Television is an important political tool in Latin America. In recognition of its ability to shape public opinion and influence political behavior, Brazilian electoral authorities provide political parties with free television airtime in the weeks preceding elections. While Brazil’s publicly financed electoral program levels the playing field between parties, it may contribute to intraparty resource disparities. This article contends that racial considerations influence how party elites distribute television airtime and thus contribute to the political marginalization of Afro-Brazilians. Using original data from Rio de Janeiro’s 2012 municipal elections, it shows that party officials provide Afro-Brazilian candidates significantly less airtime than their white counterparts, even after controlling for theoretically important nonracial candidate characteristics. Moreover, it shows that there are racial differences in how candidates use the airtime they are awarded. Afro-Brazilian candidates are nearly ten times more likely than whites to focus on racial issues in their campaign ads. These results provide new insight about why Afro-Brazilians are rarely elected to public office and, when elected, the types of issues they may address.

Although the US preserves a dominant position in Latin America, China’s rise poses economic and political challenges and has set up a potential battle for the hearts and minds of the Latin American populace. To explore this theme, this article considers the level of support among Latin Americans toward China and the United States at the country and individual levels, the causes of variance thereof, and whether the views of China, the newcomer, covary with views about the region’s traditional power broker. We provide evidence that the views do not covary, either positively or negatively, largely because while attitudes toward the United States are structured by ideology and other factors, attitudes toward China are relatively unstructured. This lack of structure appears to be the result of China’s success in appealing to diverse sectors of Latin American society, which, in turn, should positively influence its future trajectory.

Politicians often buy votes with impunity. Brazil outlawed vote buying for many years, but prosecutions were rare. However, popular pressure mounted against the practice in the late 1990s. Over one million Brazilians signed a petition against vote buying, leading to the country’s first law by popular initiative passed by the national legislature. The law not only surmounted key obstacles to the popular initiative process but also dramatically increased prosecutions for clientelism during elections. Campaign handouts became the top reason that politicians were ousted in Brazil, with over a thousand removals from office. This study examines the role of civil society and the judiciary in the enactment and implementation of this important legislation.

El artículo examina la relación entre institucionalización del movimiento indígena boliviano y su dinámica en el sentido de su actividad de protesta y su cohesión interna durante el período 1997–2014, para capturar el posible cambio en la institucionalización del movimiento con la llegada de Evo Morales al poder en 2006. En base al estudio hemerográfico de la prensa boliviana, el análisis concluye que el movimiento indígena pasó por la institucionalización bajo el gobierno de Morales, el hecho que está reflejado en la creciente representación indígena en las estructuras del poder estatal. Sin embargo, la institucionalización era un proceso selectivo y prefirió organizaciones campesinas antes que el sector indígena originario, que al contrario experimentó más bien cooptación que institucionalización. La selectividad del proceso produjo diferentes efectos en la movilización de las organizaciones individuales. La política favorable y el acceso a la estructura estatal moderó al sector campesino, mientras las organizaciones indígenas originarias afrontaron las estrategias gubernamentales de división.

This article analyzes the structure and the stability of Brazilian public attitudes toward foreign policy issues. It argues that Brazilian attitudes on foreign affairs are more structured and stable than has previously been believed. It asserts that deep and historical beliefs about Brazil’s role in international affairs, such as pacifism and protagonism, are responsible for creating reasonably consistent and stable public attitudes toward specific foreign policy preferences. The argument builds on the model proposed by Jon Hurwitz and Mark Peffley (1987) in their study on the coherence of US public opinion on foreign policy issues. The article uses survey data from two national samples undertaken in 2014 and 2019 (about 1,800 respondents each). The samples are part of the “Brazil, the Americas and the World” project, which conveys information about Brazilian public opinion on foreign policy issues.

This study focuses on a dimension of partisanship overlooked by most comparative studies on campaign effects: individual-level stability, a measure of short-term partisanship. Some voters in young democracies are able to develop partisanship as a screen through which they observe the political world, leading them to interpret new information in a manner that reinforces their political predispositions. However, some voters lack long-term partisan attachments, enabling them to update their party identification as the campaign unfolds. These voters have a harder time reinforcing their precampaign dispositions and are more likely to change their vote intention. The findings suggest that for some voters, partisanship and vote choice are empirically intertwined.

