Las hipótesis sobre la relación entre competencia política y gasto particularista predicen consecuencias opuestas. Una sugiere que la competencia política —el gobierno sin mayoría<— constriñe al ejecutivo y reduce el particularismo, la perspectiva opuesta predice un mayor particularismo como resultado del intercambio de apoyo legislativo por beneficios. Ambas descansan sobre un supuesto que no siempre se cumple: la presencia de actores con poder de veto en el congreso. Este artículo argumenta que este supuesto es crucial para ambas hipótesis y muestra que allí donde aquel no se cumple estas últimas no se sostienen. Explora los efectos del gobierno con y sin mayoría en contextos de debilidad institucional del congreso a través de un análisis del gasto en bienes públicos locales de los gobiernos subnacionales en México y Argentina y muestra que el gobierno sin mayoría no conduce a ninguno de los resultados anticipados por los modelos existentes.

Por primera en vez Chile una mujer triunfó en las elecciones presidenciales. Sugerimos que la victoria de Michelle Bachelet se explicó, en primer lugar, por sus atributos personales. Los chilenos la evaluaron como la candidata más confiable y con mayor cercanía, valorando además sus condiciones como posible gobernante. En segundo lugar, se vio favorecida por un ambiente político y económico derivado de la reconocida gestión del ex presidente Ricardo Lagos. Un tema crucial que atraviesa todo el escrito corresponde a la solidaridad de género. Se sostiene que el apoyo de las mujeres fue determinante para el triunfo de Bachelet, cuestión que se corrobora tanto a nivel de encuestas en términos de intención de voto como de resultados electorales finales por comuna.

Why is Colombia, a country with fertile arable lands, increasingly importing its food supply as a consequence of shrinking lands dedicated to crop production, whereas land inappropriate for pasture and livestock has been expanding exponentially? The answer lies in the land laws approved since the 1930s, coupled with the state's economic policies, which have reduced the opportunity costs of investing in this sector. Both have provided an institutional matrix to transform parts of the rural economy from food production to a rentier political economy spearheaded by cattle ranching. This article explains why cattle ranching has become increasingly prominent since the 1950s for a segment of the dominant classes that is predisposed to invest in this endeavor despite the risks and low economic returns. More important, the article explains how the institutional matrix (laws and policies) and precarious property rights in rural areas provided the incipient narco-bourgeoisie, since the mid-1970s, with a pivotal incentive to choose cattle ranching as a favorite means to launder money, speculate, and exercise political power, consequently cementing rentier capitalism.

El abandono del régimen de convertibilidad en 2002 implicó cambios sustantivos a nivel macroeconómico que tuvieron un fuerte impacto en el desempeño de los distintos sectores de la economía argentina. Sin embargo, durante la posconvertibilidad parece haberse registrado también cierta continuidad en determinados procesos económico-sociales: si bien desde los elencos gubernamentales se ha reivindicado sucesivamente la necesidad de recuperar un empresariado nacional fuerte, el peso del capital extranjero entre las empresas más grandes del país no ha disminuido. Esto es sumamente relevante teniendo en cuenta que la Argentina es una economía dependiente y, por lo tanto, el rol del capital transnacional en su proceso de acumulación es determinante. El objetivo del artículo es indagar sobre las continuidades y las rupturas en el proceso de extranjerización del gran capital en la Argentina a partir de un análisis de lo ocurrido con las quinientas empresas líderes de la economía durante el período 1993-2008.

In 1955, a monument to Inca warrior Rumiñahui was erected in Otavalo's central plaza. In this article, I study the ways in which competing imaginings of the Ecuadorian nation have shaped the material and symbolic trajectory of the monument. The monument was the outcome of a struggle for hegemony between nonindigenous elites. The current appropriation of the monument by the local indigenous population, however, is at odds with the ideological purpose for which it was built. The initiative to build the monument emerged from the public sphere—which at that time excluded indigenous peoples—in a context of national debates about the Indian problem. The widespread notion that the indigenous people of Otavalo were exceptional propelled the local nonindigenous elite to debate the Indian problem and shape, in the process, a public sphere. Elucidating the workings of the public sphere in the racialization of indigenous peoples, I aim to contribute to the academic literature about the relationship between Indian and nation in Ecuador. This literature has focused on the role that either the state or the private sphere has played in this racialization and has not paid enough explicit attention to the public sphere.

