A significant shortcoming in Latin American transitions to democracy has been the failure of some subnational units to follow suit, leading to the emergence of authoritarian enclaves. Recently, however, some of these nondemocratic regimes have moved toward a political opening. In this respect, the state of Bahia in Northeastern Brazil is intriguing. Antônio Carlos Magalhães and his associates, known as carlistas, were in office between 1970 and 2006, when Jaques Wagner, from the Worker's Party (PT), won the gubernatorial election. While the ascent of the PT was saluted as spearheading Bahia's democratization, numerous observers have signaled important elements of continuity, including personalism, clientelism, and top-down decision making. What changed and what didn't is thus a pertinent question. To answer it, I use Robert Dahl's procedural definition of democracy (completed and updated by more recent scholarship) as the guiding criterion to compare carlista and PT rule in Bahia. I conclude with a broad reflection on subnational democratization in Latin America.

¿Cuáles son las condiciones bajo las cuales surgen los gobiernos de corte populista? A partir de un enfoque clásico de representación política (Pitkin 1985) y con datos de encuestas de opinión (Latinobarómetro 1996–2008), este trabajo analiza (1) en qué medida los deficientes resultados de las políticas públicas y la ausencia de rendición de cuentas aumentan la desconfianza ciudadana en las instituciones representativas y cómo esta desconfianza contribuye al surgimiento de liderazgos populistas como una forma de resolver un problema de principal y agente, a través de una rendición de cuentas simbólica. Según se propone aquí, en un inicio los liderazgos populistas contribuyen a disminuir la distancia de los ciudadanos con el sistema político y aumentan la calidad de la representación, en especial la percepción ciudadana de una rendición de cuentas efectiva a través del vínculo directo del pueblo con el líder. Paradójicamente, el aumento de esta dimensión informativa y argumentativa de la rendición de cuentas va de la mano del deterioro progresivo de la dimensión electoral o sustantiva, haciendo difícil su sostenibilidad —analítica y empírica— desde el enfoque de la teoría democrática.

O Brasil vem experimentando nas duas últimas décadas mudanças significativas com a queda da desigualdade, estabilidade económica, ampliação das oportunidades no mercado de trabalho formal e ampliação da escolarização. O artigo procura analisar o acesso ao ensino superior dos jovens de 18 a 24 anos por raça e renda com o objetivo de provocar uma discussão sobre as desigualdades no contexto de expansão educacional e os alvos das ações afirmativas no ensino superior em vigor no país, em especial a adoção recente da reserva de vagas nas Instituições de Ensino Superior Federais. Os dados são oriundos da Pesquisa Nacional de Amostra Domiciliar (PNAD), realizada pelo Instituto Brasileiro de Estatística e Geografia (IBGE), nos anos de 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008 e 2011, anos que marcam momentos específicos das mudanças ocorridas nas desigualdades e no sistema educacional brasileiro.

Fiscal history has become one of the most active new fields of research on colonial Spanish America. This trend has resulted from a number of recent breakthroughs, most notably the reconstruction of colonial treasury records and the appearance of the first revisionist studies based on the new data. These works are challenging traditional views, particularly the general understanding of the colonial economic experience and the evolution of imperial ties. Indeed, the fiscal series now being made available, if properly supported by qualitative research and regional studies, may affect seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historiography as notably as the demographic works of the Berkeley school affected sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historiography.

This article treats pre-1959 Cuban cookbooks as interlocutors to see how the struggle to define Cuba's racial and national body can be found in efforts to characterize what goes into that body by setting a close textual analysis of the books alongside an account of their historical context. In examining recipes, visuals, and nonrecipe prose, this article explores how later authors attempt to represent Cuba as white and European by ignoring and trivializing the culinary contributions of nonwhite Cubans and particularly Afro-Cubans, a move that encounters resistance in the ongoing persistence and popularity of Afro-Cuban cuisine. As an interface between political economic processes and personal choice, the author argues that cookbooks act as a site for assertions of racial and national identity in which some authors embarked on a racial project to civilize the consumer by civilizing cuisine via the cookbook, thus illustrating social fissures, tensions, and contradictions that climaxed in the 1959 revolution.

