Peruvian migrant domestic workers in contemporary Santiago. A 2002 field study found that middle-class employers of Peruvian workers simultaneously praised them as superior workers and denigrated them as uneducated and uncivilized. While this response is not unique to Santiago, this study argues that it fulfilled particular ideological functions in this context. The praise served to discipline the Chilean working class, who middle-class employers claimed no longer knew their place. The epithets served as a foil for Chilean national identity. Stories about Peruvians serve as tools in ongoing ideological contestations over class, race, and nation in Chile and, at the same time, shape the working conditions and integration of the migrants themselves.

The strengthening of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) during the 1990s was an unintended consequence of a series of tactical successes in U.S. antidrug policies. These included dismantling the Medellín and Cali drug cartels, interdicting coca coming into Colombian processing facilities, and using drug certification requirements to pressure the Colombian government to attack drug cartels and allow aerial fumigation of coca crops. These successes, however, merely pushed coca cultivation increasingly to FARC-dominated areas while weakening many of the FARC's political-military opponents. This provided the FARC with unprecedented opportunities to extract resources from the cocaine industry to deepen its long insurgency against the Colombian state. The Colombian experience demonstrates the importance of creating a more sophisticated understanding of how lootable wealth can exacerbate civil wars.

This article evaluates the effectiveness of OAS mechanisms for safeguarding democracy through multilateral diplomacy, what some scholars have dubbed the interamerican defense of democracy regime. Drawing on a range of international relations theories, this study derives competing hypotheses about member states' responses to democratic crises in the Americas. It then analyzes all instances in which a collective response—that is, an application of Resolution 1080 or the Inter-American Democratic Charter—was debated in the OAS between 1991 and 2002. Patterns of state behavior suggest that domestic politics, rather than the structural or systemic traits of the interamerican system, best explain foreign policy responses to crises of democracy in the region. The OAS record in confronting such crises is uneven.

This article analyzes a dataset of policy views of members of the Brazilian Congress to assess the nature of support for genderrelated policy issues. It makes three core claims. First, liberal and progressive opinions on gender correspond to party membership more than to sex. Left parties have consistent and programmatic policy positions on controversial gender issues. Women and men are more divided, as are parties of the center and the right. Second, coalitions supporting change differ across policy issues. Support for gender quotas, for example, does not translate into support for more liberal abortion laws. Third, there is a large gap between legislators' attitudes toward gender-related policy and actual policy outcomes. Institutional deadlock and executive priorities explain this discrepancy. This article concludes that although women may share some interests by virtue of their position in a gender-structured society, these interests may be trumped by partisan, class, regional, and other cleavages.