Mounting evidence suggests that Latin American democracies are characterized by politics and societies becoming more divisive, confrontational, and polarized. This process, which we define here as the “new polarization” in Latin America, seems to weaken the ability of democratic institutions to manage and resolve social and political conflicts. Although recent scholarship suggests that polarization is integral to contemporary patterns of democratic “backsliding” seen in much of the world, this new polarization in the region has not yet received systematic scholarly attention. Aiming to address this gap in the literature, the different contributions in this special issue revise the conceptualization, measurement, and theory of a multidimensional phenomenon such as polarization, including both its ideological and affective dimensions, as well as perspectives at the elite and mass levels of analysis. Findings shed light on the phenomenon of polarization as both a dependent and an independent variable, contributing to comparative literature on polarization and its relationship to democratic governance.

Despite the salience of corruption in elections in Latin America and beyond, it remains unclear what makes certain candidates attractive to voters as solutions to address corruption. Building on studies about the effect of candidates’ professional affiliation on voting behavior, we hypothesize that police and military officers are perceived to be more competent to address corruption. We test our theoretical expectations through an online survey of Brazilian voters with an image-based factorial experiment that presents respondents with three randomly generated handbills, varying candidates’ professional affiliations and potential confounders, such as economic policy, insider versus outsider status, and demographic features. Our results demonstrate that candidates affiliated with the police or the military are perceived to be more effective at reducing corruption, all else equal. The effect of police or military professions on candidates’ perceived effectiveness to fight corruption varies according to respondents’ ideology and is particularly significant among conservative voters.

A growing body of literature has focused on how different states continuously “make race” by legitimizing certain racial categories while invisibilizing others. Much less has been written on the actual processes of transforming race into a bureaucratic category when implementing antiracist public policies. This article focuses on the recent use of verification commissions to validate the racial self-identification of potential beneficiaries of racial quotas at federal higher education institutions in Brazil. We argue that through their choices, particularly through their definition of what race is, of who can see race, and of how to see race, these commissions are transforming not only understandings about affirmative action’s aims but also understandings of race. The study focuses on three potential consequences of commission practices for Brazilian racial boundaries: the disciplining of racial identifications, the decontextualization of race, and the individualization of racial injustice.

Defined as a credible threat that strengthens the bargaining position of the executive, presidential vetoes, widely understudied, carry a stigma of confrontation between state powers. But under some institutional setups, partial vetoes can be an additional step in the executive–legislative bargaining process. After a discussion of whether partial vetoes are a proactive legislative tool or a bargaining tool to induce executive–legislative cooperation, we test four hypotheses using the 2,346 bills introduced in Chile between 1990 and 2018 that reached a vetoable stage. We identified 97 partial vetoes (4.2 percent) and one total veto. Presidents are more likely to veto bills with more complex legislative processes and when they have stronger support in at least one chamber, but more popular presidents do not veto more bills. As most presidential vetoes in Chile are partial, they are an additional executive–legislative bargaining step in the lawmaking process rather than evidence of hyperpresidentialism.

Why does the ability of political leaders to control the bureaucracy vary? With strong meritocratic recruitment and tenure protections, Brazil appears an ideal case for successful bureaucratic resistance against political control. However, our analysis reveals how Bolsonaro overcame initial resistance by recalibrating strategies, ultimately dominating many key sectors of the bureaucracy. Drawing on over 100 interviews with public officials, we find that strategies of political control and bureaucratic resistance unfold in a dynamic, yet often predictable, pattern based on leaders' previous experiences and their ability to learn, adjust, and tighten their grip on the instruments of the state. The Bolsonaro administration transformed the regulatory framework and targeted individual state employees, reducing arenas of contestation and inducing public sector workers to remain silent, implementing the president’s policy preferences. We examine these control strategies in environmental agencies, their replication, and potential long-term consequences.

During the past few decades, Latin American governments’ recurrent attacks against journalists have contributed to the erosion of press freedom in the region and, relatedly, of the quality of democracy. Yet what pushes governments to harass journalists? We argue that governments are more likely to harass journalists when popular support for them drops. Due to the ability of journalists to influence public opinion, governments could perceive the harassment of journalists as a means to punish and silence those individuals who are seen as contributing to their decline in public support or as obstacles to regaining popularity. We test our argument on a sample of Latin American countries observed from 1990 to 2019. We find that declines in governments’ popular support lead to more harassment of journalists. Our research contributes to the debate on the determinants of press freedom and sheds further light on the current decline of democratic quality in Latin America.

