Consensus is growing about the fundamental principles underlying economic policy reforms. In addition, a series of recent comparative studies have increased scholarly understanding of the political conditions necessary for launching such reforms. Yet understanding of the factors that make reforms sustainable over the longer term is far less developed. A wide-ranging and unresolved debate continues over the roles played by institutions, politicians, interest groups, and the popular sectors. The influence of such groups tends to be marginal during the initial implementation of policies, a process involving an insulated group of technocrats. As the reforms proceed, the opposition of different societal groups to specific policies may have some impact but is less critical to the success or failure of the adjustment program than overall economic performance (see Geddes 1995). The primary strength of these groups is retrospective and collective: they can vote reforming governments out of office. Elections—and therefore voter behavior—are critical in sustaining economic reforms over the long term. Voters can reverse economic reform programs, and at times they do. Yet they also can play a major role in making programs more sustainable by legitimating their continuation at the ballot box.

The new democracy in Chile provides an interesting test case for two influential lines of thinking on Latin American political economy. Both these perspectives have claimed that the recently installed civilian regimes would find it exceedingly difficult to effect equity-enhancing change. One hypothesis has stressed the impediments posed by a capitalist free-market system to measures favoring the poor. The other has emphasized the obstacles presented by a transition to democracy that avoids a rupture with the preceding conservative dictatorship. Because the democratic government led by Patricio Aylwin (1990–1994) faced both types of constraints, it should have been particularly unlikely to achieve greater social fairness.

This essay will report the results of research on the Río de la Plata clergy during the transition to Argentine nationhood, between 1806 and 1827. It will examine a database compiled from manuscripts, printed primary sources, and biographical dictionaries on 204 clerics residing in the Río de la Plata during those years (about 40 percent of the estimated 560 individuals). The database is analyzed according to descriptive and correlation procedures. The statistical analyses were undertaken to relate the demographic characteristics of the churchmen to their attitudes toward independence from Spain and the religious reforms initiated in the ensuing years by Bernardino Rivadavia, chief minister under Martín Rodríguez, governor of the Province of Buenos Aires. The quantification complements the secondary literature (mostly narratives) on the nineteenth-century Catholic Church in the Río de la Plata region.

Although there exists a significant body of literature documenting the under-representation of black Cubans in the island's most important governing institutions throughout the forty-four years of Fidel Castro's rule, these analyses have emphasized limited access to political power as the sole factor responsible for this state of affairs. However, this comprehensive analysis contends that with the aging of the Cuban Revolution, other factors such as low holdover and high replacement rates for blacks during periodic reshuffling of the political elite have become crucial, albeit unacknowledged, explanatory variables for the paucity of blacks among the country's leadership. An important determinant for this pattern is the existence of inter- and intra-institutional stratification among blacks, the reasons for which remain unknown. Nonetheless, the presence of this factor increases the vulnerability of nonwhites as decisions are made about which individuals should be retained or replaced in key government institutions.

This issue marks the start of LARR's thirty-sixth year of publication, the twentieth year of LARR's tenure at the University of New Mexico, and the beginning of the process of moving the journal to a new host institution, yet to be determined. The history of LARR is in some ways the history of Latin American studies as an interdisciplinary field. Before LARR, research on Latin America was essentially a disciplinary endeavor, carried out primarily by historians, political scientists, and faculty in literature. LARR's establishment represented a declaration that the complex realities of Latin America and the Caribbean required the interaction of information and perspectives from many fields. It also reflected a leap of faith in the untested notion that those conducting disciplinary research on Latin America would be interested in research from other fields.

Conceived as a contribution to debates about the role of state institutions in perpetuating racial inequality in modern Brazil, this article explores the relative importance of social and racial characteristics in determining defendants' treatment in Rio de Janeiro's criminal courts between 1930 and 1964. Focusing on rarely noted aspects of defendants' class and citizenship status, and emphasizing the importance of judicial procedure, it argues that social discrimination was open in Rio de Janeiro's courts, but that race alone was a relatively poor predictor of defendants' fates. At the same time, it suggests that racial and social characteristics ought not to be seen as separate and competing categories, both because “social' language had important racial meanings and because ”social“ discrimination had significant racial implications. Institutionalized social prejudice may thus go far in explaining the stubborn persistence of racial inequity in an age when ”racial democracy“ became a national hope and mantra.