Under what conditions may a social scientist legitimately pass judgment on the geopolitical climate of a region? The question is not easy to answer. First, it presupposes acknowledgement that there are value issues embedded in such judgments. Second, while a value-free attitude may indeed be attempted, such an attitude is difficult to achieve. All too frequently, evaluation of a region's “climate” is based on the values of the evaluator (and often without disclosure of this fact to unsuspecting readers).This is especially likely when the observer adopts a theoretical position, taking insufficient account of the tension between society and actors. Unfortunately, such theories give social scientists the false feeling that they have some sort of preferred cognitive vantage point. Theories which incorporate an “oversocialized conception of man” (Wrong, 196l) or, alternatively, an “overly psychological conception of society,” ignore the fact that people act and make decisions about those actions, both of which are based upon value-judgments, and which do not have a one-to-one correlation with any given social situation.

In recent years, Chile has arrived at a significant consensus regarding a number of subjects central to the country's development; and, notwithstanding certain important differences between the Concertación government and its opposition, there is considerable agreement regarding certain basic aspects of economic growth which will doubtless continue to be maintained in the mid-to-long run.

The official policy, as laid down by the government, is that Chile's economy is now oriented toward achieving growth with social equity, and that the way to reach those goals is by strengthening the country's insertion into the international economy, since the world is now moving towards a globalization which no country can afford to ignore. Given this new reality, the Chilean economy is also moving to take part in this process in a strategy that has proved fairly successful in recent years.

In recent years students of contemporary Argentine letters have begun to recognize the importance of the period 1946-1955 as one of crisis, of fundamental reassessment, and of generational strife. Though it would be an oversimplification to assign the cause of these trends to the political and social changes wrought by Juan D. Perón, the study of his regime—particularly as it affected cultural activity—can help put into clearer focus the confusing picture of literary groups, “generations,” and promociones that confronts the student of recent Argentine literature.

It should be emphasized that peronismo, for better or for worse, was more than an exclusively political movement: its influence was also farreaching in broad areas of popular culture, social standards, in matters of dress, speech, and in the use of leisure time. Its effects were complex, but on balance they all tended to produce a feeling of relaxation, a looseningup of formalities and traditional practices: stuffed shirts were displaced by descamisados; the normal work week was frequently broken up by strikes and government encouraged vacations; formal attire was no longer required at the opera; and many of the public parks that previously had, by some unwritten law, been considered the semi-private preserve of the middle and upper classes, became crowded with picnicking workers and their families.

A worldwide scheduled air transportation system for passengers, cargo, and mail has been created since World War II. In its global scope it is almost unique; the International Air Transport Association's only prototype is the Universal Postal Union, which for over a century has been the intergovernment vehicle for arranging the expeditious, reliable interchange of foreign mails between nations. Somewhat comparable to IATA in purpose but much more limited geographically, are such arrangements as those which provide for the transfer of electric power across the border between the United States and Canada, the coordination of highway, waterway, and railway traffic respectively in Europe, and the international telephone, cable, and radio services. The general public does not know—and has little need to know—what has gone on behind the scenes to create these facilities which in essence are large international public utility systems. A typical person's impressions would probably reflect his nationality. An American would probably assume that the individual components of such a utility system were privately owned and operated for commercial profit (except for the Postal Service). A European would tend to assume that electric power companies, railroads, airlines, telecommunications companies, and the Postal Service would all be owned by some government. Each would be substantially correct in his own context.

A backward glance, a thumbnail sketch of the Chilean press from the colonial period to 1823, sets the stage for the story of the press from 1823 to 1842. To begin with, Chile was off to a late start — 1747. Mexico had a press in 1540; Lima, 1584; Santo Domingo, 1600; and Paraguay, 1715. Second, the press was closely related with the struggle for independence. Foreign influences were felt through a number of colorful figures such as Mateo Arnaldo Hoevel, a Swedish refugee involved in the assassination of Gustave III, the North-American Procopio Polloc, and three North-American typesetters. Camilo Henríquez, a priest, was “the mentor of the revolution,” while the prócer, Bernardo O'Higgins, also played an important role.

