Existing research shows that the ideas of judges shape their behaviour. A natural next question to ask is, where do these ideas come from? Yet, there is little empirical evidence regarding the content and distribution of these ideas and even less evidence regarding the sources of these ideas, especially how ideas transfer or diffuse among judges. In this article, a survey of judges in the Mexican state of Michoacán generates original data on the attitudes and professional ties among these legal elites, and a mixed-methods design examines the diffusion of these attitudes along these ties, sequencing quantitative network analyses and interviews with judges to strengthen causal inferences. The core finding that the social structure of judges influences the attitudes judges hold contributes a valuable analytic complement to scholarship on comparative judicial behaviour, and clarifies our understanding of the role of judicial networks in strengthening democracy and the rule of law.

This article demonstrates that Bolivian tariff policy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not as passive as previously assumed and that the average tariff ratio remained high. However, high average tariffs coexisted for a long time with free-entry rights for different products which represented the main economic activity of certain Bolivian regions. Furthermore, the competitiveness of products was sometimes mostly determined by the geographic fragmentation of the country and the uneven pattern of railway construction rather by than tariffs. Therefore, beyond its high average level, the protectionist effect of tariffs was sometimes constrained by institutional and geographical restrictions.

This article offers a critical analysis of scholarship produced about Brazil's Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Econômico e Social (BNDES) since its founding, in 1952, to 2013. BNDES has performed an important, if changing and sometimes controversial, role in Brazil's economic development over the past 60 years, especially as provider of long-term finance. This analysis of almost 1,000 texts highlights discussions about its initial organisation and mission and how the role and activities of the bank changed over time, guided by turbulent national political and economic contexts. In spite of the bank's institutional importance, however, the literature is more narrative than analytical and of limited scholarly impact, dominated as it is by the bank's authorship. We argue for independent, evidence-driven, critical analyses of the effectiveness of this important institution in promoting Brazil's economic and social development.

Abandonment has become a performative idiom in Andean Peru, where it retains its purchase despite the investments of the state. Local development is tied to the desire to be governed. In spite of prolonged state presence, the villages’ relationship to authorities is continuously and persistently figured as one of abandonment: villages are abandoned because someone is deliberately holding them in such unfortunate conditions. To figure abandonment in village politics is to draw on this idiom as an effective means of both communicating the historical experience of governance and putting forward morally grounded claims to local authorities. The idiom of abandonment is therefore both effective and affective as a critique of governance and a claim to citizenship.