In the 1990s, trade liberalization eroded the competitiveness of Caribbean economies as manufacturing export platforms. Proposed new economic strategies favored a shift from vertically integrated, transnationally based segment manufacturing to segments of knowledge-intensive industries and services. This strategy, however, reproduces the economic asymmetries associated with the core-periphery relation (low wages, value-added rates). Postindustrial technologies and economic strategies provide the opportunity to formulate alternative policies to overcome the shortcomings of peripheral postindustrialization and foster sustainable postindustrial development.

It is frequently argued that the key to “successful” economic liberalization is to marginalize interest groups that profit from existing regulatory regimes. This paper contends that some established interests can craft public policies to protect their rents in the new market setting. The state may shape the interests of social actors and create proreform constituencies out of old populist and interventionist groups. In Argentina, this coalition building was achieved by constructing reform policies that granted rents in new markets to business and organized labor and by deliberately avoiding unilateral deregulation in sectors where reform would hurt traditionally powerful actors. This argument is developed through a comparative analysis of policy reform in the labor market institutions and protected industrial sectors, areas where the costs of deregulation are said to be unavoidable for the established actors.

What determines how judicial institutions perform? Prominent theoretical approaches, such as international political economy, institutional rational choice, social capital, and structural theories, suggest that international economic actors, political competition, political participation, and poverty may all be important forces driving institutional behavior. This study analyzes these various theoretical approaches and uses qualitative and statistical analysis to compare judicial performance in the Mexican states. It provides evidence to support the institutional rational choice hypothesis that political competition generates judicial independence. Poverty, political participation, and an export-oriented economy seem to influence judicial access and effectiveness.

This paper analyzes the conditions in which the governments of Argentina and Brazil founded security institutions in the early 1990s, while they were democratizing. It advances the hypothesis that international cooperation in the security field is often linked to the evolution of civil-military relations. Civilian leaders in both countries established institutions and sought international participation deliberately to achieve civilian control and gain leverage over the military establishment, which they sorely distrusted. The need to stabilize civil-military relations at home was therefore the prime motivating force behind the emergence of security institutions in the Southern Cone. Three mechanisms were at work: omnibalancing, policy handling, and managing uncertainty. These mechanisms are derived from three different schools of thought: realism, organizational-bureaucratic models, and theories of domestic political institutions. Besides explaining the sources of nuclear bilateral cooperation, this argument also serves as a critique of two prominent theories in international relations that attempt to explain cooperation and peaceful relations among democracies: neoliberal insti-tutionalism and democratic peace theory.

This article explores competing definitions of equality embedded in contending visions for regional finance in the Americas. The U.S. free market–oriented project envisions extension of a NAFTA-like regulatory framework hemispherewide, promising Latin Americans better financial services, credit, and investment in exchange for strong financial property protections and (implicitly) dramatically reduced financial policy autonomy for their governments. Venezuela's vision of “Bolivarian” finance, exported to the Caribbean and the upper Andes, promotes assertive state management of both foreign and domestic investors, populist redistribution, and increasing reliance on nonmarket financial transactions. Brazil's regional financial project would unite South America through continentwide physical infrastructure and capitalist financial markets while retaining a role for public sector banks responsive to central government priorities. Brazil's approach shares with Venezuela's an emphasis on governments' need for financial policy authority and with the U.S. approach a concern for regulatory predictability and financial deepening.

Mercosur has survived several crises by resorting to presidential diplomacy, but it risks becoming an empty shell unless member states work to coordinate macroeconomic policies. Its survival depends on the outcome of domestic political struggles in Brazil and Argentina and on the harmonization of exchange-rate policies between the two countries. This article examines the Argentine-Brazilian “trade wars” provoked by successive devaluations of the Brazilian currency, aggravated in 2001 by the Argentine economic crisis. The social explosion in Argentina in December 2001 showed that domestic actors can successfully challenge proglobalization policies. To consolidate, Mercosur will have to address the democratic deficit while building supranational institutions and an effective dispute-settlement system.

