Unlike many developing countries, Colombia has managed since 1958 to avoid both military rule and chronic political instability while being governed by a civilian political regime, a consociational regime. The purpose of this article is to help explain the Colombian political regime's relative longevity by focusing on the behavior of producer groups in Colombia and the associations that represent them. The article asks how important the support of these groups has been to the political regime established in 1958. It also seeks to identify the major patterns of interaction between the groups and different governments and to determine what implications these patterns have had for continued regime support. The article will find significant support for the regime by producer groups, support that is linked to considerable, but not unlimited, capacity for influence. Such regime support has been conditional, rather than consolidated, and derives from favorable access to the state, the regime's overall policy orientation, and its ability to maintain order.

Neopatrimonial exercise of power, combining ruler appropriation of resources with ruler discretionality in the use of state power, remains present to varying degrees in contemporary Latin America. Building on an extensive literature, this article provides a delimited conceptualization and measurement of neopatrimonialism for 18 countries in the region and examines the effects of neopatrimonial legacies on poverty with cross-national quantitative analysis. The study finds that higher levels of neopatrimonialism have a significant, substantive impact on poverty levels, controlling for other relevant demographic, socioeconomic, and political factors. It confirms the importance of a cumulative record of democracy for poverty alleviation, while the analysis indicates that neopatrimonialism limits the effects of the political left in power on poverty reduction.

In the 1980s and 1990s, economic crisis produced ideological convergence in many Latin American party systems. Much scholarship explores how this convergence frequently provoked system change that enabled renewed ideological differentiation, but little research examines instances where convergence persisted without destabilizing the system. Through comparative historical analysis of Dominican continuity amid regional change, this study identifies factors that sustain or challenge party systems. Then, through analysis of Americas Barometer surveys, it assesses the causal mechanisms through which these factors shape support for the traditional Dominican parties. The findings demonstrate that maintaining programmatic and clientelist linkages facilitates continuity. In addition, the article argues that the threats political outsiders pose to existing party systems are constrained when people excluded from the system are divided and demobilized. In the Dominican case, Haitian immigration divides the popular sector while Dominicans abroad sustain ties to the parties, with both migration flows facilitating party system continuity.

A considerable body of research has analyzed the influence of the women's movement, changes in women's political representation, and policies promoting women's interests in the developing world. However, we know comparatively less about the degree to which the attitudes and behaviors of the mass public mirror these national patterns. This article explores the evolution of gender differences in citizens' political interest, civic engagement, and support for women in politics in the Dominican Republic over 1994–2004, a period important for the country's democratization as well as one of significant changes in gender-related discourse and policies. We find evidence of a shift from a traditional gender gap to a modern gender gap, but the explanations for changes in women's views are distinct from those of men. We find that sociostructural factors, particularly age and education, and cues from political elites have significantly different effects on men versus women. Women's levels of political interest and support for equality in political participation are more fixed in their youth, whereas men's levels evolve through middle age. The evidence also indicates that reducing the gender gap in political interest would significantly narrow gender differences in civic activism. Most notably, men appear to be more easily swayed by elite cues that favor or oppose women's political participation; women's support for equal participation is much less susceptible to reversals in elite support. The consolidation of advances in gender equity thus depends significantly on contextual factors such as elite discourse.

For only the fifth time since 1978, the Dominican Republic held concurrent elections in 1994 for candidates at every level of government — presidential, congressional and municipal. The most important of these contests, for the presidency, saw the incumbent, Joaquίn Balaguer, returned to the post he has held for so long, defeating his principal challenger, José Francisco Peña Gόmez, by a margin of 22,281 votes. The most recent election, on 16 May 1994, proved to be just as traumatic and incident-prone as those that preceded it, dating back to the first democratic election in 1978. Unlike the last election (in 1990), however, in which Balaguer also won a narrow victory, this time the charges of electoral fraud were well-documented and the accuracy of the tally widely disbelieved, not just domestically but internationally as well.

There are Several Reasons why the drug phenomenon has proved to be a difficult analytical puzzle for social scientists. One is that the field of study itself shifts depending upon the interest of the analyst, ranging from topics as diverse as drug abuse, the political and judicial impact of violence and corruption engendered by the illegality of drug trafficking, and the nature of the groups that generate revenue from drug trafficking—and the purposes to which they put that money. Another reason, of course, is the fact that hard data are often absent; measurement problems are severe. A third reason, compounding the second, is that generalizations decay quickly in this area, as zones of production, patterns of consumption, trans-shipment points, and methods and relationships among trafficking groups, state agents and local producers can all change quickly.

In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars interested in studying Latin American politics inevitably were drawn to the study of military coups d'etat and their causes. In the 1980s, a number of the countries in Latin America whose civilian political regimes were overthrown by military regimes may undergo or attempt to consolidate processes of democratization or redemocratization. Thus scholarly interest has tended to shift away from seeking to understand the causes for military overthrows of civilian regimes toward the study of prospects and processes of democratization or redemocratization in Latin America. In this context, the reexamination of earlier examples of durable transitions from authoritarian military regimes to civilian regimes may shed light on the relative importance of different factors in determining particular outcomes. This article carries out such a re-examination for the case of Colombia, analyzing the transition from rule by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-1957) through the crucial period of the interim military junta (1957-1958) to the consociational National Front political regime.