This article analyzes the relationship between ideas, interests, and institutions in the 1996 reform of the civil service in Uruguay. Beneath the appearance of a process led by technocratic principles, the reform's agenda and content were shaped by legitimating principles, strongly institutionalized interests, and the political legacy of earlier failed reform attempts. Reformers sought a strategy of a reform “without losers,” which, instead of gathering support for adoption and implementation, sought to minimize opposition. This deliberately low-profile strategy left people unaware of the reform's achievements and thereby reinforced a political culture that has made resistance to change both a political virtue and an inescapable condition.

This article challenges two prominent explanations for military behavior: militaries, like other bureaucracies, will seek to maximize their budgets; and in the interest of maintaining professionalism, militaries will perform sovereignty missions—external defense and counterinsurgency—more intensively than policing functions. Running counter to these expectations, since 2000, Ecuador’s army has neglected its professional, lucrative mission of northern border defense, instead focusing on police work. The analysis applies organization theory to argue that the army’s minimal border defense efforts have been a way to maintain predictability for patrols on the ground, the part of the army that most directly performs the army’s core function of security. Specifically, the article traces how a contradiction has emerged in the army’s border mission. The contradiction has meant anything but predictability for the work of troops patrolling the border, compromising the mission.

How can policymakers reduce public fear of crime in Latin America? This study compares the effectiveness of “zero tolerance” and community-based policing strategies in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile. At the micro level, it assesses the links between fear of crime and social identity characteristics, contextual factors, the media, community participation, and other insecurities. It finds that citizens' economic, political, and social insecurities are the main determinants of their fear of crime. At the macro level, the study compares levels of public insecurity and finds that cities that employ community-based strategies to fight crime register lower levels of public fear of crime.

For years, nongovernmental terrorism in Latin America was considered an epiphenomenon of the Cold War. The persistence of this type of political violence in the 1990s, however, not only belied many assumptions about its causes but also led scholars to reexamine the phenomenon. This article investigates the validity of a number of hypotheses by applying a pooled time-series cross-section regression analysis to data from 17 Latin American countries between 1980 and 1995. Findings indicate that nongovernmental terrorist acts in Latin America are more likely to occur in poorly institutionalized regimes characterized by varying degrees of political and electoral liberties, a deficient rule of law, and widespread human rights violations. The analysis also shows that nongovernmental terrorism in the region tends to surface in cyclical waves; but it finds no association between economic performance or structural economic conditions and the incidence of nongovernmental terrorism.

Institutional effectiveness varies widely across Chile's 346 municipalities. Whereas some local governments seem to work with impeccable precision, others struggle to deliver basic services and welfare benefits to the population. This article seeks to explain why such variation exists; it combines quantitative and qualitative evidence to show how mayors can play a crucial role in building institutional effectiveness. The study focuses on the administration of Chile's municipal job placement offices. It finds that municipalities where mayors have held office for three or more consecutive terms exhibit stronger institutional capacity than those localities where electoral turnover is the norm. The analysis, therefore, underscores an interesting finding: electoral competition has the potential both to improve and to undermine administrative capacity.