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.

Este artículo teoriza las relaciones entre la ciudadanía y el Estado ecuatoriano durante el primer año y medio de la pandemia COVID-19. Basado en una metodología cualitativa de entrevistas, las perspectivas de los participantes revelan relaciones contradictorias con el gobierno características de los estados de seguridad neoliberales, pero también de patrones (pos)coloniales persistentes de exclusión racista y clasista: por un lado, un sentido de abandono del Estado, particularmente en salud pública y educación; y por otro lado, la fuerza represiva del Estado en su uso de medidas militares y policiales y de estados de excepción. Proponemos el término estado disperso para referirnos a estas tendencias opuestas de simultánea ausencia y presencia estatal. Argumentamos que las respuestas ciudadanas a la ausencia estatal incluyen cierta aceptación del retorno de las funciones educativas y sanitarias a comunidades, hogares e individuos, provocando de todas maneras nuevas formas de adaptación y creatividad cultural. En cuanto a la presencia represiva del Estado, los participantes expresaron apoyo considerable hacia medidas estatales autoritarias, frecuentemente justificadas por discursos esencialistas sobre el carácter de la ciudadanía nacional.

Political polarization is a systemic-level and multifaceted process that severs cross-cutting ties and shifts perceptions of politics to a zero-sum game. When it turns pernicious, political actors and supporters view opponents as an existential threat and the capacity of democratic institutions to process political conflict breaks down. The article identifies four common fault lines of polarization globally – who belongs, democracy, inequality and social contract. It argues that while Latin American countries experience, to varying degrees, all four of the fault lines, it is the deep-seated, persistent social hierarchies oriented around class, race, and place that stand out relative to other countries. Reaching consensus on reforms that may renew or reformulate agreements on the terms of the social contract, boundaries of community membership, and redressing social inequality is a tall task. Yet the region’s sustained consensus on the democratic rules of the game can provide the mechanisms for addressing this task if new majority coalitions can be formed.

This article offers an analysis of the changes in mass-level ideological polarization in Latin America. It provides a cross-national, region-wide assessment of polarization dynamics using survey data on left-right ideological identities. A novel indicator for measuring ideological polarization at the individual level is proposed, which is more compatible with theoretical conceptualizations of ideological polarization than other existing indicators. The indicator is applied to data from the AmericasBarometer surveys to measure degrees and changes in mass-level ideological polarization in 19 Latin American countries between 2006 and 2019. The study reveals a substantial process of mass-level ideological restructuring, accompanied by a region-wide increase in ideological polarization in Latin America taking place during the second decade of the twenty-first century. We also find that ideological polarization, albeit varying in intensity from country to country, is clearly present at the mass level in the majority of countries in the region.

Polarizing rhetoric and negative tone are thought to generate more attention on social media. We seek to describe and analyze how presidential candidates in Colombia’s 2022 election deployed (de)polarizing rhetoric and tone, around what topics, and with what effects. We analyze the tweets (and corresponding engagement) of the four leading candidates during the campaign. Tone behaves as expected. Negatively worded tweets receive overall more likes and retweets, though the strength of their effect varies by candidate. Polarizing rhetoric behaves differently. Using polarizing and depolarizing rhetoric proved better than neutral messages, but using depolarizing rhetoric, generated greater engagement than its polarizing counterpart. This study suggests that the visibility of a candidate does not necessarily correspond to their greater use of Twitter, an increased deployment of polarizing rhetoric, or an emphasis on negative emotions. This article provides a glimmer of hope regarding the potential usefulness of positive uniting messages on Twitter (now X).

This analytical essay proposes the notion of disjointed polarization to characterize the nature of polarization in contemporary Chile. In disjointed polarization, elite-level polarization does not lead to a successful electoral realignment. Disjointed polarization is thus consistent with a long-lasting crisis of representation in which a serial disconnect between politicians (pursuing different polarizing strategies) and a sizable fraction of the electorate persists, as voters remain alienated from old and emerging political elites. Because the structural changes that make disjointed polarization persist longer than expected in Chile today are widespread across Latin America, the essay speculates on the possibility that enduring disjointed polarization applies to other cases where neither a “populist realignment” nor “generative polarization” took place. Instead, disjointed polarization might reflect the onset of a new (non-partisan representation) normal.

This article contributes to broader discussions of early Latin American nation-making by focusing on the interplay among territory, sovereignty and human movement in nineteenth-century Central America. How did early Central American nations create sovereign spaces? And how did human movement in turn impact the meanings of bordered spaces? Drawing from constitutions, legal codes and archival documents related to the implementation of migration laws, the central argument of this article is that Central American governments typically treated free migration not as a threat to sovereignty but as an opportunity to reinforce sovereignty over the fixed spaces through which people moved.