Many have attributed the recent unprecedented wave of redistribution in Brazil to national economic and political factors such as the commodities boom, changes in minimum wages or premiums to skilled labor, the rise of the Partido dos Trabalhadores and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and a commodities-driven economic boom. Yet much less attention has been devoted to the study of inequality at the subnational level, where trajectories of inequality across states remain incredibly varied. This article argues that Brazil’s most recent democratic transition enhanced political competition in many Brazilian states, which in turn has contributed to the amelioration of inequality. Using an original time-series cross-sectional dataset covering the highly redistributive period of 1998–2015, this article finds that Brazilian states with higher political and party competition have lower levels of inequality than those with less competitive party systems.

By using innovative microlevel data from Colombia’s civil war, this article examines protests, one of many actions that civilians employ to resists peacefully armed actors during civil war. By using a cost-benefit analysis, the author argues that inhabitants can mobilize and solve their collective action problem when the costs of migrating or supporting one side in a war are too expensive. By examining the civil conflict on Colombia between 1988 and 2010, the author finds that civilians are likely to protest armed actors under three conditions. First, autonomous communities, which enjoy benefits associated with their territory, are likely to protest because migration would be costly; moreover, the institutional strength of these communities can decrease the costs of mobilization against armed actors. Second, foreign aid distributed through nongovernmental associations can empower individuals to take action by providing selective incentives for mobilization, thus decreasing costs. Last, high levels of violence, up to a certain threshold, increase the costs of nonparticipation and induce civilian action.

This article reevaluates often-made assumptions of retrospective voting and voter irrationality in studies of voting behavior in political contexts colored by haphazard, apolitical events. To do so, it leverages the quasi-random 2015–2016 Zika epidemic in Brazil and the accompanying priming of “women’s issues” relating to infant health to empirically assess whether exposure to the virus increased political support for female candidates in the 2016 Brazilian local elections. Results of difference-in-difference analyses suggest that high incidences of the virus in the months immediately preceding the election increased female candidates’ vote shares. Conflicting with theories of irrational retrospective voting, the results are consistent with an understudied theory of rational prospective voting. Robustness and falsification tests and dubious support for alternative explanations lend additional support to the argument. The research contributes to an elucidation of both the complex calculations underlying voting behavior and the conditions favorable to female candidates’ electoral prospects.

In 2008 Guatemala passed legislation criminalizing various forms of violence against women and mandating the creation of courts that would specialize in such violence. This article demonstrates that these reforms’ impacts were unevenly felt, with the most marginalized benefiting the least. It explains this gap by drawing on a historical intersectional analysis, and reveals the importance of including place alongside more commonly studied categories of difference. It also illuminates the sources of the gaps between policies and their impacts. It finds that many Guatemalan women remained marginalized from security and justice, despite attempts to protect them, for two reasons. First, the reforms isolated violence against women from other structural sources of inequality, thus undercutting their impacts for multiply marginalized women. Second, the reforms’ impacts were undermined by historically constituted patterns of state-society relations and the uneven nature of the Guatemalan state.

Las Cortes influyen de forma directa e indirecta en el proceso legislativo. Hasta el momento, los estudios sobre Congreso en Colombia se han enfocado mayoritariamente en la influencia directa de la Corte Constitucional. Este artículo explora su influencia indirecta. Usando la Reforma Penal Militar de 2012 como estudio de caso, mostramos cómo la Corte cambia los cálculos y comportamiento de los congresistas. Debido a su independencia y accesibilidad, la Corte Constitucional amplía el abanico de estrategias disponibles a las coaliciones minoritarias de oposición en el Congreso. Aquí identificamos dos prácticas de obstrucción: invitar a la Corte (mediante la motivación o aprovechamiento y la documentación de vicios de procedimiento), y demandas ante la Corte. Juntas, estas estrategias les permiten a oposiciones minoritarias bloquear leyes adversas y avanzar su agenda en el proceso de construcción de políticas públicas.

This article studies the legacy of local dynamics of the War of Independence in local state building in Mexico. The analysis shows that municipalities where local militias were organized have a higher number of public servants and a larger budget per capita in the early 1900s than municipalities with an insurgent legacy, relative to those with no conflict. The results hold when restricting the sample to neighbors and controlling for geographic and economic factors. Historical evidence supports existing theories of intra-elite conflict while highlighting the role of local fiscal councils in municipalities with a legacy of local militias. Decentralization during and after the war strengthened local elites, while the negotiated war termination added a political-elite layer of insurgent leaders, born in conflict with colonial-era economic elites. These findings suggest that the local dynamics of civil warfare can have long-lasting effects on state building, boosting local state capacity in some regions and not in others.

