Scholars have argued that social capital—understood to mean those social networks, norms, and trust that allow citizens to act together more successfully to pursue shared goals—encourages political participation and a more robust democratic experience. Consequently, international development agencies have made promotion of social capital a major emphasis in recent years. Using data from the 1999–2001 wave of the World Values Survey, I show that in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Peru this relationship holds true. Greater involvement in nonpolitical organizations does lead to more participation in explicitly political activities. Higher levels of interpersonal trust also promote political participation. However, despite encouraging results from studies of popular participation in the region, Latin American levels of organizational involvement and political participation are moderate by the standards of more mature democracies, and levels of trust are relatively low.

Postcolonial criticism and theory have been instrumental not only in showing how Western texts have constructed non-Western peoples and cultures, but also in analyzing discourse on the racialized Other in travel writings by members of formerly colonized societies and cultures who may reinscribe—consciously or unconsciously—the structural values of cultural domination. As privileged members of comparable societies that had assimilated and been assimilated into dominant ideologies of European cultural and biological superiority, Spanish American visitors to the United States during the segregation era uniquely exemplify such discourse and thus merit scholarly attention. Examining—within their respective cultural and historical contexts—selected texts by six Spanish American writers who visited or lived in the United States during the period 1880-1947, this paper analyzes their observations of, experiences with, and reactions to the realities of racial separation and the attendant violence against African Americans in order to determine the extent to which the writers resisted or participated in the “othering” process that represented African Americans as different and inferior.

During the 1990s, the Argentine federal government dramatically increased the number of workfare programs targeted to the unemployed. The distribution of employment programs, however, varied across provinces. Previous studies suggest that this uneven distribution has taken place because politicians have not distributed programs according to formal eligibility criteria, but rather, in a clientelistic manner to entice voters' support.

I conduct a balanced pooled time series analysis for twenty-four provinces for the period 1993–2002 and find that partisanship, institutional features of the Argentine federal system, social mobilization, and economic factors strongly determine the way in which presidents have distributed employment programs. The results challenge the assumption that these programs have been exclusively used as clientelistic handouts to buy people's votes, and point to the necessity of looking at institutional, social, and economic variables to better understand the criteria used by federal politicians to distribute means-tested programs.

The ethnic-cultural (re)naissance in Chile is currently undergoing an expansion as well as a diversification along lines of minority cultures and gender differentiations. Since the explosion onto the Chilean literary landscape of the bilingual poet Leonel Lienlaf in 1989, Mapuche-Huilliche writers have come into the spotlight of academia, state, and popular culture critics. Younger generations of Huilliche poets are distinguishing themselves through a hybrid, reflexive, and literary expressiveness. In opposition to the poetry that is tied to indigenous cultural institutions, orality, and traditional rural forms of existence, these poets thrive and strive for a pluricultural and complex way of living and expressing themselves. This work explores a selection of poets and their individual circumstances in an attempt to delineate the differences within and between these poets and the more traditional ones, and suggest a greater cultural change that is coming about in south Chile.

Scholars have recast debates on globalization by emphasizing both national actors’ selective appropriation of transnational practices and their hybrid reinvention in national settings. Drawing on Nestor García Canclini’s concepts of “global communities “ and “hybrid cultures, “ I explore these debates by comparing gay and lesbian activists’ first experiments in electoral activism in Mexico and Brazil, both occurring in 1982. The different electoral strategies that prevailed in each country drew on the transnational arena in different ways. To explain these differences, I consider the relative strength of competing sectors within heterogeneous social movement fields and their variable participation in competing global communities. The relative influence of these sectors and thus the relative salience of specific transnational practices, in turn, reflected each movement’s embeddedness in broader opposition movements to authoritarian regimes. Finally, I argue that these practices should be read contextually, with attention given to their transformation and limitations in national settings.

This article evaluates postelector al conflicts in Mexico’s Oaxaca state before and after the state government legally recognized usos y costumbres—local leader selection via traditional practices (rather than parties and secret ballots). Assessing usos y costumbres within the normative debate between multiculturalists and pluralists on incorporation of ethnic minorities, the article compares the level of postelectoral conflict in usos y costumbres and non-usos y costumbres municipalities. It argues that since such conflicts have increased in Oaxaca over the last decade while simultaneously diminishing dramatically in Mexico’s other 31 states, the cause is probably unique to Oaxaca. Conflict may be at least partially attributed to perverse implementation incentives created by the law’s provocation of conflicts requiring mediation (rather than judicial verdicts). While further research is needed to test normative claims that usos y costumbres increase governing institutions’ credibility and foster positive group identities, the article concludes that while the customary practices “experiment” has failed at least by one criterion, it may warrant reconsideration if customary elections can be viewed as a set of evolving, instrumental processes, rather than as fixed, static, and essentialist conditions.

