For only the fifth time since 1978, the Dominican Republic held concurrent elections in 1994 for candidates at every level of government — presidential, congressional and municipal. The most important of these contests, for the presidency, saw the incumbent, Joaquίn Balaguer, returned to the post he has held for so long, defeating his principal challenger, José Francisco Peña Gόmez, by a margin of 22,281 votes. The most recent election, on 16 May 1994, proved to be just as traumatic and incident-prone as those that preceded it, dating back to the first democratic election in 1978. Unlike the last election (in 1990), however, in which Balaguer also won a narrow victory, this time the charges of electoral fraud were well-documented and the accuracy of the tally widely disbelieved, not just domestically but internationally as well.

This article explores practices of political clientelism in a native village in Mexico City during recent elections (2006, 2012), aiming to create more conceptual clarity and to demonstrate the usefulness of ethnographic approaches. Seen from the clients' and the brokers' perspective, political clientelism and vote buying are two different practices, carried out in different ways, with different degrees of legitimacy. The problem-solving network studied here bridges the gap between the citizen and the state, while the political operators hope to be rewarded with public employment. In this case, one candidate-patron changed parties a few months before the 2012 elections, and the electoral statistics provide indications of the numerical effectiveness of his clientelist network. Multiparty competition, instead of undermining clientelist practices, appears to “democratize” them.

Theoretically based on Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, this study examines three cases of rupture or exit by Mexican presidential contenders, in 1940, 1952, and 1988, and one “noncase,” in 1999, with a view to how dissidents' strategies shape political institutions. Mexico's PRI-dominated political system depended on its leaders' ability to create an equilibrium based on mutual incentives to remain loyal to the regime.

How does political competition shape institutions that govern the expansion of social policy subnationally? Brazilian states have shown a surprising variation in the design of their public health institutions, which regulate the distribution of health resources and citizen access to public health care. While many states have experienced fragmentation, some have remained highly centralized and discretionary, and only a select few have established a coordinated system based on power sharing and rules-based distribution. Accounts that link public health care expansion to federal government imposition, the presence of the public health care movement, and leftist parties cannot fully explain this variation. Instead, in the three Brazilian states examined here, the nature of subnational political competition triggered different institution-building strategies. The findings indicate that plural political competition yielded incentives for limiting state-level discretion and for sharing power with municipal governments, while political concentration reinforced the attraction to centralized and discretionary policymaking.

Youth politics in contemporary Latin America diverge from those of previous generations. Increasingly decoupled from parties, unions, and the state, young people glide seamlessly across previously assumed boundaries: culture and politics, individual and organization, subjectivity and collectivity, virtual and “real.” This article presents findings from a systematic review of research on youth politics and demonstrates the new direction through three main categories: repression, incorporation, and exclusion, relationships between state institutions and youth identities; generational, cultural, and digital lenses, the innovative trends for theorizing current patterns of youth politics; and unsettling politics, the fusion and diffusion of youth political dexterity. The article concludes by highlighting current strengths and proposing future steps to build on this new direction.

This article presents a short summary of the world-systems perspective on globalization as relevant to considering the possibilities and probabilities of Guatemala’s prospects for democracy and development. Guatemala’s structural position in the larger global political economy is examined. The strategy of “globalization from below” as popular movement alliances’ response to neoliberal corporate globalization is considered in the Guatemalan context.

Venezuelan politics presents a puzzle to students of Latin America, and to anyone concerned with the comparative analysis of democratization and democracy. As the major countries of Latin America (and the majority of scholars) worked their way from authoritarianism through “transitions”to democracy and hopefully toward democracy’s consolidation, Venezuela moved in the opposite direction. After decades of political stability and social peace, beginning in 1987 Venezuela’s democratic order was shaken by widespread unrest and citizen disaffection, the decay of key parties and state institutions, attempted coups, and the impeachment and removal of the president in 1993.

The Salvadoran and Guatemalan cases correspond to a new model of public security that is widely shared across Latin America. The more localized processes of demilitarization in the two countries, moreover, appear to share a similar dynamic. In the midst of real reforms, however, the deterioration of public security as directly experienced by much of the population is cause for worry. An examination of the reforms established in the peace accords leads to an interpretation of these experiences in a comparative regional framework.

In the last 20 years, two broadly defined theories have sought to explain the relationship between economic inequality and redistribution. The well-known hypothesis set forth by Meltzer and Richard (1981) states that larger income differences between the median voter and the average income earner should increase redistributive pressures in democratic regimes. Power Resource Theory (PRT), by contrast, argues that income inequality breeds power inequality and should dampen redistribution. Critical to both theories is the translation of redistributive interest into policy signals. This article considers protests as signals that increase the salience of inequality among voters. Results provide evidence that protests facilitate more progressive cash transfers in highly unequal environments but have modest effects in more egalitarian ones.

Amid the aura of urgency in which many today view hemispheric affairs, criticisms of the Organization of American States are legion. In both Latin America and the United States, there are growing numbers who believe that the only viable alternative to complete systemic collapse is a radical organizational transformation. For critics of the inter-American organization, there has been a sharp predilection to place the burden of their argument on either a cataloguing of bureaucratic ills or a polemic attack upon the problems and inconsistencies of United States involvement. And certainly various North American actions and policies have helped contribute to the present precarious position of the OAS.

Although one recent influential textbook on Latin America has characterized the decades immediately following the achievement of independence as “the long wait,” in Mexico at least, these years were marked by an intense political and ideological conflict which defined the direction of its future (Halperín Donghi, 1969: 134-206). The most perceptive student of the epoch, Edmundo O'Gorman (1960) traces within the confused welter of pronunciamientos and manifestos two great forces: the search for a providential leader and the desire for some form of democratic populism. An analysis of ideology cannot be separated from a consideration of society. The presidential power created by Benito Juárez and perpetuated by Porfirio Díaz operated outside the strict legal confines of the Constitution. At the same time, the failure of classic liberalism to express popular aspirations retarded social reform for over half a century. Without the sanction of theory, few such demands could be translated into law.

