This paper demonstrates that in Latin America a significant portion of the increased legislative party system fragmentation since the 1980s is explained by the recent political incorporation of ethnic populations. Until now, scholars have likely not identified this relationship because they have not used the nuanced measures of ethnic fractionalization that account for internal diversity of indigenous populations and race, and because they have not focused on the time period when ethnic peoples were politically incorporated. In addition to demonstrating this relationship statistically, we use two case studies from Bolivia and Ecuador to illustrate how in recent years the dynamic relationship between ethnic groups and political parties in Latin American legislatures has changed and resulted in the statistical association between ethnic fractionalization and party system fragmentation that we observe.

Most conditional cash transfer evaluations have focused on estimating program effects on schooling, consumption, and labor supply. Fewer studies have addressed these outcomes using a distributive lens. This article uses data from three programs in Latin America to obtain evidence of their impact on educational inequality of opportunity, measured using primary enrollment. The main results indicate that groups considered vulnerable gain more in terms of access to education and that these interventions help level the playing field. They do not eliminate inequality of opportunity but are certainly a useful complement to equity-enhancing policies.

Why do politicians pursue policy reforms to improve government performance when these are perceived to be costly, both materially and politically? Theories based on advanced democracies stress electoral accountability mechanisms rooted in programmatic parties with strong ties to society. Empirically, these are largely absent in less developed democracies, and this often leads to poor public goods provision. To better understand the incentives for local policy reform in developing democracies, we constructed a comprehensive data set of local natural resource management reforms in Ecuador's cantons during 1997–2008. We find that the presence of “organic” political parties, legitimate participatory decision-making institutions, and high levels of civic engagement increased the incidence of reform. Our findings suggest that even in environments marked by clientelist politics and weak, elite-based party systems, institutions linking politicians with a mobilized civil society (e.g., organic parties and participatory decision-making institutions) can incentivize elected officials to pursue performance-enhancing reforms.

This article introduces the topic of pandillas (street gangs) and their implications for security in Central America. There is minimal scholarly literature on pandillas and security. In part this is due to serious challenges in analyzing pandillas. First, pandilla members consider truth to be situational; data derived directly from them is suspect. Second, those who know most about them are involved in NGOs that rely on foreign assistance for their work. The project reports they produce go to funders abroad and are generally not published. Third, to research and write on pandillas is dangerous.

El modelo de latifundios y oligarquías terratenientes orientadas a la producción primaria fue el predominante pero no el único en América Latina colonial. Convivió con otros modos de producción, entre los cuales se destaca la vitivinicultura, caracterizada por la pequeña propiedad, la agricultura intensiva orientada a la industria, fuertes pautas de movilidad social y la emergencia de incipientes burguesías. En el marco de este tema, el presente estudio procura mostrar el grado de complejidad que alcanzó la industria vitivinícola a través de un indicador: la capacidad para realizar crianza biológica de vino. El desarrollo de este complejo método basado en conocimientos y técnicas especializadas, fue posible por una serie de factores sociales, culturales y económicos.

This article argues that one of the most important contributions of Carlos Fuentes's Terra Nostra is its rewriting of the modern subject. Through its metafictional dimension, the novel seeks to change the legacy of the recoding of subjectivities begun in the Spanish Golden Age. More specifically, it is through the construction of its characters and the way in which the latter depend on, and grow out of, the structure of the novel that Fuentes revises modern individualist conceptions of the subject. Although critics have tended to privilege the novel's realm of myth (understood as transcendent and timeless), this reading depends on the novel's evocation of a Marxist narrative of culture as struggle driven that Carlos Fuentes never loses from sight. The novel's structure arguably promotes a diachronic understanding of history into which both the mythic and material strands feed. Myth, in this reading, is a consciously embraced worldview that grounds, and dialectically informs, this vision of history rather than shying away from it.

Using the 2006 Mexican Social Mobility Survey, this article evaluates the influence of parental wealth on several outcomes of adult children, including educational attainment, consumption level, asset holdings, home ownership, and home value. Three main findings emerge from the analysis. First, parental wealth is a strong determinant of educational attainment, net of the standard indicators of socioeconomic advantage. Furthermore, the influence of parental wealth appears to be stronger among the most disadvantaged children—those with low cultural capital residing in rural areas. Second, the mechanism of parental influence on adult children's economic well-being differs depending on the outcome: in the case of consumption level, the influence is largely indirect, mediated by offspring's human capital, while the opposite is true for children's asset holdings, where a direct transfer of resources predominates. Third, access to homeownership is only weakly stratified by economic resources, but parental wealth significantly affects home value. The findings here highlight the critical but largely neglected impact of wealth on inequality and mobility in Latin America.