En un contexto histórico de expansión educativa, mejora de los rendimientos de la educación y aumento de la participación de la mujer en la actividad económica, este artículo examina y compara las pautas y tendencias en homogamia educativa en México y Brasil entre 1970 y 2000. Concretamente, tratamos en perspectiva temporal y comparada las siguientes cuestiones: grado y alcance de la homogamia educativa y simetría en las relaciones de género. Para ello utilizamos las muestras armonizadas de microdatos de los censos de México 1970, 1990 y 2000, y de Brasil 1970, 1980, 1991 y 2000, puestas a disposición por el proyecto IPUMS-International. Los resultados muestran un aumento de la homogamia entre las capas más instruidas y una disminución de la hipergamia femenina en ambos países. Comparativamente, la homogamia educativa es mayor en Brasil que en México, reflejo de una mayor desigualdad social, mientras que las diferencias de género son mayores en México.

There is variation among the Latin American sending countries in the timing, sequence, and form by which they have approved retention-of-nationality laws (dual-citizenship laws) and have extended political rights to their migrants abroad. This variation is the product not only of the characteristics of the migration in each country but also of the specificity of their political and electoral systems and of the historical relationship between the state and its citizens. I focus my analysis on Latin American migration to the United States, which, although not the only destination, has attracted the majority of Latin American migrants and has significantly influenced, with its immigration policies, the policies of Latin American sending countries towards their émigrés.

Political parties are crucial for democratic politics; thus, the growing incidence of party and party system failure raises questions about the health of representative democracy the world over. This article examines the collapse of the Venezuelan party system, arguably one of the most institutionalized party systems in Latin America, by examining the individual-level basis behind the exodus of partisans from the traditional parties. Multinomial logit analysis of partisan identification in 1998, the pivotal moment of the system’s complete collapse, indicates that people left the old system and began to support new parties because the traditional parties failed to incorporate and give voice to important ideas and interests in society while viable alternatives emerged to fill this void in representation.

This essay explores the intellectual foundings of Argentine constitutionalism from the 1830s to the 1850s. Focusing on the writings of Juan Bautista Alberdi and some of his critics, it argues that Argentine constitutionalism had liberal roots but invoked arguments that could neither bring unity to the state-building coalition nor resolve some basic tensions within the framework of national sovereignty.

Interest in defense issues among Latin American politicians has faded with the advent of widespread democratization in the region and the retreat of the armed forces to their barracks. Defense policy is rarely subject to the same level of public scrutiny and debate as other major policy issues faced by the region, such as health, education, and public safety. This is puzzling because by ignoring defense policy, civilian leaders in the region risk ceding authority to their militaries, allowing them a degree of self-management and undermining the consolidation of democratic civilian control of the armed forces. This article explains civilian politicians' inattention to defense as a function of three factors: a historical path that has produced armed forces with limited capabilities that are more often a threat to their own governments than their neighbors; a relatively benign international threat environment in Latin America that makes neglect of defense policy a low-risk proposition; and the low importance that voters assign to the provision of the national defense as either a public or a private good. Under these circumstances, it is rational for most civilian politicians to ignore defense policy and focus their attention instead on coup avoidance.

During the last decade, the term Establishment has gained currency among Colombian opinion makers—be they newspaper columnists, politicians, or even academics. After surveying the ambiguities of the concept in the United Kingdom and the United States—the countries where it was first popularized in the 1950s and 1960s—this paper focuses on the usages of the expression in the Colombian public debate. Based on a variety of sources—including op-eds and newspaper reports, interviews with leading public figures, and other political and academic documents—I show how generalized the term has become. I examine how the prevailing language gives the “Establishment” a central role in shaping political developments in the past decades. It blames the Establishment for the country's most fundamental problems while conferring on this same Establishment the power to solve them. However, any attempt to identify what is meant by the Establishment soon reveals an extremely confusing picture. In the final part of the paper, I highlight some of the implications of the general usage of such a vague and contradictory concept for the quality of democratic debate, the legitimacy of the political system, and the possible solution of the armed conflict in Colombia.

This paper demonstrates that in Latin America a significant portion of the increased legislative party system fragmentation since the 1980s is explained by the recent political incorporation of ethnic populations. Until now, scholars have likely not identified this relationship because they have not used the nuanced measures of ethnic fractionalization that account for internal diversity of indigenous populations and race, and because they have not focused on the time period when ethnic peoples were politically incorporated. In addition to demonstrating this relationship statistically, we use two case studies from Bolivia and Ecuador to illustrate how in recent years the dynamic relationship between ethnic groups and political parties in Latin American legislatures has changed and resulted in the statistical association between ethnic fractionalization and party system fragmentation that we observe.