In several Latin American countries, social violence has risen to warlike levels. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to the extent of social violence and the new (informal) forms of governance generated by the so-called violent nonstate actors (VNSAs). Where a state’s forces fail to provide for the physical protection and social security of its citizens, some areas are governed by a mix of formal (vertical) and informal (horizontal) forms of governance, mixing state and nonstate actors. In these socially bounded spaces, nonstate actors produce and distribute public goods similarly as the state does. In this article, we explore how hybrid governance has appeared in the South American region, considering the operation of two regional VNSAs, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) in Brazil and the Bandas Criminales (BACRIM) in Colombia. We show that such VNSAs are significant agents for security governance, as they challenge preconceived notions of state authority (legitimacy).

Does national media news coverage affect the behavior of legislators when deciding foreign policy matters? This article aims to disentangle the relationship between the media and legislative behavior in foreign policy, using Paraguay as a case study. We analyze the level of public debate on international affairs, measured by the frequency of news in the newspaper ABC Color in the six months before the roll-call votes on the Chamber of Deputies of Paraguay. The literature on Latin American studies finds a lack of parliamentary interest in foreign affairs due to low voter attention to this subject, and therefore a low impact on reelections. We find the relationship between parliamentary polarization and public interest in a bill to be mediated by mass media. After estimating a Tobit model, we observe a significant and positive relationship between the news coverage a law receives and the degree of polarization among parliamentarians. Thus, our empirical evidence contradicts the idea that there is a lack of electoral interest in foreign policy. We confirm this finding through qualitative data gathered from in-depth interviews.

Existing work on state building focuses on the creation of modern bureaucracies and institutions for education and taxation but generally neglects to point to communal property regimes as tools of statecraft. Political science scholars who focus on ethnic communal lands in the Americas emphasize the rise of formal multicultural institutions, including Indigenous land rights, but are skeptical about governments’ willingness to title large extensions of land to Indigenous or other ethnic groups because of opposing economic interests. Focusing on the titling of 12 percent of Honduras’s territory between 2012 and 2016, this article uses semi-structured elite interviews, land titling data, field notes from three months in rural and urban sites in Honduras, and drug-trafficking reports to examine the motivation of officials in the central government. Evidence suggests that the central government views and uses ethnic land titling as a strategy to reclaim territorial dominance in contested locations that lack state presence.

Preferential trade agreements (PTAs) have spread rapidly around the world since the 1990s. In the Americas, the proliferation of trade agreements with countries from within and beyond the region have resulted in a “spaghetti bowl” of overlapping rules and regulations, some of which address behind-the-border issues such as investment, competition, labor, and environmental standards. Earlier research has linked trade agreements to increased foreign investment inflows. This article argues instead that the effects of PTAs on FDI depend on the domestic institutional capacities of member countries. Domestic institutions condition the benefits and effectiveness of PTAs by influencing governments’ external credibility as well as their ability to implement the agreements they sign. The empirical findings show that weak state capacity exacerbates the spaghetti-bowl effects of multiple, overlapping agreements. Moreover, it is not the quantity but the quality, and more specifically, the depth of trade agreements that matters for attracting FDI.

En este artículo propongo un nuevo enfoque teórico para analizar la militancia de alto riesgo. Argumento que, a la idea original de disponibilidad biográfica, de McAdam, es preciso integrar tres perspectivas analíticas: lo que aquí llamo repertorio de alto riesgo; un análisis de las estructuras de movilización; y, un entendimiento más preciso del tiempo, para lo cual propongo el concepto de situación de alto riesgo. Este nuevo enfoque teórico es puesto a prueba en el análisis micro de las trayectorias de vida de cuatro militantes que se hallaron en Ciudad de Guatemala, en una perspectiva de tiempo que va de 1980 a 1985. La perspectiva de alto riesgo es empleada aquí para entender una dimensión de la desaparición forzada, enfocada en los militantes, sus contextos y sus razones para, a pesar del alto riesgo, haber decidido permanecer.

The widespread violence in Mexico by state and nonstate actors since the government launched a military strategy against drug cartels in 2006 has generated demands for justice, including spaces of mourning and commemoration that recognize hundreds of thousands of Mexican nationals and migrants from other countries who have been killed or disappeared. Creating memorial spaces for ongoing forms of violence whose perpetrators and victims are hard to define has proven difficult from a bureaucratic, political, and aesthetic perspective. This article examines and contrasts three commemorative and transformative memorial interventions to show that in a context that lacks a clear transition and access to justice, memory activists respond to the state in a playing field that is not simply concerned with a politics of memory—who gets to decide how to remember the past—but with delineating the past from both the present and the future in the first place: a politics of time.