In a recent article published in the Latin American Research Review, Simone Bohn analyzed electoral results and survey data from Brazil to contest several theses concerning the reelection of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2006. In particular, Bohn asserted that beneficiaries of Bolsa Família, a conditional cash transfer program that was reaching eleven million families at the time of the 2006 election, were already supporters of Lula in 2002, and therefore the program could not have contributed to the change in Lula's constituency between his election in 2002 and his reelection in 2006. We show that these claims are based on voter recall data collected between nine and fifty-seven months after the elections, and that these data grossly overestimate actual electoral support for Lula—probably as a result of well-known reporting biases. Reanalysis of Bohn's data as well as analysis of more reliable surveys suggest that there were indeed significant changes in voting patterns between 2002 and 2006, and that Bolsa Família did play an important role in the 2006 elections.

Some deem the Bolsa Família program (BF) in Brazil to be a quintessentially clientelistic tool, thought to have produced colossal sociodemographic transformations in the base of support of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, particularly in the 2006 election. An earlier article (Bohn 2011) maintained that significant changes in Lula's electoral base took place prior to his reelection; other social policies, such as the Benefício de Prestação Continuada, contributed significantly to the changes in Lula's camp; and, most important, that the link between the receipt of social benefits and vote is less straightforward than those who view Bolsa Família as a clientelistic program assume it to be. This work addresses some of the criticisms that the article received and reinforces the need for further research that uses individual-based data to disentangle the complexity of the electoral behavior of the poor in highly unequal societies.

This article challenges the assumption that parties and candidates with access to material benefits will always distribute goods to low-income voters in exchange for electoral support. I claim that a candidate's capacity to turn to clientelistic strategies of mobilization is a necessary but insufficient condition to explain his or her decision to use clientelism. Besides having the capacity to use clientelism, candidates have to prefer to use clientelism to mobilize voters. In studying candidates' capacities and preferences to use clientelism, this article provides an account of the microfoundations of political clientelism in Argentina. By combining quantitative and qualitative data at the municipal level, I find that the number of pragmatist candidates, who are capable of using clientelism and prefer to turn to such strategies, is almost equaled by the number of idealist candidates, who, though capable of doing so, prefer not to use clientelism.

¿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.

This article explores the relationship among trade liberalization, deindustrialization, and income inequality in the more industrially advanced Latin American countries. It argues that, among the most important liberal reforms implemented during the 1980s and 1990s, trade reform was especially detrimental to equality because it accelerated deindustrialization. The analysis provides evidence to support this mechanism. Therefore, as the liberalization of trade increased, the deindustrialization process produced an increase in inequality. In short, evidence shows how the process of economic integration to the global market, as it took place, produced an increase in inequality through the destruction of formal employment.

Do Latin American citizens admire the United States for its material wealth and the opportunities this creates for them, or do they revile the United States because of the military and economic threat it has historically posed? Both narratives have a strong presence in Latin American societies, and much scholarship on mass anti-Americanism in the region portrays the dominant narrative as one of the United States as threat. In this article, we consult surveys from contemporary Latin America and find that various forms of ongoing economic exchange with the United States—trade, aid, migration, and remittances—are the primary influence on mass perception of the northern hegemon and actually promote goodwill, rather than bitterness, toward the United States. Moreover, we demonstrate that the most powerful channel through which economic exchange does so is consumption: inflows of US imports boost pro-American sentiment more than do other forms of exchange. In contrast, the legacy of US imperialism has little resonance in mass beliefs about the colossus of the north.

In this article I consider the temporality of postapocalyptic narrative and use a contemporary postapocalyptic novel, Plop (2004), by the Argentine author Rafael Pinedo, to open up new considerations of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento's classic Facundo: Civilización y barbarie (1845). Following the method proposed by Jorge Luis Borges (1966) in “Kafka and His Precursors,” it is my position that Pinedos novel invents a new, postapocalyptic Facundo, thus converting Sarmiento into one of the American continent's first postapocalyptic authors. Furthermore, Pinedos novel reframes the “civilization or barbarism” debate under the contemporary sign of ecological catastrophe, allowing the reader to arrive at new and startling conclusions about language, the environment, and disaster.

Much of the literature on political economy expects complementarities between (universal) welfare regimes and production regimes. This article draws from Costa Rica's showcase of human development and universalistic social policies to address how the production regime supports and constrains the welfare regime. We show that there were some positive relations between the two regimes at various points but that they were neither fully nor mostly complementary. At the heart of our interpretation of Costa Rica's performance—and Latin America's pervasive lack of complementarities—lies the dominance of structural heterogeneity in the production regime. Our analysis has significant implications for current theoretical and policy debates in Costa Rica and elsewhere. At the theoretical level, we highlight key features of production in Latin America and the need to consider such material bases as part of robust welfare policies. At the policy level, our argument stresses the importance of promoting both leading and low-productivity sectors simultaneously and of securing stable funding mechanisms for the welfare regime. Our article thus offers a cautionary note to Latin American countries slowly moving toward the creation or re-creation of universal social programs in the context of relatively unchanged production regimes. Since tensions between production and welfare regimes may also be appearing in a growing number of postindustrialized developed countries, theoretical and policy implications can easily travel beyond Latin America.