A new generation of social policies in Brazil and elsewhere in Latin America are being read by scholars as first and foremost the result of top-down initiatives by state elites and technocrats. This article explores what role, if any, middle-class professionals have played and how this role might be framed in analytical terms. The article examines the trajectory of two of the most important new social programs that target the poor in the city of São Paulo, Brazil: the family health program PSF and Renda Mínima. It compares the city-level reform dynamics that have shaped the trajectory of the programs over 18 years. It finds that networks of reformist middle-class professionals that traverse public and private institutions played a substantial role in the creation and evolution of the new programs.

Chile's 1989 constitutional reforms constituted a trade-off: the military gave up protected democracy provisions but acquired greater autonomy. The democratic opposition could accept or reject, but not modify, constitutional changes proposed by the outgoing dictatorship. This study addresses a very limited time period in the transition to democracy: the moment after the transition has been secured and transitional rules have been established. The dynamics of this period differ markedly from those in the larger democratic transition. The approach in this study complements alternative explanations of why the 1989 reforms benefited the outgoing dictatorship more than the incoming democratic government. Although the outgoing regime granted several opposition demands by reducing restrictions on political pluralism and eliminating barriers to political party activity, it also secured provisions that made the military more independent of civilian authorities than originally conceived in the 1980 Constitution.

This article argues that the increased participation of women in Peruvian politics in the 1990s and the advances made in some areas of their citizenship rights are connected to the strategies put in place by some sectors of the women's movement and to the openings provided by the Fujimori regime. Some of the impact of neopopulist rule on political institutions is shown to be positively related to women's increased opportunities during this period; yet the weak rule of law and the political use of the women's agenda by an increasingly questionable regime placed the women's movement in a complex political panorama. A disaggregated analysis of the politics of women's citizenship reveals that women from the popular sectors did not benefit from the same progress in their rights claims as women from the feminist movement or women in party politics.

As new political institutions provide Brazilians with unprecedented access to policymaking and decisionmaking venues, politicians and activists have undertaken reform efforts to promote institutional arrangements partly designed to expand accountability. The expansion of participatory decisionmaking venues may grant citizens greater authority, but these institutions could also undermine municipal councils’ ability to curb the prerogatives of mayors. This article analyzes participatory budgeting in São Paulo, Recife, and Porto Alegre to illustrate that mayors have differing capacities to implement their policy preferences, and this greatly affects how accountability may be extended.

This article explores the relationship between women's embodiment and political resistance in Argentina during 2002–2003. This was a time of socioeconomic crisis, influenced by neoliberal globalization. In this tumultuous context, women's bodies became embattled sites, shaken by the crisis but also actively engaged in constructing a new society and new forms of womanhood. Bodies are important to understanding political resistance, as reflected by the meanings attached to poner el cuerpo, a common expression in contemporary Argentine social movements. This article analyzes how women construct embodied subjectivities through their activist practices and how they define poner el cuerpo in terms of collective protest and daily activist work, coherence between words and actions, embodied sacrifice, and risk taking and struggle. As life in Argentina deteriorated because of the crisis, women's bodies represented not only suffering but also resistance and renewal.

Do Caribbean Basin states influence U.S. immigration policy? Although the terrorist attacks of September 2001 eventually derailed migration talks, before that time Mexico and the United States appeared poised to negotiate a major bilateral agreement, largely on Mexico's terms. Drawing on 88 detailed interviews conducted with Mexican and other Caribbean Basin elites, this article examines sending-state preferences for emigration and their capacity to influence policy outcomes. The informants considered migration to be the most problematic issue on the bilateral agenda, but also saw migration policy as relatively open to source-state influence. A case study of Mexican emigration policymaking details the national and transnational changes that make migration increasingly an inter-mestic policy issue.

After a decade of civil war and four consecutive conservative administrations, El Salvador's leftist FMLN won its first presidential election in 2009. How has public policy changed under this New Left government, and why? This article addresses the question in the area of public health care. An alliance of health sector leaders with both technocratic and diplomatic abilities capitalized on the policy window opened by the FMLN's electoral victory and worked within the parameters set by President Mauricio Funes, the FMLN, and civil society to universalize health care. The new minister of health, a professional highly esteemed inside and outside the country, was able to engage both a large social movement protesting neoliberal policy and an energetic health diplomat sent by the Pan American Health Organization. In designing its reform, this alliance benefited from international as well as “bottom-up” policy diffusion.