Durante los últimos años, varios países de América Latina han bajado las tasas de impuesto a las utilidades de las empresas, entre otras razones, con el objetivo de atraer más inversión extranjera. Sin embargo, dicha política sólo puede tener resultados significativos si la inversión extranjera es relativamente sensible a la tasa de impuestos. De lo contrario, el efecto principal se limitaría a una fuerte reducción en la recaudación tributaria. Desafortunadamente, para América Latina no hay evidencia empírica en la literatura económica que indique la magnitud de dicha elasticidad. Una primera contribución de este trabajo consiste precisamente en estimar la magnitud de los efectos tributarios en la inversión extranjera en América Latina. Una segunda contribución consiste en considerar explícitamente en el análisis empírico el hecho de que los inversionistas extranjeros tienen una outside option en sus alternativas de inversión y pueden decidir no invertir en ningún país de América Latina. La evidencia empírica en este trabajo, utilizando un modelo de elección discreta y un panel de once países en Latinoamérica para el período 1990–2002, muestra una elasticidad impuesto de la inversión extranjera entre –0.8 y –1.

A crisis of urban violence has emerged in northern Central America during the past two decades. Although youth gangs are responsible for only a portion of this violence, punitive approaches to dealing with gang violence have sharpened public hostility toward gang members and created a context conducive to the practice of “social cleansing” aimed at reducing gang violence by eliminating gang-affiliated youth through extrajudicial executions. Against this backdrop of public anger and resentment aimed at gang youth, a sizeable number of Evangelical-Pentecostal pastors and lay workers have developed ministries aimed at rescuing gang members and restoring them to society, often making considerable sacrifices and taking personal risks in the process. After describing the difficulties and risks associated with leaving the gang, this article takes a sociological approach to gang member conversions to discover the resources that Evangelical-Pentecostal congregations and gang ministries offer to former gang members facing the crisis of spoiled identity. I draw on semistructured interviews conducted in 2007 and 2008 with former gang members and gang ministry coordinators in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and a handful of follow-up interviews conducted in 2013.

Decentralization has been considered a tool of democracy promotion because of its ability to improve citizen participation and increase equity by allocating resources to long-neglected populations. I examine these claims by focusing on decentralization's effects for indigenous and Afro-Latino individuals in fifteen Latin American countries. Using AmericasBarometer survey data provided by the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), I first analyze how the inclusion of ethnic citizens in local government affects attitudes that are considered crucial for democratic consolidation, such as satisfaction with democratic governance. I then assess whether decentralization has increased inclusion by examining how political, fiscal, and administrative decentralization affect ethnic individuals' participation and engagement in local government. The analyses demonstrate the limits of decentralizing reforms for democratization. I find that the inclusion of marginalized citizens is not substantially enhanced by decentralization, which is especially important given the other significant result of this study: that local inclusion increases ethnic individuals' support for democracy. The results suggest that individual reserves of social capital may be most important for enhancing local inclusion, and hence support for democracy.

This article analyzes the Catholic Church's involvement in social conflicts resulting from resource extraction activities in Peru. The nature and degree of the Catholic Church's involvement vary greatly according to the type of conflict and the diversity of standpoints of the Church at the local level. The article focuses on three distinctive, widely known conflicts against the expansion of extractive activities. It shows that the importance conventionally given to the role of particular religious figures, their adherence to progressive ideologies, and the defense of the Church's strategic interests do not fully encompass the complexity of local processes. In contrast, the article contends that the Church's institutional embeddedness in local networks is the most influential factor in the involvement of Catholic organizations in anti-mining conflicts. Embeddedness coincides with a spirituality that prioritizes local people's agency, whereby the priests and Church organizations accompany and follow the initiatives of local communities instead of taking a leading role. This does not mean that the Church takes a passive stance in these conflicts. Priests and other pastoral agents have incorporated environmental and human rights discourses into an explicit religious framework that amplifies the social space of the Church and provides legitimacy for mobilizations. In parallel, locally generated doctrinal frameworks permeate the official discourse of the Catholic Church, reinforcing the position of those committed to the defense of local demands.

La idea de que Bolivia vive un proceso de fortalecimiento de la democracia, representada por el ascenso de Evo Morales Ayma, un dirigente sindical campesino de origen aymara, a la presidencia, está escondiendo no solamente el hecho de que su gobierno es la culminación de un largo proceso histórico, sino que también oculta los riesgos del rentismo petrolero, del caudillismo político y del debilitamiento institucional, que podrían estar afectando las perspectivas de la democracia y el desarrollo.