How does international migration affect political parties’ electoral strategies in the sending countries? This article argues that remittances help political parties decide whom to target during elections. Drawing from theories of vote targeting and those on the effects of remittances, this study addresses how political parties’ electoral strategies follow the specific characteristics of remittance recipients. Using individual-level data from Mexico’s 2006 presidential elections, the results show that receiving remittances had a significant impact on experiencing electoral targeting, especially by the then-incumbent PAN. This study reveals the importance of remittances in shaping the strategies of Mexican political parties.

A significant proportion of the population in Latin America depends on the informal economy and lacks adequate protection against a variety of economic risks. This article suggests that economic vulnerability affects the way individuals relate to political parties. Given the truncated structure of welfare states in the region, citizens in the informal sector receive lower levels of social security benefits and face higher economic uncertainty. This vulnerability makes it difficult for voters to establish strong programmatic linkages with political parties because partisan platforms and policies do not necessarily represent their interests and needs. Using cross-national microlevel data, this study shows that individuals living in informality are skeptical about state social policy efforts and exhibit weaker partisan attachments. The findings suggest that effective political representation of disadvantaged groups remains a challenge in Latin American democracies.

In many developing countries with weak formal institutions, the protection of state actors is essential for organized criminal activities and illicit markets to emerge and thrive. This article examines the relationship between the state’s regulation of drug trafficking and its associated violence in highly fragmented markets. It argues that political competition influences coordination among the police, generating different types of regulatory regimes. Police with greater coordination implement protection rackets that curb violence; uncoordinated police carry out particularistic negotiations with drug traffickers that exacerbate criminal violence. This argument is illustrated with a subnational comparison of two Argentine provinces that experienced a similar drug market expansion with different patterns of violence. These cases show how corrupt states can obtain relative order in highly fragmented drug markets, and illustrate police influence in shaping the evolution of drug dealing in metropolitan areas.

This article challenges the widely held view that, during the Mexican Revolution, the Zapatista villages governed themselves with complete autonomy from the state and according to the pueblos’ customary justice. It shows how Zapatistas in the multi-state region of south-central Mexico dealt with quarrels over small and medium-sized properties, the restitution of usurped pueblo lands and water resources, as well as village boundary disputes. They did so by blending nineteenth-century judicial procedures and civil law, limited but radical reforms to the existing judicial system and new forms of land and water management – all of which strengthened state authority.

This article argues that growing civilian direction of the defense sector should generate three consequences: greater interoperability of the armed forces, a stronger emphasis on operations outside the national territory (here called externalism), and better defense-diplomacy coordination. An original investigation of the makeup of the drafting committees of three of Brazil’s national security strategy documents since the mid-1990s shows that varying rates of civilian participation in defense policymaking generate an impact on defense policy directives commensurate with theoretical expectations. Defense policy implementation, however, has found varying degrees of success. Using new and systematic quantitative data, this study demonstrates that interoperability has made progress, defense-diplomacy coordination is at an intermediate stage, and externalism, albeit not a failure, is still far from a success. Externalism’s performance is a consequence of rising crime, deficient police forces, the pragmatism of civilian elites, and public support for law-and-order military missions.

This article analyzes the constitution of dockworkers’ power and its impact on trade union strategy in recent labor disputes in Chile and Colombia. Dockworkers’ strategic location in the economies of both countries would predict a high degree of shop-floor power among both groups. In practice, however, Colombian dock-workers had far less shop-floor power than their Chilean counterparts, as a result of mitigating social and political factors. Consequently, they developed a strategy this study terms human rights unionism, relying on external allies and lawsuits for leverage, rather than shop-floor action. Dockworkers in Chile, by contrast, adopted a strategy termed class struggle unionism, relying on nationally and internationally coordinated shop-floor action. This article therefore proposes an expanded model of workers’ structural power, incorporating the roles of state and society to better account for power differentials and divergent strategic pathways among workers who share a common position in the economic system.