The Catholic Church in Latin America was until the mid-1960s one of the most ignored topics of research in a neglected continent. It was not only overlooked by North Americans and Europeans; stranger still, it received only cursory attention from Latin American scholars. The meagre consideration it did attract was overwhelmingly historical in nature and frequently came from authors promoting or attacking particular religious beliefs and institutions. The controversy in Colombia over the persecution of the Protestants (Goff, 1965), and the dramatic events caused by the reactions of the Church to the Mexican revolution (Brown, 1964), stimulated a literature that was at times extremely biased.

Yet, it is not easy to explain the neglect of the Church in the literature since, unlike peasant leagues or guerrilla movements, it is not a novelty in the region. The Church was founded simultaneously with the Iberian societies; much of the culture of Latin America derives from within the Church and has evolved in relationship to it; social fields such as education and charity have always been heavily influenced by Church doctrine and organizations; and the vast majority of the population are declared Catholics. In addition the Church is a highly structured organization in a region of low organizational development; in all countries Catholic groups have been politically active and in some cases assumed the form of Christian Democratic parties (Williams, 1967) which have held power; and the political models currently being formulated in Brazil and Peru would appear to owe much of their content to traditional Catholic principles of hierarchy, paternalism, and corporate identity.

The specific contribution of this study is to explore how a communitarian lifeworld. prepares the ground for practices of political clientelism without requiring the foundational favor“ noted in other contexts. Based on the encounter between ethnographies from two different communities of the Mesoamerican tradition in Mexico, the article argues that this lifeworld is forged by the habitual ways in which most collective tasks are carried out, that is, by forming and participating in networks. First, we offer a concrete description of the operation of two problem-solving networks of political clientelism in these communities. These networks are considered legitimate since they appear to be part of the communitarian practices. Second, we observe that the state often fails to reach out to the citizens with many social benefits, and we maintain that the problem-solving networks bridge the gap between the citizens and the state. Third, we argue that the ethnographic approach has been of paramount importance in reaching these findings, which are hardly attainable without this method. We consider that the workings of the clientelist networks represent a deep expression of people's communitarian lifeworlds.

When studying the politics of taxation it is important to evaluate changes to the tax code in terms of rates, bases, and exemptions instead of just revenues. With that objective in mind, we have compiled a more comprehensive database of tax reforms for Latin America. In this article, we present a description of the database as well as the stylized facts. We also explore the economic and political determinants of reform such as the role of the economic and politico-institutional variables, and compare the results to the consensus. We find two interesting results. First, determinants of reforms seem to have changed over the years as democracies have solidified. Second, disaggregating reforms in various ways is a better strategy for understanding the mechanisms behind tax reforms than looking at the overall number of reforms. Having developed an exhaustive database that allows such disaggregation we provide motivation for future research on this topic.

Strikes have important effects on the workers and employers directly involved as well as significant indirect effects on consumers, economic growth, electoral outcomes, policy making, and political stability. Moreover, strikes form patterns that illuminate long-term social processes, the dynamics of economic and political conflict, and the functioning of industrial relations systems. Because strikes are important as both causes and symptoms of social change, an extensive literature has arisen on patterns of strike activity. To date, however, this literature has focused mainly on advanced industrial countries. To prepare the way for analyses of strike patterns in Latin America, more research is needed on the ways in which Latin American strike statistics have been collected and reported. This research note will report the results of such research for Argentina. The first section will assess the quality of strike statistics covering a century of Argentine history. The second section will compare four sources of data on Argentine strikes since the return to democracy in 1983, focusing on particularly useful data published by the Consejo Técnico de Inversiones (CTI) in Buenos Aires. The third section will make the CTI statistics available for research and will employ them to assess some widely held assumptions about labor militancy in Argentina during the period from 1984 to 1993.

This essay reviews and analyzes recent north american writing on united States-Latin American relations, particularly on the Alliance for Progress. It does not attempt to summarize or evaluate the Alliance's history as such, nor does it deal with Latin American perspectives on the Alliance (or more generally on inter-American relations), though I hope to treat these subjects in future works. What this article does instead is to analyze the dwindling North American literature on the Alliance for Progress, as a means of illuminating the state of scholarship in this country on United States-Latin American relations. I shall draw on available writings to illustrate my major theme, which is that United States analysts of inter-American relations tend to adopt either of two alternative perspectives. These perspectives, which I will call “liberal” and “radical” (using both words without quote marks hereafter), differ sharply in their sets of assumptions about the nature of United States-Latin American relations and, more generally, about politics in America, North and South. Each perspective provides insights for interpreting the Alliance and for explaining other aspects of inter-American relations; neither, by itself, seems to me satisfactory. In the final section of this essay, I shall attempt to sketch out a complementary “bureaucratic politics” perspective, one that is usually missing from both liberal and radical accounts, and suggest that this third perspective may be useful for analyzing United States policy toward Latin America.

