Import substitution industrialization was the postwar development policy of choice in Latin America, and the diagnosis of its weaknesses heavily influenced subsequent policy recommendations. Yet few attempts have been made to test the predominant sectorally based explanation of ISI's failings against alternatives. This article develops a model of direct (clientelistic) linkages between politicians and their supporters and tests it against the standard sectoral model based on indirect linkages. Examining three features of process (economic sector influence, legislative voting, and exchange rate policy) and analyzing the distributional implications of the overall policy in Brazil, this article demonstrates that a clientelist model provides a more complete and coherent account of the empirical record. By demonstrating that variation in linkage type alters the political constraints on policy choice, the analysis also provides new insight into enduring puzzles, including the better performance in East Asia.

The Guatemalan military dominated the country's politics for nearly half a century, but its political power declined during the 1990s. Democratically elected presidents Alvaro Arzú (1996–2000) and Alfonso Portillo (2000–2004) subordinated the armed forces to their authority and thereby gained an unprecedented opportunity to reduce the role of the military and institutionalize democratic civil-military relations. Unfortunately, neither of these tasks was accomplished. An analysis of the level of democratic control, combining Alfred Stepan's military prerogatives indicators with a newer system of measurement and classification designed by Samuel Fitch, shows that the armed forces retained substantial institutional autonomy and de facto legal immunity when Portillo left office in 2004. The role of the military in Guatemalan society, moreover, expanded again under Portillo after declining under Arzú. This study finds that the lack of sufficient civilian commitment to reform, rather than resistance from the armed forces, was the principal cause of these disappointing outcomes.

This article explores the role of environmental concerns in free trade areas made up entirely of developing countries. It surveys the environmental institutions of Mercosur, the Common Market of South America, and its member states. It also presents a case study of the recently terminated negotiations over a regional environmental legal instrument as an example of collective environmental decisionmaking. The article concludes that all the environmental components of the agreement are weak, and have even been downgraded in recent years. Even so, national environmental protections have increased during the years of the Mercosur agreement, and some regional actors are poised to join their northern counterparts in opposition to any potential free trade area of the Americas that does not include environmental provisions.

This article uses the concept of entrepreneurial powers to discuss how and under what circumstances Brazil successfully accomplishes its goals in international crises. The concept of entrepreneurial power focuses on systematic evidence of middle-power behavior and its relation to foreign policy tools. Brazil resorts to three agency-based foreign policy tools that are the substance of its entrepreneurial power. These instruments are always mediated by a structural condition, the dominant power pivotal position in the crisis. This study applies qualitative comparative analysis methodology to 32 international crises since the early 1990s in which Brazil played a role. It finds that for regional crises, the use of only one agency-based tool is sufficient for success, regardless of the dominant power position; and for global crises, the use of only one agency-based tool is a necessary and sufficient condition for Brazil to accomplish its goals, despite the dominant power position on the issue.

Unequal income distribution in Latin America and the Caribbean is linked to unequal distributions of human and physical assets and differential access to markets and services. These circumstances, and the accompanying social tensions, need to be understood in terms of traditional fragmenting forces; the sectors of the population that experience unfavorable outcomes are also recognized by characteristics such as ethnicity, race, gender, and physical disability. In addition to reviewing the general literature on social exclusion, this article surveys several more specific topics: relative deprivation (in land and housing, physical infrastructure, health and income); labor market issues, including access to labor markets in general, as well as informality, segregation, and discrimination; the transaction points of political representation, social protection, and violence; and areas in which analysis remains weak and avenues for further research in the region.

Extant studies have documented a positive correlation between country participation in International Monetary Fund–sponsored programs and collective protests in Latin America. However, anecdotal evidence indicates that there is a great deal of variation in the number of protests in recipient countries across the region. This article provides a theoretical argument that explains how the fund interacts with the level of party system institutionalization to affect the level of protest. The main prediction is that the level of protest decreases in recipient countries when the level of party system institutionalization is high. Empirical results from a sample of 16 Latin American democracies observed from 1982 to 2007 provide strong statistical and substantive support for the main hypothesis.

Like many new democracies, Argentina has struggled with contentious movements that have challenged its precarious stability. Two very different sectors have led particularly powerful opposition movements: the military—associated historically with the abuse of power—and the unemployed workers, with important support from prestigious human rights organizations. This article looks both at how the political standing of the sector (military versus civil society) influences policy choices and at how these policy choices influence whether opposition movements remain mobilized and contentious. It argues that situation-alleviating policies—those that successfully address interests of the sector as a whole—tend to be more successful in defusing contentious movements than policies relying on coercion, concessions, or co-optation of mobilized opposition groups. Situation alleviation depletes the contentious groups of possible recruits, while policies targeting the mobilized opposition may inadvertently motivate those actors to remain mobilized.