Chile es uno de los países con mayor concentración del ingreso a nivel mundial. Dada la relación entre alta desigualdad económica y patrones de estratificación social, en tal contexto se esperaría una alta dispersión de las percepciones respecto del propio estatus o estatus social subjetivo. Sin embargo, la evidencia internacional señala una marcada tendencia hacia la media del estatus subjetivo, es decir, existirían distorsiones del estatus subjetivo respecto del estatus objetivo. La presente investigación intenta profundizar en este aspecto para el caso de Chile, particularmente en la relación entre estatus socioeconómico, clase social y estatus subjetivo. Los datos a analizar corresponden al módulo de desigualdad económica de la encuesta International Social Survey Programme (ISSP), en su versión del año 2009 para Chile. Los resultados indican una marcada tendencia en la población hacia la media del estatus subjetivo, principalmente de parte de aquellos con mayor estatus objetivo.

Este artículo transcribe y considera la discusión suscitada en Lima, Perú entre activistas y académicos de las Américas tras nuestra presentación de trabajos preliminares sobre religión y movimientos sociales progresistas. Al concluir las ponencias, planteamos al público varias preguntas para pensar sus experiencias con la religión en el marco de su activismo. El artículo intenta capturar el interés y la diversidad de intervenciones al invertir la dinámica etnográfica convencional, dándole prioridad al informante en lugar del investigador. Confirma así un importante deseo entre activistas de comentar y debatir el papel de la religión en las luchas sociales. Observamos una amplia gama de respuestas marcada en sus extremos por posiciones antagónicas. Algunos comentaristas representaron a la religión como la que acoge, protege y da fuerza a movimientos sociales y sus participantes. Otros ven en la religión un marco opresivo que conlleva legados históricos coloniales de machismo, verticalismo y pensamiento único.

The fight against HIV/AIDS is an example of a global struggle for the promotion of sexual health and the protection of human rights for all, including sexual minorities. It represents a challenge for the understanding of its impact on political, social, and economic processes. My central goal in this piece is twofold. First, I underline the importance of a political and human rights perspective to the analysis of the global response to the pandemic, and I introduce the concept of policy networks for a better understanding of these dynamics. Second, I argue that, in the case of Mexico, the constitution of HIV/AIDS policy networks, which incorporate civil society and state actors, such as sexual minority activists and public officials, and their actions—both domestic and international—have resulted in a more inclusive HIV/AIDS policy-making process. However, serious human rights violations of HIV/AIDS patients and sexual minorities still remain.

Research surrounding political institutions and credible commitment to the rule of law is integral to recent efforts to tie democracy to economic development. I identify the determinants of rule-of-law perceptions in Latin America and argue that constraining elected officials facilitates a commitment to democracy that makes government policies credible. I also argue that aspects of politics leading to deadlock might have a hidden upside in generating policy credibility. I test my arguments against pooled cross-sectional time series data for twenty Latin American countries between 1996 and 2012. Ultimately, my research demonstrates the benefits of functioning checks and balances among elected officials for the rule of law and provides a uniform framework linking democratic inputs to legal and economic outcomes.

Scholars have argued that social capital—understood to mean those social networks, norms, and trust that allow citizens to act together more successfully to pursue shared goals—encourages political participation and a more robust democratic experience. Consequently, international development agencies have made promotion of social capital a major emphasis in recent years. Using data from the 1999–2001 wave of the World Values Survey, I show that in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru this relationship holds true. Greater involvement in nonpolitical organizations does lead to more participation in explicitly political activities. Higher levels of interpersonal trust also promote political participation. However, despite encouraging results from studies of popular participation in the region, Latin American levels of organizational involvement and political participation are moderate by the standards of more mature democracies, and levels of trust are relatively low.

En este trabajo se revisan los principales factores que permiten explicar la emergencia del movimiento piquetero argentino en una de las regiones donde se manifestó más tempranamente: las localidades salteñas de Tartagal y Mosconi. A diferencia de lo que se ha venido afirmando, la idea de la existencia de un estado de bienestar antes de las contrarreformas neoliberales de la década de 1990, y la caracterización del movimiento piquetero, las rebeliones populares (puebladas) y las asambleas populares de la zona como nuevas formas de organización y protesta vinculadas al efecto de las contrarreformas, resultan inadecuados. Con respecto a la primera, se mostrará que nunca existió en la zona algo parecido a un estado de bienestar; sobre la segunda, que existían experiencias de lucha previas dentro de las que el corte de ruta y la Asamblea Popular ya habían sido implementadas, y que esas experiencias nutrieron los acontecimientos posteriores.

This article contributes to a growing literature on the ways in which migrants are shaping democracy back home. Its empirical lens is Mexico's “Three-for-One” (3×1) Program, in which each level of the Mexican government provides matching grants for community projects solicited and financed by migrant hometown associations (HTAs), primarily in the United States. Based on an original data set constructed from key informant interviews and household surveys in sixty Mexican communities, it uses descriptive statistics, multivariate regressions, and qualitative case narratives to explore the relationship between migrant involvement in the 3×1 Program and accountable governance at the local level. Its central finding is that migrants are most likely to act as effective agents of accountability when they are embedded in translocal networks with local residents.