How do peacebuilding institutions affect political behavior? This article studies the historic victory of the Colombian left in the 2022 presidential elections in light of the implementation of local peacebuilding programs through the 2016 Peace Accords. Using a quasi-experimental design, we show that the Development Plans with a Territorial Focus (PDET), a central component of the 2016 Peace Accords between the government and the FARC, increased the vote share for the leftist coalition, Pacto Histórico, in the 2022 elections by increasing voter turnout in PDET regions. In a departure from existing literature, we find that the explanatory effect of violence on vote share is significantly reduced when we include an indicator for PDET implementation and additional covariates. While there is a substantial body of work examining the effects of conflict violence and the presence of armed actors on elections, there has been relatively little focus on how the peacebuilding has affected vote choice and political behavior. We see our project as a bridge to fill this gap in the literature.

This article offers an analysis of the changes in mass-level ideological polarization in Latin America. It provides a cross-national, region-wide assessment of polarization dynamics using survey data on left-right ideological identities. A novel indicator for measuring ideological polarization at the individual level is proposed, which is more compatible with theoretical conceptualizations of ideological polarization than other existing indicators. The indicator is applied to data from the AmericasBarometer surveys to measure degrees and changes in mass-level ideological polarization in 19 Latin American countries between 2006 and 2019. The study reveals a substantial process of mass-level ideological restructuring, accompanied by a region-wide increase in ideological polarization in Latin America taking place during the second decade of the twenty-first century. We also find that ideological polarization, albeit varying in intensity from country to country, is clearly present at the mass level in the majority of countries in the region.

There has been a significant growth of social media as a means to inform oneself about politics. This article explores the consequences of this trend on the credibility audiences attribute to news exposing corrupt politicians and on their willingness to penalize the exposed politicians in elections. The study focuses on ten Latin American cities and employs a randomized control trial using experimental data embedded in a survey. Through this method, credibility and penalization levels are compared between state communications, newspapers, named journalists on social media, and anonymous journalists on social media. The article’s key findings demonstrate that corruption reports published on social media are deemed less credible than those published by state auditors and newspapers. This effect is exacerbated when the source of the report is anonymous. In addition, reports on corruption published on social media by anonymous sources have a negative effect on voter penalization of corrupt politicians.

In recent decades, Brazilian voters have grown polarized between supporters of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party, PT), known as petistas, and its opponents, known as antipetistas. What explains this animosity? One potential source of polarization is partisan stereotyping, a tendency for partisans to misperceive the social composition of both their own side’s bases of support as well as their opponents’. We show that most Brazilians overestimate the extent to which petistas and antipetistas belong to party-stereotypical groups such as Afro-Brazilians, evangelical Christians, or poor or rich people. We then show that stereotyping is associated with polarization: the greater the bias in perceived partisan group composition, the greater the perceptions of partisan political extremism and feelings of social distance toward the partisan out-group.

How do bureaucrats implement public policy when faced with political intermediation? This article examines this issue in the distribution of land rights to informal settlements in the municipality of São Paulo, Brazil. Land regularization is a policy established over three decades, where politicians’ requests for land titles to their constituencies play a relevant role. Based on interviews and documents, this study finds that bureaucrats adopt a twofold approach to regulate distribution: they document informal settlements, enacting eligibility criteria; then, they manage and prioritize beneficiaries, accommodating qualifying political demands. In this process, they enforce eligibility rules consistently across cases, constraining political intermediation to a rational scheme. Therefore, bureaucrats reconcile nonprogrammatic politics and policy rules by separating eligibility assessment from beneficiary selection. This paper bridges urban distributive politics and street-level bureaucracy literature by revealing that policy implementers may use technical expertise to curb political influence and negotiate conflicting interests and constraints.

Regional integration blocs are subject to the admission of new members, which must be approved by domestic institutions. This article analyzes how the incorporation of Venezuela and Bolivia into Mercosur passed in the Paraguayan Congress. While the first case lasted from 2007 to 2013, demonstrating parliamentary opposition, the second episode took place between 2015 and 2016, suggesting convergence between the executive and legislative branches on the issue. Using process tracing, the unveiled mechanism shows how government and opposition forces act to alter the duration of the bill in Congress and that political parties have a pendular behavior according to political cleavages. Moreover, the findings of this study suggest the existence of a parliamentary veto power in foreign affairs and the importance of having homogeneous coalitions to achieve faster approvals.

