What is required for sustaining an alliance between union and environmental activists? Applying grounded theory to a case study in the Costa Rican banana sector, this article reveals five historical phases. First, unions and environmentalists identify common opportunity structures for joint action. Second, a preexisting network becomes a resource for mobilization. Third, the new coalition engages in communicative action that leads to shared identity and cultural framing and a foundation for handling exogenous global forces. Market policy changes in the fourth phase stimulate a transnational activist network and framing linkages. Dramatic supply disruptions in the fifth precipitate autonomous organizational approaches that require reframing, identity extension, and flexibility. This study argues that the Costa Rican case can be generalized to other labor-environmental coalitions if such alliances create simple, open structures that agilely adapt to external opportunity structures and expand frames that encourage collaborative autonomy and dualistic collective definitions.

This article shows how modified European power resources theories can be applied to Latin America to explain differences in the depth of policy reforms. It innovates on previous work on Latin American social policy by particularly examining the effect of unions and other civil society groups on the process of structural reforms (or lack thereof) in the health and pension sectors in Argentina and Brazil. Through a most similar system design, this analysis shows that the strength and support (or opposition) of organized civil society groups is a crucial condition to account for the enactment (or failure) of a given broad policy reform.

Mexico's 3 × 1 Program for Migrants is a matching grant scheme that seeks to direct the money sent by migrant organizations abroad to the provision of public and social infrastructure and to productive projects in migrants’ communities of origin. To this end, the municipal, state, and federal administrations match the amount sent by hometown associations by 3 to 1. This article explores the impact on the operation of the 3 × 1 of a particular facet of Mexican political life: its recent democratization and the increasing political fragmentation at the municipal level. The study finds a lower provision of public projects in jurisdictions where a high number of political parties compete. This finding casts doubt on the claim that policy interventions such as the 3 × 1 Program actually improve local public goods provision at the local level under increasing political competition.

Many existing explanations of electoral volatility have been tested at the country level, but they are largely untested at the individual party level. This study reexamines theories of electoral volatility through the use of multilevel models on party-level data in the lower house elections of 18 Latin American countries from 1978 to 2012. Testing hypotheses at different levels, it finds that irregular institutional alteration increases electoral volatility for all the parties in a country, but the effect is more significant for the presidential party. At the party level, the results show that while a party that is more ideologically distinctive than other parties tends to experience lower electoral volatility, party age is not a statistically significant factor for explaining party volatility.

Based primarily on declassified U. S. government documents, this study analyzes the U. S. effort to build a “showcase for democracy” in Guatemala following the U. S.-engineered regime change of 1954. The effort was doomed, for the U.S. government lacked both unity of purpose and the necessary continuous commitment at the top. The documents also demonstrate limited consideration of the sociopolitical constraints that U. S. policy objectives would face. This is clear from examining three key U. S. objectives: to eliminate the “communist threat”; to create a stable, legitimate, democratic government; and to develop a free, independent labor movement. Domination and the limits of power are equally central to understanding the relationship between the Eisenhower administration and Guatemala, a case study that also has more general utility.

Through the in-depth ethnographic study of one squatter neighborhood in Montevideo and its leader’s political networks, this article illustrates a successful strategy through which some squatter neighborhoods have fought for their right to the city. This consists of opportunistic, face-to-face relationships between squatter leaders and politicians of various factions and parties as intermediaries to get state goods, such as water, building materials, electricity, roads, and ultimately land tenure. Through this mechanism, squatters have seized political opportunities at the national and municipal levels. These opportunities were particularly high between 1989 and 2004, years of great competition for the votes of the urban poor on the periphery of the city, when the national and municipal governments belonged to opposing parties. In terms of theory, the article discusses current literature on clientelism, posing problems that make it difficult to characterize the political networks observed among squatters.

Most accounts of the turmoil that shook Argentina in 2001–2 focused on the harmful impact of the financial environment, imprudent policymaking, and institutional weaknesses. These explanations paid little attention to the cultural frames and cognitive patterns that underlie the connection between civil society and political society. Based on a discourse analysis of Internet forums and presidential speeches, this article argues that the Argentine crisis cannot be fully grasped without considering the link between collective behavior and ingrained conceptions of national identity. The analysis finds that national myths and definitional questions of national purpose are key factors in the way citizens behave in the context of an economic and political crisis.