Although partisan bias – when an authority transfers discretionary public resources to a politically aligned receiver − has been extensively studied, less is known about how this practice is affected by the voting regime − compulsory or voluntary voting. In this article, I study partisan bias in Chile, using administrative data of transfers from the central authority to local governments, highlighting two relevant scope conditions: the electoral cycle, and electoral uncertainty caused by the adoption of voluntary voting. I found strong evidence of partisan bias, especially in election years and in electorally riskier municipalities. This suggests that the uncertainty introduced by this electoral reform induced politicians to allocate a large share of resources to risky municipalities, because such resources would play a more significant role in the electoral outcome. Overall, these results imply that voluntary voting has a large impact on the way that resources are allocated across subnational units.

The historiography of the Nicaraguan workers' movement suffers from two basic problems: an extreme paucity and dispersion of primary sources and a tendency to compensate with analytic frameworks for what is lacking in substance. The triumph of a revolutionary movement in 1979, genuinely interested in allowing the Nicaraguan people to become ‘dueños de su historia’, has stimulated the search for primary source materials and has awakened the interest of historians in the trajectory of class struggle in Nicaragua. However, if at this moment, we do not confront fundamental methodological problems this new search for the past will offer precious little illumination on the problems of class development and conflict in contemporary Nicaragua.

The meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of the American Republics in Rio de Janeiro in 1942 was both the end of the series of inter-American meetings called in order to formulate an ‘American attitude’ toward the events in Europe and also the formalization of the war-time co-operation which followed. But, at another level, it was a clash of the foreign policies of Brazil, Chile, Argentina and the United States which both typified and shaped inter- American relations well into the 1950s. This discussion, which is largely based on United States goveernment documents, examines the inter-meshings of these foreign policies at the Rio meeting and the immediate aftermath of that conference.

This article explores the relation between transatlantic immigration and wealth accumulation in late colonial Mexico City, the chief destination for transatlantic emigrants from Spain. In contrast to the prevalent focus in the literature on networks and transatlantic ties, I argue that economic mobility and thus entry into the upper classes of colonial society depended on the social background of immigrants in their home regions in the peninsula. Human capital rather than social capital was the key determinant explaining why certain regional groups, notably the Basques, succeeded economically as merchants and miners, challenging traditional notions of networks and interconnectedness in Atlantic history and beyond. The findings are grounded in quantitative datasets of Spanish immigrants, overcoming both the biases of anecdotal sources and the methodological intricacy of disentangling the causal relationship between wealth accumulation and social ties.

Even at first glance, one can see remarkable similarities in the topography, geography and patterns of land use of the west coast republics of South America and of the states of Australia which stretch along that continent's eastern and southeastern shores. Not only are the latitudinal parameters comparable, but similarities in climate and patterns of agriculture abound. The resemblances are particularly defined as we consider the geographical extravagance of Chile and compare it alone to the eastern edge of Australia.

Social scientists make a fundamental assumption about the nature of the relationship between theory and fact. For them, theories are seen, not as guides to individual behaviour, but as tools for the clinical investigation of social processes. The end of this search is a better theory. A theory has most chance of acceptance if it seems elegantly to order a very large number of hitherto unrelated facts.