This article identifies four frames of corruption in the discourse of three leaders of Operation Lava Jato, also known in English as Operation Car Wash, a large-scale Brazilian anticorruption operation (2014–2021). These frames are inequality, hidden pact, backwardness, and chronic disease. The frames were identified by analyzing a wide set of press interviews, opinion articles, and books by two prosecutors and one judge whose work has revealed scandals involving the state oil company Petrobras. The operation had a major impact on politics and the economy and left a controversial legacy. We noticed a contradiction between one frame invoking judicial activism (inequality) and three frames focusing on specific techniques that appeal to a more conventional view on the judiciary’s role (hidden pact, backwardness, and chronic disease). Furthermore, even when scholars were still largely positive about the operation, the discourse showed signs of judicial activism. This analysis contributes to the debate on Lava Jato and judicial activism by focusing on discourse rather than action.

Clientelism is traditionally viewed as a mechanism through which patrons exert control over clients. Drawing on qualitative data from three municipalities in Santiago, Chile, and building on literature that emphasizes client agency, this article explores a variant of clientelism in which clients initiate and enforce clientelistic relationships. The findings suggest that these two forms of clientelism can differently impact a crucial aspect of democracy: horizontal accountability. Client-driven clientelism compels patrons to seek resources for distribution, rendering them susceptible to influence by those who can grant them access to these resources. When patrons are tasked with accountability roles and the resource providers are subject to their oversight (as in the relationship between municipal councilors and mayors), the providers can deter these accountability functions. In contrast, patrons with independent access to resources can better preserve their autonomy.

The article analyses an original database of 177 Latin American women activists killed that had some connection with feminist social movements from 2015 to 2023. A growing body of literature has focused on the killings of socio-environmental activists in Latin America and where they occurred. However, their activisms are under-researched, precisely because feminist social movements and activists have frequently been killed while advocating for women’s rights in the subcontinent. This article focuses on the circumstances, a few reasons portrayed in newspaper events, and the perpetrators of such violence. Based on a literature review, I argue that taking into account the recent narcodynamics of the region, it is possible to understand such violence within the context of drug-related violence, but also—and more likely—to consider those killings as political feminicides. Political feminicides are then examined largely through transfeminicides and peasant/communitarian activists.

What explains voter attitudes toward immigration in Latin America? This article argues that increased refugee arrivals moderate the impact of social identities on immigration attitudes. We propose that informational cues associated with increased immigration make cosmopolitan identities less important—and exclusionary national identities more important—determinants of immigration preferences. Analyzing 12 Latin American countries from the 2017–2022 wave of the World Values Survey, we demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is positively associated with pro-immigration attitudes, but only in countries experiencing low-to-moderate refugee inflows. Conversely, nationalism is negatively associated with pro-immigrant attitudes, and increasingly so as refugee inflows increase. The uneven distribution of refugee migration has therefore reshaped public opinion in Latin America by moderating the effects of competing social identities (i.e., cosmopolitanism and nationalism). These findings contribute to broader debates on the behavioral impacts of immigration by highlighting an indirect mechanism by which increased immigration may generate anti-immigrant hostility.

In Latin American comparative politics, a tension exists between North Americanization and parochialism. While certain academic scholarship is published in Scopus-indexed journals that engage with “mainstream” Global North literature, other works are found in non-indexed outlets, focusing solely on their home countries and fostering parochial scientific communities. To assess this tension in graduate program curricula, we compiled an original dataset of comparative politics readings from 21 universities across nine Latin American countries. Our network analysis reveals a centralized structure influenced by mainstream readings, challenging the expectation of parochialism. In addition to the mainstream content, universities tend to incorporate readings from regional journals to facilitate cross-case comparisons. However, these materials are inconsistently shared, resulting in fragmentation of content from Latin American sources. Our findings contribute to and challenge the North Americanization versus parochialism debate, showing that future scholars receive similar mainstream training but encounter diverse regional materials during their PhD studies.