With remarkable success, Latin Americans have sought to impose their free trade policy agenda on a very reluctant and internally fractious United States. They have an ally in President George W. Bush, whose senior appointments notably support hemispheric trade integration even as political pressures sometimes have yielded protectionist outcomes. Bush's trade negotiator, Robert Zoellick, pursues a doctrine of competitive liberalization while accepting some linkage between trade and social and political goals. In negotiating the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), the administration will have to balance many domestic pressures without alienating Latin America. Ultimately, FTAA ratification will signal a new Western Hemisphere economic-security alliance for the twenty-first century.

The latest president in Latin America to adopt social funds on a large scale as an integral part of his government program has been Hugo Chávez Frías of Venezuela. Based on the literature on clientelism and social funds in Latin America, this article finds that Venezuela's latest experiments with social funds were influenced by political variables. It uses empirical data from the distribution of resources for some of the subnational misiones programs to show how, given increased levels of electoral competition and weak institutional constraints, the government used these funds clientelistically, even while distributing oil income to the very poor. Chávez's misiones served two very different purposes: to manipulate the political context and to distribute funds directly to the low-income population.

The ascendance of the left in Latin America has sparked new interest in the politicization of social class. What factors should scholars consider in choosing and constructing measures of social class in survey research? To what degree can measurement affect results? This article evaluates several common measures in terms of validity and reliability. It then shows that alternative measures produce strikingly different results when examining class voting in Venezuela’s 2006 presidential election. Simple measures of household income or wealth, which fare poorly in validity assessment, suggest minimal levels of class voting. Various socioeconomic scales that also incorporate data on education and, in some cases, weights for household composition, suggest very high levels of class voting. The article provides guidelines for evaluating measures and illuminates the debate on class voting in Venezuela. Scholars have reached contradictory conclusions while using different measures, but the decisive role of measurement has gone unrecognized.

Are international labor rights campaigns making a difference in Latin America? This article reveals that Dominican policymakers and bureaucrats are responding to foreign pressure by redoubling their commitment to a distinctively Franco-Iberian model of labor law enforcement, in which skilled labor inspectors use their discretion to balance society's demand for protection with the economy's need for efficiency. In so doing, they provide an alternative to traditional collective bargaining practices—which at least partly decouples both the intensity of the enforcement effort and the degree of worker protection from the level of unionization—and an example for the rest of the region. The article therefore concludes by reconsidering the Central American experience in light of the Dominican findings and discussing their joint implications for our understanding of administrative reform, industrial relations, and globalization, not only in the so-called CAFTA countries but in Latin America more generally.

This article argues that civil-military relations should be conceptualized not only in terms of democratic civilian control but also for effectiveness in implementing a spectrum of roles and missions. It also argues that achieving effectiveness requires institutional development as a necessary but not sufficient condition. Currently in Latin America, the focus in civil-military relations remains exclusively on civilian control. While there is a growing awareness of the need for analysis beyond asserting control over the armed forces, so far nobody has proposed or adopted a broader analytical framework. This article proposes such a framework, and employs it to analyze differences among four major South American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. The explanation for the differences identified by use of the framework is found in the incentives of civilian elites in Chile and Colombia, who have recognized serious threats to national security and defense.

This article advances the idea that coalition formation and maintenance in highly fragmented presidential regimes is not only crucial to overcoming policy deadlock, but in some cases, critical to ensuring government survival. To advance this argument, the article looks at the formation and demise of legislative coalitions in Ecuador between 1979 and 2006. The empirical data suggest that paradoxically, government coalitions became more difficult to sustain after the adoption of institutional reforms intended to strengthen the president's legislative powers. The adoption of those reforms, it is argued, undermined the legislative incentives to cooperate with the government and helped to accelerate coalition erosion. Not only did the reforms fail significantly to avoid policy deadlock, but in some cases they contributed to the early termination of presidential mandates. This article contributes to the study of coalition survival and how it is linked to policymaking.

This study analyzes the causes of executive-legislative deadlocks in the Dominican Republic in the period 1978–2005. Deadlocks are considered a pernicious element in (presidential) democracies. The study applies a combination of simple statistical techniques and process tracing to test four institutional hypotheses, which argue that certain institutional and party system constellations increase the probability of deadlocks. The hypotheses point to necessary causes of deadlocks, but their predictions are imprecise. Presidents' persuasive powers and coalition building have helped alleviate the deadlock problem. Analysis of the deadlock periods shows that the additional triggering or sufficient causes for deadlocks are either exogenous to the political institutions or related to the instability of coalitions in the nation's nonideological party system, which consists of three almost equal-sized parties.