This article looks into the factors that explain foreign direct investment (FDI) in Brazil by country of origin. We collected a sample of 180 countries with and without FDI in Brazil. We use multiple estimation techniques and controls to isolate the effect of country political risk on outward foreign direct investment and show that countries with lower levels of political risk undertake more FDI in Brazil, and that features of the policy environment of home countries drive the negative relationship between risk and FDI. Furthermore, we show that the aspect of the political and institutional environment that is most likely to drive this negative relation between risk and investment into Brazil is related to the effectiveness of national governments. Our findings broaden the understanding of the puzzling influence of political risk on FDI observed in previous studies, correct for sampling and selection biases, and have substantive implications for policy design to attract FDI.

This article studies how the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa and, more generally, neoliberalism rearticulate the opposition between civilization and barbarism, and the vision of the world that underlies it. During a time in which many intellectuals have embraced a relativistic notion of culture that makes judgment problematic, neoliberals embrace this clear-cut value hierarchy with complete abandonment. In fact, one cannot but be surprised by the ease with which Vargas Llosa makes pronouncements based on the identification of individuals, groups, and political movements with either civilization or barbarism. However, the fact is that his reference to this dichotomy differs substantially from its nineteenth-century version and its colonial precedents. The implicitly racial hierarchization proposed by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and other nineteenth-century thinkers has been replaced in Vargas Llosa's writings by one based on cultural and social values.

The central hypothesis derived in this article is that the ability of Brazil's central government to bypass governors determined the success of delivering public goods federation-wide in the area of noncontributory social protection policy. The Workers' Party's (Partido dos Trabalhadores) first-term administration from 2003 to 2006 successfully reformed, expanded, and implemented four previously existing cash-transfer programs designed to alleviate poverty. The central administration's flagship program Bolsa Família was implemented in all of Brazil's municipalities, delivering benefits to more than 11 million households. A nonmajoritarian political system, the constitutional autonomy of municipalities, and the gradual hardening of post-1995 subnational budget constraints facilitated the ability of the central government to live up to the aspirations and expectations of the Brazilian public by combating hunger, poverty, and misery through this program. This article shows these institutional factors to have provided incentives for successful central-local collaboration in this social policy area.

Over the past few years, a burgeoning literature on Latin American politics has developed, focusing on explanations for the renewed success of the left in the region. Building on electoral trends and public opinion analysis, we argue that the region is experiencing the normalization of democratic politics rather than a backlash or a revolution. Furthermore, we believe that electoral support for the left reflects the disenchantment of voters with underperforming right-wing governments. Using a unique data set covering eighteen countries in the region, our statistical analyses demonstrate that retrospective voting provides a powerful explanation of the recent electoral success of the left in Latin America. Thus, the central implication of our argument is that electoral accountability is still the primary mechanism of controlling the executive in the region's young democracies.

The landscapes of the Greater Caribbean have been undergoing a process of ecological globalization since the arrival of European explorers and settlers in the late fifteenth century. The character of this ecological globalization has changed over time. Models of commodity-led economic development drove, directly or indirectly, the neo-Columbian exchanges of the long nineteenth century (roughly 1720–1930). The neo-Columbian exchanges differed from the Columbian exchanges of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in several key ways: They were increasingly mediated by imperial and transnational scientific institutions. The geographical scope of the exchanges grew, and the Greater Caribbean saw many new direct introductions of people, plants, and animals from Asia and the Pacific, as well as from the eastern part of the Atlantic World. A parallel movement of pathogens from Asia and the Pacific also introduced new epidemic diseases—especially crop diseases—to the Greater Caribbean. The neo-Columbian exchange drove the region's dramatic expansion in agricultural production, but this constructed abundance came at the expense of ecological impoverishment and fragility.

In January 1966, delegates from the liberation movements of eighty-two nations came together at the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, Cuba, to form an alliance against imperialism. This alliance, called the Organization of Solidarity with the People of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Organización de Solidaridad de los Pueblos de Africa, Asia y América Latina, OSPAAAL), quickly became the driving force of international political radicalism and the primary engine of radical cultural production throughout the world. I argue that this influential political movement, which has been the subject of surprisingly few scholarly studies, forms the ideological backbone of current conceptualizations of global subalternity, such as the increasingly circulating notion of the Global South. Through close analysis of documents from OSPAAAL's propaganda apparatus, namely the Tricontinental Bulletin and a newsreel by Santiago Álvarez called Now (1965), I examine how OSPAAAL, through its engagement with the African American Civil Rights Movement, presents a theory of transnational subaltern political resistance that is resurfacing in the contemporary notion of the Global South.

Muchos ven el gobierno de Evo Morales y el Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) como la vanguardia del “giro a la izquierda” en América Latina. Este artículo argumenta que hay una tension profunda dentro de la administración del MAS: un empuje para la justicia social, por un lado, y un abrazo a las instituciones liberales democráticas (sean elecciones, asambleas constituyentes y referenda directas públicas), por el otro. Una mirada de algunos de los conflictos producidos mientras el gobierno intenta poner en equilibrio estos dos marcos puede iluminar algunas tensiones subyacentes en la democracia realmente existiendo tanto como el liberalismo mismo. Sugiero que cuando Morales y compañía empujen su agenda, no solo están tratando de pasar más allá del neoliberalismo, sino también tratan de perfeccionar o “vernacularizar” el liberalismo para hacerlo más democrático y más relevante a los pueblos indígenas bolivianas. Entonces, en vez de pos-neoliberalismo, tal vez vemos esfuerzos de la transformación del liberalismo por medio de interacciones con culturas y demandas indígenas, con la meta de profundizar la democracia.

Using data from three surveys of religion in El Salvador from 1988 to 2009, this research looks at changes in the demographic characteristics, religious orientations and practices, and political attitudes of Salvadorans as they transition from civil war to democracy and participation in global capitalism, and from mostly Catholic affiliation to increasing affiliation with Pentecostal Protestant churches. Over the two decades encompassed by the study, the Protestant population has become less clearly differentiated from the Catholic majority in terms of education, income, occupation, and even political beliefs, while remaining distinct in terms of religious beliefs and practices. Unlike much previous research, this study allows for comparisons among practicing and nonpracticing Catholics as well as Protestants and those identifying themselves as unaffiliated.

The laborante was a revolutionary identity of the Ten Years' War that represented those who worked clandestinely in favor of Cuban independence. The repeated invocation of the term did not emerge from a single print source, nor was its usage evolutionary such that each reference responded to a previous one. Instead, writers appropriated the term to represent anticolonial advocates from diverse sectors of Cuba's socioeconomic strata and to grapple with shifting identities. A Latinate term for “worker,”laborante intimates the changing dynamic between elites, the working class, and slaves. This article examines the uses of laborante to show how Cuban identity was negotiated in different but related moments. It also explores why elites may have cultivated the worker, a figure of limited economic power, to represent their aspirations for increased political freedom, and what this implies about the agents of the revolution.

In the context of urban poverty in Brazil, this article considers the national context of civil society starting in the 1950s through to the approval of the Statute of the City in 2001. Focusing on a case study of Niterói, Rio de Janeiro State, I unpack the perception of a declining civil society in that city. Rather than taking a retraction of civil society at face value, I make the case for alterations within civil society and the role of the political context.