After seven decades of Mexican judicial subordination, President Ernesto Zedillo in 1994 introduced judicial reforms that increased the independence and judicial review powers of the judicial branch. The willful creation of a judiciary capable of checking the power of the president and the ruling PRI appears to counter political logic; but it makes sense as a political “insurance policy” to protect the ruling party from its rivals. PRI politicians, newly unable to control political outcomes at state and local levels and unsure if they would continue to dominate the national government in the future, opted to empower the Mexican Supreme Court as a hedge against the loss of office. This article argues that the likelihood of the reforms' producing an empowered judiciary increases as the ruling party's probability of reelection declines.

Luna, Murillo, and Schrank (LMS) do our field a very valuable service by raising questions on the state of research on the political economy in Latin America and where it should be going. They cover a lot of ground in a short space, leaving a smorgasbord of issues to mull over, question, or endorse. To my mind, some of the most promising critiques in the memo are that there are gaps in the field and that those gaps are due in part to methodological fashion. Yet the discussion of gaps in LMS is somewhat ungrounded and underspecified. Closing the essay with a call for more research on democracy, development, state formation, inequality, and international linkages seems to miss the fact that most recent research is actually related to these five topics. Many readers probably would react by saying to themselves that they have been conducting some research in one or more of these areas.

This article examines the challenges and opportunities of indigenous justice for women in Ecuador. The legal recognition of indigenous justice is a major component of democratization in the region. Yet it also raises the risk of institutionalizing detrimental gender biases within indigenous forms of law. Taking the Remache case as a point of departure, this article identifies some of the fault lines in legal pluralism and women's conflicted relationship with it. Rather than rejecting customary law, however, women advocate for their rights within it—lobbying for gender parity within indigenous justice in the 2008 Constitutional Assembly. As women's support for indigenous justice relocates legal authority, it also challenges conventional practices of state sovereignty. To understand the attractiveness of legal pluralism for women and its impact on the state, this study explores the confines of feminist alliances, the accessibility of indigenous justice, and its implications for state sovereignty.

Beginning in the 1980s, social and political actors across Latin America turned to courts in unprecedented numbers to contest economic policies. Very different patterns of high court–elected branch interaction over economic governance emerged across the region, with crucial implications for economic development, democratic governance, and the rule of law. Building on both institutional and strategic accounts of judicial politics, this article argues that high court “character,” a relatively stable congeries of informal institutional features, channels interbranch struggles into persistent patterns. Two case studies illustrate the argument. In Argentina, the high court's political character encouraged a pattern of court submission to elected leaders marked by periodic bouts of interbranch confrontation over economic governance. In Brazil, the high court's statesmanlike character induced interbranch accommodation. This study demonstrates that even in politically unstable settings, institutional features can shape law and politics.

This article explores the conditions that allow judicial councils and impeachment juries to promote judicial autonomy. In theory, these bodies intervene in the appointment and removal of judges in order to reduce executive control over court composition, thereby promoting judicial independence. Using the case of Argentina at the federal and the subnational levels, this study demonstrates that competitive politics enhances the capacity of judicial councils and impeachment juries to bolster judicial autonomy. Interparty competition provides incentives for the executive to develop a meaningful system of checks and balances, which includes an independent judiciary that can check executive power. In contrast, monolithic party control—defined as a prolonged period of unified government under a highly disciplined party—permits the executive to maintain a monopoly on power and thereby control judicial appointments and removals.

The potential democratizing effect of political decentralization reforms has been a matter of substantial theoretical and empirical debate. This article analyzes the effect of local democratic institution building on the political attitudes and behavior of citizens living in small towns in Uruguay. More specifically, using a natural experiment design, this research seeks to establish the causal impact of recently established elections of local authorities on individuals' political engagement. It develops a comparative case study analyzing the consequences of this institutional innovation in two towns. It shows that individuals from the town where citizens have the opportunity to elect their local authorities have more positive attitudes toward politics than those from the town without such elections.