This article assesses popular mobilization under the Chávez government's participatory initiatives in Venezuela using data from the AmericasBarometer survey of 2007. This is the first study of the so-called Bolivarian initiatives using nationally representative, individual-level data. The results provide a mixed assessment. Most of the government's programs invite participation from less active segments of society, such as women, the poor, and the less educated, and participation in some programs is quite high. However, much of this participation clusters within a narrow group of activists, and a disproportionate number of participants are Chávez supporters. This partisan bias probably reflects self-screening by Venezuelans who accept Chávez's radical populist discourse and leftist ideology, rather than vote buying or other forms of open conditionality. Thus, the Venezuelan case suggests some optimism for proponents of participatory democracy, but also the need to be more attuned to its practical political limits.

This article offers a critical assessment of the first postneoliberalism development framework that emerged in Latin America after 1990. The ability of neostructuralism to present an attractive narrative about a twenty-first-century “modernity with solidarity” is based on abandoning key tenets of ECLAC's structuralism and the thinking of Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado; namely, a focus on the distribution and appropriation of economic surplus and a framing of Latin American development problems in a world capitalist system. This article argues that Latin American neostructuralism's discursive strengths, as well as its analytical weaknesses, stem from the marginalization of power relations from key dimensions of the region's political economy. Since 2000, neostructuralism has exacerbated its descriptive, short-term perspective, further dulling its analytical edge, by focusing on policies that promote social cohesion and state intervention in the cultural and the socioemotional realm.

This article explains the twentieth-century Latin American shift from majoritarian to proportional representation (PR) electoral systems. It argues that PR was introduced when the electoral arena changed significantly and threatened the power of the dominant party. The adoption of PR was therefore an effort by the established party to retain partial power in the face of absolute defeat. Majoritarian systems remained in place when the incumbent party was strong enough to believe that it could gain a plurality of the votes despite electoral changes. An empirical analysis of 20 countries over 104 years (1900–2004) provides support for this argument.

Over the last decades, indigenous movements have propelled the political empowerment of historically marginalized groups in Latin America. The Maya struggle for ethnic equality in Guatemala, however, since its reawakening during the peace process, has reached an impasse. Based on field research consisting of dozens of elite interviews, this article analyzes the patterns of and obstacles to present-day Maya mobilization. It combines movement-internal and -external factors in an overarching theoretical argument about indigenous movements' capacity to construct strong collective voices. In the Guatemalan case, organizational sectorization, the lack of elite consensus on key substantive issues, and unclear alliance strategies compromise the effectiveness of horizontal voice among Maya organizations. These problems are exacerbated by the lasting effects of the country's unique history of violence and state strategies of divide and rule, preventing the emergence of a strong vertical voice capable of challenging the Guatemalan state.

This article investigates the performance of the new democracies of the third wave by developing a conceptual model of the core elements of liberal democratic government and by constructing a new Database of Liberal Democratic Performance. The performance is shown to be uneven in two main ways. First, the institutional attributes of democratic government advance while individual and minority rights languish. Second, particular institutional attributes coexist uncomfortably, as do particular rights. A comparison of Brazil, Colombia, and Guatemala complements the big picture drawn from the database and focuses on the specific contextual conditions that can create the general political contours of the wave. The uneven democratic performance of these cases is mainly explained by the combination of persistent oligarchic power and a largely unaccountable military. Yet uneven performance, and the imperfect rule of law in particular, does not necessarily prevent democratic survival.

This paper examines the process of reform in the Mexican telecommunications sector and makes comparisons with similar processes in the United States, New Zealand, and Brazil. Differences in policy responses are explained by the structure of the political institutions and the policy context in any given country. The policy lessons to be drawn from the regulatory experiences examined are that the sequence and the pace of reform influence policy outcomes. The speed with which the Mexican reform was carried out led to a lack of the institutional and legal support necessary to create a level competitive playing field. The permanence of a vertically integrated firm in the Mexican market, moreover, introduced consequential costs to the regulation of the industry. The results of this paper support the theoretical argument that privatization, in itself, does not guarantee the development of the sector and point to the need to attain a more effective regulation of competition in telecommunications.

This article assesses the contributions of studies in the rational choice (RC) tradition to scholarly understanding of Latin American politics. It groups some representative works according to their use of RC assumptions, and also reviews some of the major works in the institutionalist tradition. It argues that works in the RC tradition have neither forced a major rethinking of established theories nor filled major lacunae, although they have illuminated some phenomena that were only partly understood. The RC approach works best for narrow questions in which power relations and structural constraints are stable, whereas its essential assumptions become untenable in questions that involve shifting power relations among social groups and the state over time.

This article discusses the relationship between certain institutional regulations of voting rights and elections, different levels of electoral participation, and the degree of political instability in several Latin American political experiences. A formal model specifies the hypotheses that sudden enlargements of the electorate may provoke high levels of political instability, especially under plurality and other restrictive electoral rules, while gradual enlargements of the electorate may prevent much electoral and political innovation and help stability. Empirical data illustrate these hypotheses. A historical survey identifies different patterns of political instability and stability in different countries and periods, which can be compared with the adoption of different voting rights regulations and electoral rules either encouraging or depressing turnout.