Cuban emigration in the post-Soviet period has largely been attributed to economic motivations, but without significant racial analysis. Moreover, little is known about how black Cubans on the island think about emigration. It is therefore imperative to re-examine how blacks, once cited as the Cuban Revolution's loyalists, make decisions today about remaining in Cuba and/or pursuing economic security outside of its borders. Using original survey data of black Cubans on the island, I find that economic motivations are prominent among black Cubans, but that these motivations can be multifaceted. In a study of black Cubans and emigration, the issue of increasing racial inequality and racial exclusion has significant influence on economic opportunity, which in turn influences the desire to leave Cuba to achieve economic and professional success. The results have implications for the ways in which we analyse migration throughout the Latin American region, where race has not been factored into why people migrate.

The treatment of draft dodgers and miscarriages of justice by Argentine military courts provoked mobilisations by families, communities and the major political parties. An examination of the debates and discussions around these issues reveals a widespread sentiment that rarely questioned neither the right of the armed forces to draft young men nor the legitimacy of the armed forces. By adopting the language of patriotism and civic obligation, individual and community petitioners and politicians who represented them challenged the state's broad claim of power over the bodies of young men from a reformist position. Military justice formed a critical platform through which citizens debated the meaning of citizenship and the place of the armed forces in society.

Venezuela has two types of prisons: a prison regime ruled by a hierarchical organisation of armed inmates and the securitised ‘New Regime’ system under the control of the Ministry of Penitentiary Services. This article uses a comparative approach to examine how legitimacy is constructed in these competing yet co-existing prison regime formations in Venezuela. Both the Venezuelan state and the prisons under ‘carceral self-rule’ legitimate their respective carceral orders through discourses of left-wing emancipation that correspond with different phases of the Bolivarian project. Yet contradictions emerge from these legitimising discourses and neither regime conforms to its respective discourse of participation or socialism. In the state-abandoned, violent and hierarchical prisons under carceral self-rule, prisoners are only partially empowered, while in the New Regime prison types predation at the hands of one's fellow inmates is replaced by the violence of the ‘humanising’ state.

I am very pleased to participate in this dialogue on the effect of collective protest on social spending in Latin America, which initiated when the editors of LAPS invited me to review the research note titled “Organized Labor Strikes and Social Spending in Latin America: The Synchronizing Effect of Mass Protest.” Dongkyu Kim, Mi-son Kim, and Cesar Villegas engage with my paper, published in Comparative Political Studies (Zarate-Tenorio 2014), which analyzes the effects of organized labor strikes and mass protests on social security and welfare, health and education spending in Latin America, 1970–2007.

The aim of this article is to analyze three key issues in current Nicaraguan politics and in the political debate surrounding hybrid regimes: de-democratization, political protest, and the fall of presidencies. First, it analyzes the process of de-democratization that has been taking place in Nicaragua since 2000. It shows that the 2008 elections were not competitive but characteristic of an electoral authoritarian regime. Second, it reflects on the kind of regime created in Nicaragua under Daniel Ortega’s mandate, focusing on the system’s inability to process any kind of protest and dissent. Third, it examines the extent to which the protests that broke out in April 2018 may predict the early end to Ortega’s presidency, or whether Nicaragua’s political crisis may lead to negotiations between the government and the opposition.

The theories and evidence about relationships between democracy and social spending in Latin America are highly contested. A recent study shows that collective protest by organized labor effectively increases social security and welfare spending, whereas mass protest does not have comparable effects on human capital spending in Latin American democracies. This article reexamines the analysis and demonstrates that organized labor alone cannot sway democratic governments. Labor strikes require the synchronizing effect of mass protest to obtain government concessions. Only through concurrent episodes of mass protest can organized labor overcome the numerical disadvantage of pressing democratic government for social welfare spending. In understanding the relationship between labor protests and social welfare spending through the lens of insider-outsider dichotomy, it is critical to consider the synchronizing effect of mass protests. The findings remain robust with alternative measures of democracy and various model specifications.

The informal sector challenges economic growth and hinders the abatement of income disparities in developing countries. This study argues that a weak and poorly governed welfare state can cause the informal sector to increase when individuals use it as an exit option from an unsatisfying welfare system. The article explores how the welfare state’s benefit structure and citizens’ trust in institutions to deliver public goods affect the likelihood of informality. A logistic hierarchical model, based on cross-sectional survey data from Latin America and the Caribbean and descriptive panel data from Brazil, is used to test the hypothesis. Findings reveal that social policy discontent, low trust, an elitist distribution of welfare benefits, and dysfunctional institutions increase the likelihood of being informally employed. However, workers with greater agency—the better-educated—seem notably less likely to informalize when social policy benefits are targeted toward their own socioeconomic group.

Once upon a time, pluralist (Dahl 1961) and modernization theories (Lipset 1959) described liberal democracy as a political regime that tended to exclude violence, insurgency, and corruption. A few decades later, Francis Fukuyama (1992) argued that in the long run, liberal democracy would triumph over other political alternatives, and about the same time Samuel Huntington (1991) revealed a massive wave of democratization (or redemocratization) in different parts of the world.