El presente artículo aborda los alcances y limitaciones del reconocimiento obtenido por el Pueblo Tribal Afrodescendiente Chileno en el proceso constituyente iniciado en Chile luego de la revuelta social de 2019 y, particularmente, en las deliberaciones de la Convención Constitucional que sesionó entre 2021 y 2022. Además de analizar la presentación y votación de normas relacionadas con el Pueblo Tribal Afrodescendiente, el principal foco está puesto en los discursos de los/as convencionales constituyentes relacionados con dichas normas. Mediante un análisis crítico del discurso, se identifican tres ejes discursivos que enmarcaron el apoyo o rechazo de iniciativas en torno al reconocimiento afrodescendiente, vinculados al significado de la categoría jurídica de “pueblo tribal”, a la cuestión de la preexistencia y a la extranjerización. El artículo concluye con una discusión de las posturas adoptadas por diferentes sectores de la Convención, identificando algunos imaginarios que comportaron límites para la inclusión del pueblo afrochileno en la propuesta constitucional.

This article explores how populist attitudes are correlated with foreign policy postures at the public level in four European countries: France, Germany, Great Britain, and Italy. We provide first evidence adjudicating between two rivalling perspectives. One perspective focuses on the ideational core of populism and argues that it entails substantive beliefs and values that may inform foreign policy preferences – just like any other ideology. Another perspective focuses on the thin-centredness of populism and argues that no policy implications can be derived from populist ideas. Analysing original survey data, we find strong and consistent associations of populist attitudes with two foreign policy postures, militant internationalism and isolationism, and weaker and less systematic associations with two others, cooperative internationalism and global justice orientations. Importantly, these patterns are independent of host ideologies. We discuss the implications of these findings for the question of how “thick” populism is and what that may mean for the politics of (European) foreign policies in times of a continuing populist Zeitgeist.

Recent research has shed light on the impact of pre-electoral coalitions on government formation in presidential democracies. However, the fact that pre-electoral coalitions are not automatically transformed into coalition cabinets has often gone under the radar. In this article, I argue that the importance of pre-electoral pacts for government formation depends on the degree of legislative polarization. When parties are distant from one another in the ideological spectrum, presidents face more difficulties in breaking away from the pre-electoral pact and rearranging their multiparty alliances. Conversely, when polarization is not pervasive, presidents have more leeway to build coalition cabinets different from the ones prescribed by pre-electoral coalitions. Drawing on a dataset of 13 Latin American countries, the results support my claim and suggest that the relationship between government formation and the concession of office benefits for pre-electoral coalition members is more nuanced than previously assumed.

In this paper, we explore the bases of Mexican national identity construction and use an array of conceptions of nationhood to study contemporary attitudes towards foreigners’ sociopolitical rights in Mexico. Rarely is the study of national identity connected with immigration policy preferences in general, and even less so outside advanced countries. We explore the content of Mexicanness and use this content to understand public opinion preferences towards the integration of diverse groups of foreigners in Mexico. We employ 2016 survey data and a survey experiment and find the persistence of xenophobic attitudes towards the Chinese community in Mexico. We also show that civic conceptions of nationhood cannot counter contemporary anti-Chinese sentiment, in great part because the civic belonging of the Chinese was defined on racial terms. Lastly, we show that these processes of national identity construction, based on the marginalization of certain groups, are persistent and shape todays’ attitudes and preferences towards the incorporation of different groups of foreigners. It remains to be explored whether material interests associated with the recent Chinese “going out” policy may be able to counter deep-seated anti-Chinismo

During the last decades, political distrust has seemingly become a common trend across Latin American democracies, however, differences in the levels of confidence among groups have also been identified. This article considers the potential effects of ethno-racial structures and their interactions with other forms of socioeconomic inequalities on political trust. Building on data from four waves of the Latinobarometer project and contextual measures from different sources, we analyze these relations and find that both socioeconomic and ethno-racial inequalities affect political trust and impact on the formation of different relations with the political system across Latin America. Furthermore, in particular it is found that at the individual-level interactions between inequalities shape political trust differently depending on the particular ethno-racial identification. These findings contribute to the understanding of ethnicity and race and its associations with other structural inequalities in shaping mass political culture.

Since the so-called war on drugs began in Mexico in 2006, the military has been the leading actor in charge of the government’s public security policy, undertaking tasks that should be carried out by the police. Analyses of this security strategy are based on quantitative methods and have focused on its results: e.g., an increase in the homicide rate or the committing of human rights violations. In contrast, based on in-depth interviews, this article explores the testimony of military personnel to understand what they experience in the field. Contrary to what the existing literature argues, which maintains that the military acts with a logic of war, this article shows that the situation is far more complex: they act in a scenario characterized by improvisation, facing the dilemma between acting and being accused of human rights or not acting and being accused of disobedience.

What is the relationship between clientelism and political participation in popular urban neighborhoods? This article addresses the question based on qualitative research in two popular neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, drawing on participant observation and interviews with residents, activists, and party brokers. Adding to a growing literature on “participatory clientelism,” we argue for greater attention to the urban context through which this unfolds. To date, research into participatory clientelism has predominantly considered specific practices—participatory innovations or contentious politics—and been limited to the survival of the urban poor and the demand for political support by party brokers. While these are crucial practices, they are not exhaustive of the relations that sustain participatory clientelism, particularly in contexts of territorialized politics. Based on the socio-spatial approach of Henri Lefebvre, influential in urban studies, we define three interconnected dimensions of participatory clientelism and identify them in the cases under study.

There has been a significant growth of social media as a means to inform oneself about politics. This article explores the consequences of this trend on the credibility audiences attribute to news exposing corrupt politicians and on their willingness to penalize the exposed politicians in elections. The study focuses on ten Latin American cities and employs a randomized control trial using experimental data embedded in a survey. Through this method, credibility and penalization levels are compared between state communications, newspapers, named journalists on social media, and anonymous journalists on social media. The article’s key findings demonstrate that corruption reports published on social media are deemed less credible than those published by state auditors and newspapers. This effect is exacerbated when the source of the report is anonymous. In addition, reports on corruption published on social media by anonymous sources have a negative effect on voter penalization of corrupt politicians.

While elections are an instrument to hold politicians accountable, corrupt politicians are often re-elected. A potential explanation for this paradox is that citizens trade-off integrity for competence. Voters may forgive corruption if corrupt politicians manage to deliver desirable outcomes. While previous studies have examined whether politicians’ competence moderates the negative effect of corruption, this paper focuses on voters’ priorities and directly assesses what citizens value more: integrity or favourable outcomes. Using a survey experiment, we assess citizens’ support for politicians who violate the law in order to improve the welfare of their community and, in some cases, benefit personally from these violations. The results indicate that citizens prefer a politician who follows the law, even if this leads to a suboptimal outcome. However, voters are more likely to overlook violations of the law that benefit the community if these do not result in a personal gain for politicians (i.e., in the absence of corruption). These findings suggest that the mild electoral punishment of corruption may be due to the public’s unawareness of private gains from malfeasance, or to the delay in these private benefits becoming apparent by election day.