This article utilises an ethnographic case study from Nicaragua to analyse people's everyday experiences of wartime violence and postwar privation. A great deal of literature dealing with political instability in war-torn countries has approached this issue by examining the societal manifestations of violence, while relatively less attention has been paid to people's everyday experiences of conflict and pain. This study focuses on the several waves of violence, displacement, and distress Nicaraguan people have suffered in recent years, beginning with their traumatic experiences of the civil war in the 1980s to the current postwar era characterised by political instability and socio-economic insecurity.

After long neglecting issues of citizen security and justice, democratisation theorists have recently begun to recognise the importance of the rule of law. Yet theorising the construction of state institutions of security and justice has tended to be piecemeal and divorced from broader theoretical debates. Using the case of post-war El Salvador, this article first argues that justice and security are tremendously important for the survivability and everyday relevance of democracy, given that crime is the chief threat to support for democracy.

Second, the article explores competing views of institutional reform. It finds support for path-dependent ‘mode-of-transition’ approaches that postulate heightened agency to adopt new rules and reform institutions during uncertain transition periods. However, more sceptical cultural and institutional theorists are right insofar as the formal removal of authoritarian structures and personnel is easier than the informal transformation of state practices and of society's attitudes about state services. The article also finds that security (i.e., military, intelligence and police) reforms operate differently to judicial reforms, which were more difficult and were less tied to the country's peace process. The interaction of these reform processes with a post-war crime wave helps explain why international observers consider El Salvador's reforms a success story, but many Salvadoreans do not.

This article compares the effects of tax reform on tax compliance in Argentina and Chile. After constructing three different comparative indexes of tax compliance, it proposes a comprehensive approach, which includes political, economic and sociological explanations to address the different behaviour of taxpayers in each country. It concludes that Chile was able to enhance better tax compliance because it has implemented a permanent, stable and rational policy that allowed for the development of an effective tax administration – a process never fully accomplished in Argentina. Tax reforms may enhance better compliance only after they reverse the entrenched evasion strategies of the taxpayers.

During the 1990s Peru's Alberto Fujimori and Argentina's Carlos Menem were the two main political successes of Latin American populism. Both completed two successive presidential terms, a unique accomplishment in the continent, and overcame the political instability that previously beset their nations. Scholars who analysed these and other contemporary regimes concluded that Latin American populism was flexible and resilient enough to adapt to a radically different environment from that of the 1930s and 1940s, when it had emerged as a major force. Some political scientists labelled as ‘neopopulism’ the newer variant of populism in the context of globalisation and widespread acceptance of neoliberal policies. These scholars stressed two salient features of neopopulism that contrasted with ‘classical populism’ of the 1930s and 1940s: its social base consisting of members of the informal economy, as opposed to the organised working class; and its implementation of neoliberal policies, as against the model of import substitution and state interventionism.