Voters’ ideological stances have long been considered one of the most important factors for understanding electoral choices in Chile. In recent years, however, the literature has begun to call this premise into question, due to several changes in the Chilean political landscape: the current crisis of representation, the high programmatic congruence between the two main coalitions, the decline in the political relevance of the dictatorship, and the rise of nonprogrammatic electoral strategies. In addition to these transformations, Chile switched to voluntary voting in 2012. This article studies whether ideology still informs electoral choices in Chile in an era of voluntary voting. It implements a conjoint survey experiment in low-to-middle-income neighborhoods in Santiago, where voters would be expected to be less ideological. It shows that candidates’ ideological labels are crucial for understanding the electoral decisions of a large part of the sample, particularly among likely voters.

Recent years have seen the rapid passage and modification of family leave policies in Latin America, a surprising trend, given the region’s historically conservative gender norms. This article argues that the rise of new paternity leave policies—as well as the modifications to longer-standing maternity leave policies—reflects contending visions of gender and the family, mediated by the institutions and actors that populate the region’s political landscape. Using an original dataset of family policy measures, this article finds that the factors facilitating the adoption of new, vanguard policies, such as paternity leave, function in ways different from those that shape the expansion of longer-standing policies, including maternity leave.

The Harvard political science professor Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) made visits to Brazil in 1972 and 1974 to advise the government about ‘decompression’ or regime liberalisation. The literature on Brazil's dictatorship references these visits as having had a major causal impact. This article argues that his influence on Brazilian regime change is greatly exaggerated. It also argues that Huntington, who became a leading theorist of democratisation, had an interest in and commitment to democracy that was more recent and circumstantial than is often thought. This helps to explain the current period of democratic ‘deconsolidation’ associated with the rise of authoritarian national populism in Brazil.

A product native to the Amazon forest, cacao became the most important staple of the Portuguese Amazonian colonial economy from the late seventeenth until the mid-nineteenth century. Based on extensive research in Brazilian and European archives, this article analyses cacao exploitation in Portuguese Amazonia, examining its dual spatial dimension: the expansion of an agricultural frontier, and the expansion of an extractive frontier in the deep hinterland, with a particular focus on the role that Indian labour played in this development.