Although the history of Latin American women has emerged only recently as a dynamic field of research, it is already shedding light on a range of social and cultural issues. Thirteen years ago, Ann Pescatello edited the first anthology of Latin American articles on gender issues, Female and Male in Latin America. One of her greatest contributions was a hefty interdisciplinary bibliography listing not only secondary sources but primary documents as well. In 1975 and 1976, Meri Knaster's excellent bibliographies appeared. “Women in Latin America: The State of Research, 1975” surveyed the research centers in Latin America with active publishing programs and assessed the state of the art. Women in Spanish America: An Annotated Bibliography from Pre-Conquest to Contemporary Times (1977) is an interdisciplinary bibliography that has become a standard reference on women in Spanish-speaking America. Asunción Lavrin's historiographic essay in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives charted the course taken by subsequent historical researchers and indicated new directions and resources (Lavrin 1978a). Marysa Navarro's “Research on Latin American Women” discussed the effects of economic development on gender roles in less-developed countries, pointing out that Marxist and radical feminist perspectives do not adequately analyze female society. June Hahner's article, “Researching the History of Latin American Women: Past and Future Directions,” briefly reviewed scholarly trends (Hahner 1983). Her most recent report in this journal identified research centers and important interdisciplinary studies on women in Brazil (Hahner 1985).

In this article, we evaluate whether Latin American participation in international arenas reinforces traditional divides between state and society in global politics or transforms state-society relations in ways compatible with the concept of global civil society. We examine the participation and interaction of Latin American nongovernmental organizations and states at three recent United Nations conferences: the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development, the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights, and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women. We conclude that Latin Americans are full participants in any emerging global civil society. Their experiences at the 1990s issue conferences closely track those of NGOs of the Northern Hemisphere, notwithstanding the much more recent appearance of NGOs in Latin America. At the same time, Latin Americans bring a regional sensibility to their participation in global processes that reflects recent political developments and debates in the region.

The Amazon was, until recently, one of those distant and unknown regions that excited the imagination but was largely irrelevant to the daily lives of scholars, policymakers, and the majority of Latin Americans. This is no longer the case. Developmentalists and disenfranchised people alike look to it as a vast resource area capable of yielding mineral, forestal, animal, and agrarian riches. Ecologists warn against the potential devastation of an environment that is still poorly understood. Agronomists are challenged by the variability encountered at every turn and the diverse responses of crops to standard management practices. Anthropologists and sociologists decry the lack of a social consciousness in the development of the Amazon and try to assess the human costs of this development paid by native and peasant populations. Many other specialists also have found the Amazon an important natural laboratory for their research skills. Yet much of this research remains inaccessible in specialized disciplinary or regional journals and unrelated to the central problems that are, fundamentally, multidisciplinary.

This essay seeks to expand our understanding of state formation in Venezuela by examining the business enterprises established by Juan Vicente Gómez and his political allies to exploit the agrarian economy, especially the cattle trade. It argues that these enterprises were critical both in cementing the allegiance of officials to Gómez, and in establishing the regime's authority over society. Venezuelans engaged in a variety of forms of protest against officials' profiteering and occasionally won concessions from the regime, signaling that corruption constituted an issue around which the terms of state control were negotiated. Relying on Gómez's correspondence, as well as British and U.S. diplomatic records, this essay argues that business networks among members of the regime fundamentally shaped not only the internal dynamics of the state, but also its relationship to society, a topic usually neglected in studies of Venezuelan state formation.

Este artículo examina el papel constitutivo de los periódicos bolivianos en los inicios del proceso deformación nacional (1825–1855, aproximadamente). Discute su intervención en los debates políticos y legales del momento, sus esfuerzos por definir los elementos que identifican con la nacionalidad, su inserción en un precario mercado, su promoción de los valores patrios y participación en la formación de ciudadanos. El artículo muestra la capacidad incorporadora de elementos heterogéneos que tienen las hojas impresas y, sobre todo, la reconceptualización del tiempo y el espacio que articulan en términos de lo nacional. Finalmente, sin minimizar las contribuciones del proyecto letrado de construcción nacional, destaca también las tensiones y limitaciones que le son inherentes.