This article analyzes new forms of distinction and inequality generated within Uruguayan squatter settlements as a result of neoliberal policies, class polarization, and the downward mobility of previously integrated populations that have migrated to the informal urban periphery. Based on ethnographic research in Montevideo, this article shows how newly impoverished Uruguayans have dealt with their new spatial proximity and ever-increasing socioeconomic proximity to chronic poverty through the maintenance of symbolic boundaries between themselves and the chronic poor. This boundary work is dependent on the reproduction of a series of moral oppositions, highly reminiscent of hegemonic discourses on the culture of poverty, which cast the chronic poor as dirty, lacking in values, apathetic, disorganized, and responsible for their own poverty.

The article aims to identify the factors behind a series of center-left electoral victories in the 2002 and 2006 state elections, which indicate the decay of state political machines in Brazil's poorest regions. It is argued that vertical competition between the federal and state governments in the provision of public policies works as a constraint on state bosses' strategies of political control. The withering of state political machines may be understood as an indirect consequence of the national political shifts represented by the rise of Brazil's most important left-wing organization—the Workers' Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores)—to the presidency in 2002 and 2006. Social and economic policies implemented by the federal government under PT rule undermined subnational patron-client networks by improving the life conditions of the poorest sections of the electorate. The article explores the interlinking of national and subnational electoral dynamics by developing statistical models for state- and municipal-level data.

Beginning in the 1930s, a new type of song entered American popular music—the so-called “latune,” that is, a tune with a Latin beat and an English-language lyric. Although latunes drew on a variety of genres, what prevailed were Cuban rhythms, and particularly the “rhumba,” an elastic term (unrelated to the Afro-Cuban rumba) that included up-tempo sones as well as languid boleros. At one time or another, many of the best-known American composers—Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer—contributed to the latune songbook. In spite of their popularity, however, latunes have elicited little attention, for they have been regarded as vapid, watered-down versions of authentic Latin American music. Arguing that these songs furnish important clues about the United States' absorption of Latin American culture, this essay undertakes a study of the history, features, and principal categories of latunes.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Latin America experienced a so-called left turn that sought either to reform or eliminate the neoliberal institutions established during the 1980s and 1990s. However, although Peru has electoral, economic, and social processes similar to those of its neighbors, the neoliberal institutions established in Peru by the 1993 Constitution remain firmly in place. This article aims to understand the mechanisms sustaining Peru's neoliberal regime since its creation. Why have these institutions survived and grown in strength in a regional environment that has been hostile to neoliberal legacies? The article answers that question, emphasizing the evolution of the balance of power between the precarious Peruvian political class and the empowered technocrats and bureaucrats within the state. The reformist politicians are too weak and amateurish to challenge the technobureaucrats within the state. Moreover, the article analyzes the different strategies deployed by technocrats and bureaucrats in order to ensure the continuity and stability of the neoliberal regime and its policies. Theoretically, the article suggests that institutional stability can arise from a daily process gradually shaped by actors and their strategies.

El artículo analiza la diversidad del campo judaico en Argentina a través de dos proyectos identitarios: la ortodoxia jabadiana y el Proyecto YOK. Dicho análisis permitirá observar las diferencias en lo que concierne a la definición de la identidad en cada uno de los proyectos identitarios y las relaciones entre identidad judía e identidad nacional. A partir del estudio sobre el campo judaico, pretendemos analizar problemáticas sociales vinculadas a la revitalización de lo religioso y a las tensiones entre identidades étnicas, religiosas y nacionales en la era de la globalización.

This article discusses the sustained and increasingly institutionalized transnational practice of repatriating the bodies of deceased Mexican migrants from the United States to their hometowns in Mexico. Far from being a strictly private transnational practice, migrants' desire for a posthumous return and burial in their homelands is popularly expressed in the memories, music, and everyday exchanges of the Mexican diaspora. Drawing on transnational ethnographic research in Los Angeles, California, and Zacatecas, Mexico, this article documents how the Mexican state has institutionalized this process at the transnational, national, state, and municipal levels of governance. Last, the article discusses the role of migrant family and social networks in these repatriations. The goals of this article are to provide a preliminary cultural and institutional understanding of the practice of repatriating cadavers from the United States to Mexico and to discuss the implications of this process for the scholarly debate on migrant transnationalism.