The electoral implications of conditional cash-transfer programs have been widely debated in recent years. In the particular case of Brazil analysts have argued that the social policies that President Lula da Silva's first government implemented enabled the Workers' Party to broaden its electoral clientele from middle-class and highly educated voters to low-income and poorly educated individuals from the Northeast. The conditional cash-transfer program known as Bolsa Família (BF) is said to have played a key role in this shift of electoral support and to have worked as a powerful clientelistic tool for Lula. Using survey data, this article challenges this view by showing that, despite changes in the profile of Lula's supporters, the BF program cannot account for them. Poor voters vote differently across regions; BF recipients were already Lula voters in 2002 and cast ballots for him during his reelection at the same rate as nonrecipients.

Does race influence political behavior in Brazil? Using data from Belo Horizonte, Brazil, we explore whether an individual's propensity to take part in a political association is affected by race, independent of socioeconomic position and of the availability of resources derived from this position. We found that white individuals participate more in political associations than do black individuals; however, after taking into account the differences in all types of resources, we found no difference in participation by racial groups. Nevertheless, by interacting race, skills, and income, it turns out that different racial groups use the same resources differently. A white individual's propensity to participate politically is significantly more affected by income than a similar black individual's propensity. Therefore, we argue that race mediates the effect of resources on political participation, which means that either different groups may use different resources or different groups can differ in how intensively they use resources.

Este artículo analiza la forma en que la construcción e institucionalización de las representaciones sociales sobre Tepoztlán, Morelos, México, han influido en la definición de la actividad turística en esta población. Proponemos el concepto de “economía de la experiencia íntima” para analizar las formas de institucionalización que tienen los lugares, las prácticas, los símbolos y las relaciones que al reunirse producen lo que la mayoría de la gente considera como vivencias auténticas, de recreo y confort. El artículo concluye que el turismo es una compleja red de dimensiones y relaciones sociales donde existe una tendencia a la creación de relaciones asimétricas de explotación del trabajo y la cultura.

Interest in defense issues among Latin American politicians has faded with the advent of widespread democratization in the region and the retreat of the armed forces to their barracks. Defense policy is rarely subject to the same level of public scrutiny and debate as other major policy issues faced by the region, such as health, education, and public safety. This is puzzling because by ignoring defense policy, civilian leaders in the region risk ceding authority to their militaries, allowing them a degree of self-management and undermining the consolidation of democratic civilian control of the armed forces. This article explains civilian politicians' inattention to defense as a function of three factors: a historical path that has produced armed forces with limited capabilities that are more often a threat to their own governments than their neighbors; a relatively benign international threat environment in Latin America that makes neglect of defense policy a low-risk proposition; and the low importance that voters assign to the provision of the national defense as either a public or a private good. Under these circumstances, it is rational for most civilian politicians to ignore defense policy and focus their attention instead on coup avoidance.

Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart's Para leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck) is considered one of the most significant works of Latin American cultural criticism. Despite the significance of Donald Duck to the history of Latin American cultural criticism and to Dorfman's own trajectory as a writer, thus far, critical studies of Dorfman tend to gloss his essays, ignore his journalism, and focus solely on his literature, especially on his play La muerte y la doncella (Death and the Maiden). While the attention to Death and the Maiden is certainly well founded, it is worth considering how these two works complement each other in Dorfman's career, given the apparent lack of a shared aesthetic between the playful cultural criticism of Donald Duck and the sparse language of Death and the Maiden. In fact, attending to Donald Duck and Dorfman's other nonfiction texts reveals the ways that he has worked across styles and genres on a series of central issues that form the core of his work. As a complement to research on Dorfman's literary production, this article focuses on his media criticism and his journalism, two areas of his work that have received the least critical attention, to suggest that Dorfman's literary production must be understood as part of a larger project, one that includes his essays, journalism, and other cultural activities.

Politicized consumer choice among brands and products is increasingly accepted as a novel mode of nonconventional political participation. However, scholars often overlook developing societies and seldom discuss consumers' perception of the marketplace as a political arena. This study reviews evidence of political consumerism in Latin America, measuring individuals' perceptions of corporations as agents that affect public goods, examining feelings of political efficacy over corporations, and analyzing motivations behind market-based activism. Research is grounded on representative samples of urban adults from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Logistic regression confirms political consumerism as driven by distrust of government and concomitant engagement with politics, suggesting a diversified repertoire of individual political action in Latin America.

Numerous recent country studies demonstrate that beneficiaries of conditional cash transfer (CCT) programs vote for incumbents at higher rates. It is reasonable to expect that, as a consequence, those incumbents will perform better nationally in the next election. This article warns against such an extrapolation. It analyzes an original cross-national data set with information for eighty-four Latin American presidential elections that took place between 1990 and 2010. My results reveal that CCT programs have not improved incumbents' aggregate electoral performances in the region, contradicting common speculative claims of the literature. They also confirm the classic economic voting hypothesis that incumbents are held accountable in the polls for their economic performance.

This article focuses on three central impediments to police reform in Argentina, each of which has generated an important, yet distinct, paradox. First, although advocates of federalism argue that police reform facilitates innovation, in practice, reform efforts at one level of government in Argentina have been sabotaged by officials at other levels of government. Second, although electoral pressures have pushed police reform onto the policy agenda, these same pressures have also obstructed reform efforts because politicians depend on illicit party-police networks for campaign financing. Third, despite copious evidence of police involvement in criminal acts, Argentina's crime wave has energized conservative civil society groups whose demand for a heavy-handed response to crime has derailed the most promising attempts to restructure the police force.