This essay argues that in the early Porfiriato Mexican officials deftly negotiated the pace and sequencing of the country's reinsertion in the world economy. Despite the government's financial weakness, officials flouted international conventions and obtained the foreign capital necessary to spark growth before settling the foreign debt, in default for more than fifty years. Rather than simply accommodating powerful private financial interests, the government's plans and policies often provoked conflict with its bankers and creditors. However, by employing a wide set of strategies that ranged from manipulating competitors to selectively not enforcing agreements to exploiting nationalist sentiment among local elites, Mexican policymakers preserved their autonomy and advanced a coherent set of policies. In addition to successfully exploiting international capital markets, the Mexican government also successfully maneuvered to establish a more competitive local market. The government's ability to exploit these capital flows, without undermining domestic support, helps explain the regime's early economic growth and political resilience. The findings of this essay extend to the financial realm previous historical scholarship that has noted that the early Porfirian regime enjoyed a surprising degree of autonomy from its economic partners.

I discuss how the chorographic view of landscape in Spanish cartography was at variance with the perspective of terrain represented in Andean mapping media when both traditions converged upon the implementation of the Crown-mandated surveys known as the “Relaciones Geográficas del Peru” (1577–1586). These surveys were collected and transcribed by modern editors for publication. The sole map included in the Relaciones may have been due to the self-interest of the Spanish author. The continued use of Andean media and the art of “memory mapping,” both of precontact origin, may explain why indigenous mappings did not enter the Relaciones record. This memory activity was, and is still, manifested during the ritualized traversing of community-held land boundaries. Therefore, the few extant paper-like mappings had been appended to land-litigation documents. I examine how the visualized route and the naming of topographical features underlie three sixteenth-century mappings and their accompanying judicial accounts (relaciones). These mappings and accounts display the native Andeans' adaptation of precontact place identification practices to Spanish boundary-marking methods. The mappings demonstrate a hybrid cartographic art, which combines manuscript and block print within the pictorial format. In one of the maps the artist-scribes include a relación in Quechua (and its Spanish version), a rare example of this genre in Andean letters. Indigenous cabildo authorities, exemplified by Felipe Guarnan Poma de Ayala, adopted writing practices by recording place names. This activity led to a pan-Andean lexicon of toponymns for judicial purposes. Contemporary ethnographic research on current walkabout customs could further elucidate the genesis of these Colonial Andean mappings and lead to the recovery of other specimens.

A growing percentage of international aid is distributed through local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Scholarship is divided on how that aid affects domestic politics. One side argues that aid to NGOs reinforces the status quo. As NGOs become dependent on external funding, they lose sight of their original goals. The other side contends that channeling funds to NGOs generates associational activity; producing political change by empowering previously marginalized groups. We test these competing hypotheses in Rondonia, Brazil, measuring the impact of internationally funded NGO activity on voting behavior. We find that the impact of aid varies with the institutional environment. At the state level, more votes for the conservative governor came from municipalities whose NGOs received project money. In contrast, the same municipalities registered a significant shift to leftist candidates at the presidential level. The findings have broad implications for the impact international aid has on political competition, political change, and democracy.

Electoral theories of governmental accountability assume that competitive elections produce responsive governments because they allow voters to punish or reward the performance of incumbent politicians at the ballot box. This research note investigates whether the increasing competitiveness of municipal elections in Mexico during the 1990s has improved the performance of local governments by focusing on the provision of potable water and drainage. The empirical evidence does not seem to support the electoral accountability hypothesis, but rather suggests that municipal governments are more responsive to the influence of socioeconomic modernity, as well as to the direct pressure of politically mobilized citizens. The findings cast doubts on the idea that competitive elections, by themselves, will significantly improve the quality of local governments in the country.

This article reports the results of a pioneering and in-depth survey of the research and information-seeking behavior of the student members of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) living in the United States and Puerto Rico. The results suggest that the new generation of Latin Americanists in the universities surveyed are confident in their abilities to carry out research on the region within their respective disciplines. However, most of these students have not received formal instruction by course instructors or librarians on how to carry out their research on Latin America. Use of the Internet as a research resource is popular but has not replaced the use of the library and long-standing research strategies such as footnote-chasing. While the reported use of library electronic resources is very high, awareness of Latin America-specific and electronically-available research tools such as HLAS, HAPI, and LAPTOC is low. The survey is the first step in reassessing the ever-changing needs and research patterns of this cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary group of academic library users and future leaders in Latin American studies.

El modelo de latifundios y oligarquías terratenientes orientadas a la producción primaria fue el predominante pero no el único en América Latina colonial. Convivió con otros modos de producción, entre los cuales se destaca la vitivinicultura, caracterizada por la pequeña propiedad, la agricultura intensiva orientada a la industria, fuertes pautas de movilidad social y la emergencia de incipientes burguesías. En el marco de este tema, el presente estudio procura mostrar el grado de complejidad que alcanzó la industria vitivinícola a través de un indicador: la capacidad para realizar crianza biológica de vino. El desarrollo de este complejo método basado en conocimientos y técnicas especializadas, fue posible por una serie de factores sociales, culturales y económicos.