This article investigates the impact of trade-based social clauses on labor rights enforcement. Drawing on insights from recent theoretical work on transnational advocacy networks and labor rights, the study examines how transnational groups and domestic actors engage the labor rights mechanisms under the NAFTA labor side agreement, the NAALC. A statistical analysis of original data drawn from NAALC cases complements interviews with key participants to analyze the factors that predict whether the three national mediation offices review labor dispute petitions. This study suggests that transnational activism is a key factor in explaining petition acceptance. Transnational advocates craft petitions differently from other groups and, by including worker testimony in the petitions, signal to arbitration bodies the possibility of corroborating claims through contact with affected workers.

The October 1983 crisis in Grenada left little doubt that the Soviet and Cuban presence had been expanding in the Caribbean basin. But the October crisis did not answer questions regarding the extent of their actual influence there, nor the direction it might take in the future, nor even what the most appropriate U.S. policy responses should be to that influence elsewhere in the region. Therefore, in the wake of the U.S. occupation of Grenada and the evidence it uncovered about the degree of Soviet and Cuban activity there, it is useful to examine the kind of situations that have encouraged the Soviets to expand their presence and/or influence in Latin America. At the same time, it equally is useful to examine the limitations or constraints on such an expanded presence or influence.

Clearly, Soviet policy in Latin America has been the product of two conflicting forces or tendencies.

Since President Hugo Chávez was first elected in 1998, the Venezuelan opposition seems to have alternated between institutional and extra-institutional power strategies at different junctures. To help explain this pattern, this article constructs a novel theoretical framework from critical readings of both general theory and accounts of the Venezuelan opposition. It proposes that the strategies should be viewed as dialectical rather than discrete. On this basis, it finds that while the Venezuelan opposition has undergone important changes toward institutionalization in its composition, discursive emphasis, and strategic direction, close readings of opposition texts, interviews with opposition actors, and observations of street demonstrations all reveal continuity with previous rupturist and extra-institutional tendencies. Both strategies therefore must be considered to achieve a fuller, more comprehensive vision of the Venezuelan opposition; this conclusion has important theoretical implications for the study of opposition in the wider region.

This brief article is designed to highlight an unfortunate discrepancy in the field of Latin American political economy. The field’s raison d’être has never been more compelling. Latin American societies have simultaneously been experiencing profound transformations—including democratic consolidation, demographic transition, and the growth of identity politics—and a palpable sense of déjà vu animated by the recovery of commodity prices and the return of populism. In a nutshell, the region is undergoing a deep economic transformation, which takes place in the context of unprecedented levels of political participation.

Latin American evangelicals have become a common presence in legislative politics. Brazil exemplifies the potential clout of evangelical legislators and a troubling tendency toward political corruption. This article explains the quality of evangelical interest representation by focusing on church organization and theology, arguing that evangelicals approach electoral politics via three different modes: rejection; participation as individual, politically engaged believers; and engagement as church corporate project. While individual participation is unrelated to political corruption, the corporate model fosters machine politics, characterized in Brazil by resource-based politics, narrow voter bases, and frequent party switching. We link these characteristics to evangelical involvement in two corruption scandals that occurred during the administration of President Lula da Silva. The analysis shows the central role of evangelical organization and theology in shaping interest representation and suggests future duplication of the church-as-political-machine model, particularly where the “Prosperity Theology” variant of pentecostalism is strong.

Although the different phases of each country's development are far from being synchronous, in general Latin America's growth in the postwar period began to change pace and pattern around the mid- 1960s, then again following the oil crisis of 1973, which ushered in a slowdown of the world economy, only to plunge into crisis anew early in the 1980s.

As discussed in Altimir (1994a), during the 1950s and 1960s, growth — i.e., at substantial rates, greater than 2%per capita — was either unequal (as in Brazil or Chile in the 1960s) or else involved an increase in inequality in the 1950s that was followed by a phase of inequality that remained essentially unchanged throughout the 1960s (as in Argentina, Colombia or Mexico).

Over time, the Organization of American States has become institutionally and normatively more capable of defending democracy in the region. Yet the OAS is as selective in its interventions on behalf of democratic promotion today as it was in the early 1990s. To explain this puzzle, this study disaggregates democratic dilemmas according to issue areas, threats, and contingencies. It finds that the OAS responds more forcefully when the problem presents a clear and present danger both to the offending state and to other members. As threats become weaker or more ambiguous, the OAS tends to act more timidly, unless domestic constituencies cry out for its assistance or the United States puts its full weight behind the effort. Case study capsules provide empirical evidence to illustrate these arguments.

Latin America has been at the forefront of the expansion of rights for same-sex couples. Proponents of same-sex marriage frame the issue as related to human rights and democratic deepening; opponents emphasize morality tied to religious values. Elite framing shapes public opinion when frames resonate with individuals’ values and the frame source is deemed credible. Using surveys in 18 Latin American countries in 2010 and 2012, this article demonstrates that democratic values are associated with support for same-sex marriage while religiosity reduces support, particularly among strong democrats. The tension between democratic and religious values is particularly salient for women, people who live outside the capital city, and people who came of age during or before democratization.

The ability to read and write in some language is of fundamental importance and is usually considered one of the prime indicators of the social and economic accomplishments and potential of a nation. The Ecuadorian scholar Gonzalo Rubio Orbe declares that "among the minimum and elementary requirements of the cultural capacity of the population for general development, and, in particular, economic development, nothing less than the elimination of illiteracy can be demanded."