The literature on aid allocation shows that many factors influence donors’ decision to provide aid. However, our knowledge about foreign aid allocation is based on traditional foreign aid, from developed to developing countries, and many assumptions of these theories do not hold when applied to southern donors. This article argues that south-south development cooperation (SSDC) can be explained by the strength of development cooperation’s domestic allies and foes. Specifically, it identifies civil society organizations as allies of SSDC and nationalist groups as opponents of SSDC. By using for the first time data on SSDC activities in Latin America, this article shows the predictive strength of a liberal domestic politics approach in comparison to the predictive power of alternative explanations. The results speak to scholars of both traditional foreign aid and south-south development cooperation in highlighting the limits of traditional theories of foreign aid motivations.

This study addresses a void in the literature on public attitudes toward police in Latin America. It integrates three theoretical models of the determinants of citizen satisfaction with police work in Chile: demographic, quality of life in the neighborhood, and experiential. The study tested the integrated model using a novel random sample of 996 individuals living in the Metropolitan Region of Santiago. The results underscore the importance of legitimacy centered on fair treatment, respect for human rights, and the perception that the police represent society. The findings are also significant for the Chilean institutional political process and for the Latin American police reform debate.

In some countries, bicameral discrepancies are solved by the formation of a conference committee. In Chile, conference committees are exclusively and automatically formed when the second chamber rejects a bill passed in the first chamber or when the first chamber rejects the modifications to its original bill made by the second chamber. This article postulates 4 hypotheses for the determinants of conference committee formation. It tests them for the case of Chile’s sequential legislative process (1990–2018) using 2,183 bills that reached the stage where a conference committee could be formed. The 482 conference committees that resulted were more likely to be formed when chambers were controlled by different majorities, when passage required special voting thresholds, when bills were more important for the president, and when the bills had more approved amendments, but they were not more likely if the bill was introduced by legislators rather than the executive.

Pension policy is a highly political issue across Latin America. Since the mid-2000s, several countries have re-reformed their pension systems with a general trend toward more state involvement, yet with significant variation. This article contends that policy legacies and the institutional political setting are key to understanding such variation. Analyzing the cases of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, this article shows that where a weak legacy, characterized by low coverage and savings rates, a weakly organized pension industry, and strong societal groups that oppose the private system, combines with a strong institutional setting, characterized by a government with large support in Congress and where the president concentrates decisionmaking, re-reform outcomes may lead to the outright elimination of the private pillar. Conversely, where a strong legacy combines with a weak institutional setting, re-reform outcomes will tend to maintain the private pillar and expand only the role of the public one.

Most literature on drugs and conflict focuses on how the drug trade affects insurgent behavior, paying little attention to its effect on state behavior in conflict settings. This article begins to address this gap by analyzing the impact of drugs on state violence during the internal conflict in Peru (1980–2000), which, in the 1980s, was the world’s major producer of coca for the international drug trade. Drawing on literature on criminal violence and on drug policy, this study theorizes militarization as the main channel by which drug production affects how state forces treat the civilian population during internal conflicts, though it also explores a second channel associated with corruption. The analysis finds that, all else equal, drug-producing localities saw increased state violence in ways consistent with the militarization channel.

Why has gold persisted as a significant reserve asset despite momentous changes in international monetary relations since the collapse of the classical gold standard? IPE theories have little to say about this question. Conventional accounts of international monetary relations depict a succession of discrete monetary regimes characterized by specific power structures or dominant ideas. To explain the continuous importance of gold, we draw on insights from social psychology and new materialist theories. We argue that international monetary relations should be understood as a complex assemblage of material artifacts, institutions, ideas, and practices. For much of its history, this assemblage revolved around the pivotal practice of referencing money to gold. The centrality of gold as experienced by policymakers had important effects. Using archival and other evidence, we document these effects from the 1944 Bretton Woods conference through the transition to floating exchange rates in the mid-1970s; most IPE scholars underestimate the role of gold during this period. Power relations and economic ideas were obviously important, but they contributed little to a fundamental development: the long process of reluctantly coming to terms with the limitations of specie-backed currency, and the progressive and still ongoing decentering of gold in international monetary relations.

Do labor unions still motivate their members to participate in politics, or have social and economic changes undermined their political importance? This question is important to revisit, as globalization and economic reform have weakened many popular sector organizations in Latin America, reducing some to mere patronage machines. This article examines the case of the teachers’ union in Bogotá, Colombia to assess whether and how labor unions are able to promote the political activation of their members. Employing a multimethod research design that begins with a quantitative analysis of a survey of Colombian teachers, this study finds that union affiliation is associated with higher levels of motivation to vote. It then uses evidence from interviews to show how union advocacy and internal elections for leadership positions shape political behavior, contributing to civic engagement. This research engages with broader debates about democratic quality and political representation in contemporary Latin America.