This article explores practices of political clientelism in a native village in Mexico City during recent elections (2006, 2012), aiming to create more conceptual clarity and to demonstrate the usefulness of ethnographic approaches. Seen from the clients' and the brokers' perspective, political clientelism and vote buying are two different practices, carried out in different ways, with different degrees of legitimacy. The problem-solving network studied here bridges the gap between the citizen and the state, while the political operators hope to be rewarded with public employment. In this case, one candidate-patron changed parties a few months before the 2012 elections, and the electoral statistics provide indications of the numerical effectiveness of his clientelist network. Multiparty competition, instead of undermining clientelist practices, appears to “democratize” them.

Why do voters reward or punish the incumbent government? A number of studies show that economic performance often drives support, though the strength of this relationship is often conditional. This article suggests that economic voting may also be conditioned by the breaking and keeping of campaign promises. A number of presidents throughout Latin America have campaigned explicitly against neoliberal economic policies, only to pursue them aggressively once in office. This study argues that presidents who abandon their promises assert the executive's responsibility for the economy and raise the salience of economic issues in the next election. Consequently, voters respond rationally to these policy switches, rewarding them when they succeed and punishing them when they fail. Using data from 78 presidential elections across 18 countries, this study finds substantial evidence that broken promises exacerbate the consequences of poor economic performance and magnify the benefits of good economic performance.

This article analyzes the discourse of Brazil's foreign policy toward South America from 1995 to 2010 by means of quantifying, codifying, and weighting all speeches registered in the homogeneous and periodic official documentation of Brazil's Ministry of Foreign Affairs using a discourse analysis approach. The aim is to investigate discourse patterns in order to qualify Brazil's foreign policy as either hard power or soft power and to identify the orientation and differences in its discourse of foreign policy regarding each country of South America during the presidential terms of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002) and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003–2010).

This article seeks to explain why electoral support for the Venezuelan opposition has increased substantially, using Venezuelan public opinion survey data from LAPOP and an opt-in sample collected through the online vote advice application Brújula Presidencial Venezuela. It analyzes why Venezuelans who had either voted for Chávez or abstained in 2006 defected and started to support the opposition in subsequent elections. It proposes several reasons: negative voter evaluations of the economy, concern for public safety, and dissatisfaction with Venezuelan democracy. While the finding that negative policy evaluations boost support for the opposition aligns with theoretical expectations, this study finds a strong relationship between having different evaluations of the quality of democracy and supporting Chávez, which shows that the advocacy of two competing visions of democracy by the incumbent and the opposition also affects voting patterns in Venezuela.