On December 9, 1964, Ernesto Guevara de la Serna, Cuban Minister of Industries and the most powerful man in Cuba under the Castro brothers, flew from Havana to New York to address the United Nations. He lashed at the United States and predicted continental revolution, “That wave of heightening fury, of just demands, of rights that have been flouted, is rising throughout Latin America, and no one can stop that tide.” From New York Guevara flew to Algiers, and thus began a trek that would take him to countries in Africa, Europe and Asia. For three months Guevara traveled, talking to leaders of nations, preaching revolution and communism wherever he went.

A growing realization on the part of scholars and the general public has been the increasing interdependence of the world. Technology and communications have narrowed distance and time between diverse cultures, resulting in increased contact, if not increased cultural harmony.

The immigration of millions of persons to new homes has heightened this interdependence. In the Western Hemisphere not only the United States but also Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile received substantial numbers of immigrants.

Brazil, alone, was the recipient of more than 5 million immigrants. The majority of the immigrants, apart from those of the Iberian Peninsula, came from Germany, Italy, and Japan. Chronologically, the Germans arrived first, the Italians second, and the Japanese third. Numerically, Italy has contributed 1.5 million, Germany 300,000, and Japan 170,000 to date.

When James Baker, US Secretary of the Treasury, took the rostrum at the IMF-World Bank annual meeting in Seoul, in October 1985, and told 9,000 delegates from 149 countries that the debt crisis could only be solved by an even closer cooperation of all parties concerned, more money from commercial banks, an enhanced role for the World Bank, and more growth in the developing world, everybody sighed with relief.

The Baker declaration was significant as it had taken three years of muddling through crises for the Reagan Administration to recognize the debt crisis for what it is: a long term economic and political barrier to development that is slowly strangling world economic growth.

The ideational definition of populism proposes that a narrative is populist if it is characterized by a Manichean cosmology that divides the political community between a “people,” conceived as a homogeneously virtuous entity, and an “elite,” conceived as a homogeneously corrupt entity. Departing from that conceptualization, this work first investigates the specific stories that Andrés Manuel López Obrador uses to spread his populist worldview, which we call “storytelling.” We define the idea of storytelling as the art of telling a story where emotions, characters and other details are applied in order to promote a particular point of view or set of values. Second, we explore whether some of those stories produce greater negative affective polarization, here defined as the extent to which rival sociopolitical camps view each other as a disliked out-group. Findings suggest that some specific stories—in particular, what we call “stories of conspiracy” and “stories of ostracism”—indeed tend to induce more polarized attitudes among citizens.

This analytical essay proposes the notion of disjointed polarization to characterize the nature of polarization in contemporary Chile. In disjointed polarization, elite-level polarization does not lead to a successful electoral realignment. Disjointed polarization is thus consistent with a long-lasting crisis of representation in which a serial disconnect between politicians (pursuing different polarizing strategies) and a sizable fraction of the electorate persists, as voters remain alienated from old and emerging political elites. Because the structural changes that make disjointed polarization persist longer than expected in Chile today are widespread across Latin America, the essay speculates on the possibility that enduring disjointed polarization applies to other cases where neither a “populist realignment” nor “generative polarization” took place. Instead, disjointed polarization might reflect the onset of a new (non-partisan representation) normal.

The European Union has developed a significant range of democracy promotion initiatives in Latin America since the 1990s. The E.U.'s approach to democracy building has been seen to possess a number of strengths relative to U.S. policy, especially in connection with grassroots developmental imperatives. European policy itself, however, has a number of limitations. It has inadequately conceptualized the linkages between economic and political dimensions; it has insufficiently recognized the potential benefits of balancing bottom-up and top-down approaches. The E.U.'s influence over Latin American governments has remained more nebulous than that of the United States. European and U.S. policies in Latin America have both rivaled and complemented each other. Understanding this might inform both actors' democracy promotion efforts in the region.

This article examines bureaucracies using a novel dataset of Chilean central government employees from 2006 to 2020. Unlike perception-based sources, this dataset provides objective, disaggregated, and longitudinal insights into bureaucrats’ characteristics and careers. The authors validate it against official employment statistics and conduct an exploratory and descriptive analysis, presenting six descriptive findings about the Chilean bureaucracy that cannot be discovered using available aggregate data. The analysis reveals significant degrees of personnel stability and professionalization in the civil service, but with considerable rigidity in careers and substantial interagency heterogeneity in turnover, wages, and exposure to political cycles. These findings suggest that the Chilean national bureaucracy is mostly well developed along Weberian lines, though not uniformly so. These measurements also serve as a benchmark for comparing other Latin American bureaucracies in the future.