This article examines the dynamics of collective behavior in Santiago, Chile every September 11, the date of the 1973 coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. It uses a multiple-method strategy that includes participant observation, personal interviews, and content analysis of three major newspapers during the period 2003–8. The theoretical approach emphasizes time and space coordinates of specified social actors, sociocultural emergence, a limited range of dominant emotions, and dramaturgy to describe the complexity of ritualized commemorations. It shows that incidents occurring on this date are not primarily caused by the actions of social movement organizations. Moreover, the dichotomy of “day and night” used to understand the peaceful and violent commemorations is an oversimplification of a complex network of events, actors, and scenarios that has the effect of denying any legitimacy to actions that fall outside the state-approved practices.

Proponents of social service decentralization often claim that transferring service administration to lower levels of government facilitates increases citizen participation and governmental accountability while improving allocative efficiency and equity in service distribution. Using the cases of health and education decentralization in Chile, this article evaluates whether and under what conditions social service decentralization programs are likely to deliver on these promises. It discusses the tensions between equity and efficiency goals and how these may play out given different accountability mechanisms in local public choice, principal-agent, and real-world “hybrid” decentralization models. The case studies illustrate the difficulty of balancing the need for central standards and funding with local autonomy, but suggest that accountability mechanisms that emerged following Chile's transition to democracy in 1990 led to improvements in both equity and efficiency in decentralized service administration.

Structural reforms, institutional arrangements, and the dominant mode of political party-base linkage all militate against effective popular participation in Chilean local democracy. Structural reforms have constrained local leaders' resources as well as their policymaking prerogatives; institutional arrangements limit public officials' accountability to their constituents and citizens' opportunities for input in decisionmaking. The parties of the center-left Concertación have reinforced this vicious cycle by pursuing a mode of linkage with civil society designed to promote their electoral success with only minimal organization and participation by their grassroots constituents. Such conditions fit well with the desire of elites of the Concertación and the right to depoliticize civil society in order to preserve macroeconomic and political stability. Yet they leave in doubt the efficacy of popular participation and the strength of local democracy in Chile.

Why have some Mexican states proceeded faster than others in the revolutionary transformation of overhauling criminal procedure? Contributing an original index of criminal procedure reform across Mexico's 32 states from 2002 to 2011 and building on existing research on policy diffusion, this article seeks to answer this question. It finds that the 2008 constitutional reform at the federal level exerts a strong positive effect (federal mandate); being situated in a neighborhood of states that have reformed has a counterintuitive negative effect (spatial proximity); and having a governor from the same party as governors of other states that have reformed has a positive influence (network affinity). These findings yield a better understanding of the vertical, cross-level and horizontal, cross-unit diffusion of reform, with implications for understanding how to overcome challenges to criminal justice reform in Mexico, Latin America, and elsewhere.

Starting in the 1990s, reforms aimed at addressing the underrepresentation of women have been implemented in Colombia. However, research on the consequences of these reforms has been inconclusive. This article analyzes the influence of institutional variables on the proportion of nominated and elected women in Colombia between 1962 and 2014, at both the national and local levels of government, in three different institutional environments. Results confirm the influence of institutional change, indicating that decentralizing reforms and the introduction of the gender quota have had a positive impact on the proportion of women's candidacies and elections, but that the adoption of the open list negatively affected the percentage of elected women.

Authoritarian responses to rising violent crime rates have become a serious problem in Central America. Inspired by theories of agenda setting and media framing, this article examines the influence of news media coverage of crime on attitudes toward crime control. Using an original survey experiment, it tests the relationship between crime news, fear of crime, trust in government institutions, and support for authoritarian crime control measures in Guatemala. It finds that crime news influences support for authoritarian crime control via its effect on lowering citizen trust in government institutions. Exposure to crime news also affects self-reported victimization rates and levels of support for a presidential candidate promoting iron fist policies. These findings not only give insight into the relationship between crime news and political attitudes but also have implications for the rule of law and the politics of crime in new or fragile democracies.