This Research Note looks at the recent Latin American record in economic and social development from the perspective of the effects of “neoliberalism.” There are at least two ways in which neoliberalism is commonly used: a narrow usage, that refers to a shift in a subset of policies to a greater reliance on markets; and, a broader usage, that implies a wholesale change in the relationship between the state and society, with a more vigorous embrace of the market being part of a generalized withdrawal of state provisioning and action. The first clearly occurred in most of the region in the 1980s and 1990s. We will argue that shifts to a greater dependence on markets were usually beneficial, probably disappointing relative to the expectations of advocates, and certainly incomplete as a development strategy. The effects on growth, stability, and inequality depend crucially on other factors, including the distributions of assets, structural policies (for example, on social development and infrastructure) and political and social institutions.

When citizens lack stable political attitudes, leaders cannot easily be held accountable for their record in office, party system consolidation becomes more difficult, and public opinion is unable to offer much substantive guidance about policy-making. Ultimately, democratic governance is likely to suffer. In this article, we analyze a recent four-wave panel survey to assess the stability of political attitudes in Mexico. We find that the degree of attitude stability in Mexico varies across different types of dispositions. Although citizens hold reasonably firm views about the country's main political actors, preferences over issues are less consistent. These findings suggest both possibilities and constraints for democratic governance.

Scholarship on the decade-long rule of Alberto Fujimori emphasizes the surprising popularity and support for Fujimori's rule. This essay, which analyzes the politics of fear in Fujimori's Peru, suggests that this presents a partial view of the nature of Fujimori's authority. Drawing on a Gramscian conceptualization of power, it explains how coercion achieved a consensual façade by manipulating fear and creating a semblance of order in a context of extreme individual and collective insecurity. It traces the roots of this insecurity in the economic crisis and political violence of the 1980s and 1990s, and explains how the Fujimori regime manipulated fear and insecurity to buttress its authoritarian rule. This essay also complements existing studies on Peruvian civil society, which point to economic factors, such as the economic crisis of the 1980s and neoliberal reforms, to explain civil society weakness. This paper explores the political factors that contributed to this process, particularly the deployment of state power to penetrate, control and intimidate civil society.

During the 1980s, the major security themes that Caribbean scholars studied were geopolitics, militarization, intervention, and instability. The interface between domestic and international politics led to linkages among some of these themes and their domestic, regional, and international dimensions. For example, the militarization of Grenada in the 1980s was predicated on the need to defend the Grenadian revolution against foreign intervention and local counterrevolution. Ironically, the same buildup created the climate that led to the self-destruction of the revolution and presented the United States with a golden opportunity to intervene. In doing so, the United States succeeded in fulfilling a preexisting geopolitical aim of its own. Elsewhere in the region, militarization and concerns about stability in Dominica, Barbados, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines raised security concerns within the Eastern Caribbean, where several countries created the Regional Security System (RSS) in 1982 to bolster subregional security and became willing accomplices of intervention when the United States intervened in Grenada a year later.

This research note contributes to the comparative studies on legislative careers. It sheds light on the scarcely researched members of four Latin American upper houses, the Senates of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. It examines both the basic social features of the parliamentary elite—age, gender, level of education, and university careers—and the legislators' political careers. The goal is to find out whether the upper houses are composed of a larger proportion of senior members than the respective lower chambers, that is, of members who not only are older, wealthier, and more educated, but that also have greater political experience. As a result of this research, the Senates of Chile and Uruguay stood out for having the largest share of senior members. The Brazilian Senate followed them with a considerable level of seniority. As a consequence of a series of institutional reforms based on the 1994 constitution, the Argentine Senate differed from the other three cases as being a much junior chamber.