Conditional cash transfers (CCTs) are a striking case of policy diffusion in Latin America. Almost all countries in the region adopted the model within one decade. While most theories of diffusion focus on the international transference of ideas, this article explains that surge of adoptions by analyzing presidents’ expectations. Out of all ideas transmitted into a country, only a few find their way into enactment and implementation, and the executive has a key role in selecting which ones. Policies expected to boost presidents’ popularity grab their attention. They rapidly enact and implement these models. A process-tracing analysis comparing CCTs and public-private partnerships (PPPs) shows that presidents fast-tracked CCTs hoping for an increase in popular support. Adoptions of PPPs, however, followed normal procedures and careful deliberations because the policy was not expected to quickly affect popularity—which, in the aggregate, leads to a slower diffusion wave.

Geopolitical competition between the United States and China has led to an increased reliance on economic statecraft. In this context, understanding the conditions that trigger trade, aid, or investment weaponization becomes crucial. This article examines how the United States has employed economic statecraft in response to Latin American countries’ engagement with China. The study revisits the theoretical debate on positive and negative economic statecraft and proposes a mechanism that identifies the conditions under which “carrots” or “sticks” are more likely to be employed. We argue that the US response towards Latin American countries’ engagement with China tends to prioritize economic engagement over economic coercion, particularly when dealing with countries that are politically and economically aligned with Washington policies. To test our argument, we adopt a mixed-methods approach. First, we conduct a case study analysis on the United States-Panama relationship. Second, we perform a statistical analysis to assess the impact of economic engagement with China on the allocation of American foreign assistance in the region.

The emergence of ex-rebels’ political parties after peace accords creates a vehicle for political reintegration, which in turn has positive effects on peace and democracy consolidation after war. However, many of these parties tend to break apart and disappear, elevating the risk of renewed cycles of political violence. In times of war, cohesion plays a pivotal role in maintaining the bonds among members of armed organizations. It empowers them to perform effectively even in the face of challenging conditions and continues to be a critical factor during postconflict transitions. By means of a quantitative analysis of former FARC guerrillas in Colombia, now part of a newly founded legal political party, we test whether ideology, organizational dynamics, or individual perceptions and motivations help to explain their levels of cohesion. Our results show that even if all dimensions add up to the observed cohesion levels, perceptions of internal democracy, and inclusion, are the most relevant. We argue that assistance to former rebels in their organizational reengineering efforts after war will help to reduce the risk of the negative effects of rebel party collapse.

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.

While invalid voting is often treated as protest behavior in an electoral context, its association with actual political protests has not yet been empirically demonstrated. The relative scarcity of research on the topic is likely due to the hybrid nature of invalid voting as a both formal and informal political gesture. The novel availability of event-based data for public protests in Latin America allows for testing whether their occurrence is connected with changes in spoiled and blank ballots. Using an appropriate dynamic regression model covering variations in the 148 intervals between Latin American legislative elections in the 1979–2021 period, this study finds a strong connection between the emergence of antigovernment protests and surges in invalid voting (and vice versa). This relationship still holds at parity of economic conditions and it is reinforced by a lack of alternation in the party of power. Conversely, the appearance of workers’ strikes appears to work as a substitute for this behavior, which is also chosen by voters when democracy deteriorates, while corruption has no independent impact on invalid voting. Overall this work’s findings promise to send the research agenda on invalid voting in a new direction, previously unexplored because of an absence of fitting data.

Anticorruption audits may deter corruption and signal to citizens that institutions are proactively combating it. However, by detecting and reporting corruption, audits might also unintentionally erode trust in institutions. Therefore, the impact of audits potentially hinges on whether they uncover corruption. Audit institutions, not implicated in the corruption they uncover, might be less likely to experience a decline in trust compared to auditee institutions. This study uses survey and administrative data from Brazil, leveraging a federal anti-corruption program that randomly selects municipalities for auditing. Results do not support the claim that audits boost institutional trust. Individuals in audited municipalities show no different levels of trust in local government or the audit institution than those in non-audited municipalities, and the coefficients may even indicate a negative effect. Additionally, audit institutions may not be better insulated from the corrosive effects of uncovering corruption than the institutions they audit.

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.

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.