Criminal groups often avoid the limelight, shunning publicity. However, in some instances, they overtly communicate, such as with banners or signs. This article explains the competition dynamics behind public criminal communication and provides theory and evidence of the conditions under which it emerges. Relying on a new dataset of approximately 1,800 banners publicly deployed by Mexican criminal groups from 2007 to 2010, the study identifies the conditions behind such messaging. The findings suggest that criminal groups “go public” in the presence of interorganizational contestation, violence from authorities, antagonism toward the local media, local demand for drugs, and local drug production. Some of these factors are associated only with communication toward particular audiences: rivals, the state, or the public. An interesting finding is that the correlates of criminal propaganda are sometimes distinct from those of criminal violence, suggesting that these phenomena are explained by separate dynamics.

How valuable is a cabinet position? While the current literature does not ignore the reality that ministries differ from one another, it does not offer either theoretical or methodological procedures to assess such differences. This article introduces a refined measure of coalescence degree that considers several characteristics ministries may have, as well as politicians’ preferences about cabinet appointments. We estimate the effect of this alternative measure of coalescence on the president’s legislative success using large Brazilian datasets from 1995 to 2014 and an elite survey conducted with 62 Brazilian legislators. Controlling for other coalition management variables (coalition size and ideological heterogeneity), our refined coalescence metric turns out to be a more appropriate tool to assess the president’s performance in Congress.

This article examines change and continuity in the United States' recent foreign policy toward Cuba. In the context of the posthegemonic regionalism of the Pink Tide and regional disputes over Cuba's position in the interamerican system, the Obama administration's rapprochement was driven to protect the institutional power and consensual features of U.S. hegemony in the Americas. The Trump administration reversed aspects of Obama's normalization policy, adopting a more coercive approach to Cuba and to Latin America more broadly. Against the emerging scholarly proposition that the international relations of the Americas have crossed a posthegemonic threshold, this analysis utilizes a neo-Gramscian approach to argue that the oscillations in U.S. Cuba policy represent strategic shifts in a broader process of hegemonic reconstitution. The article thus situates U.S. policy toward Cuba in regional structures, institutions, and dynamics.

Neopatrimonial exercise of power, combining ruler appropriation of resources with ruler discretionality in the use of state power, remains present to varying degrees in contemporary Latin America. Building on an extensive literature, this article provides a delimited conceptualization and measurement of neopatrimonialism for 18 countries in the region and examines the effects of neopatrimonial legacies on poverty with cross-national quantitative analysis. The study finds that higher levels of neopatrimonialism have a significant, substantive impact on poverty levels, controlling for other relevant demographic, socioeconomic, and political factors. It confirms the importance of a cumulative record of democracy for poverty alleviation, while the analysis indicates that neopatrimonialism limits the effects of the political left in power on poverty reduction.

Can popular organizations engage with the state in a lasting collaborative interaction that benefits their interests without being politically co-opted or captured? This article addresses this question by analyzing the interaction between cartonero organizations and the PRO administrations in Buenos Aires City between 2002 and 2018. It shows how cartoneros managed to prompt a change in the PRO’s policies on recyclable waste collection. The article’s main arguments are that popular organizations’ opportunity to gain formal access to the state without losing their autonomy is related to the strategic orientations of both the popular organization and the ruling party, and that such a possibility increases when the popular organization is not part of the incumbent party coalition. The “troubled collaboration” between cartoneros and the PRO was possible due both to the cartoneros’ combination of contentious and institutionalized actions and to an important change in the PRO’s strategic orientation toward cartoneros.

Although sociological research has examined the reproduction of Chile’s elites, there is little empirical evidence of how different forms of capital operate among them. Using datasets for members of the Chilean political elite from 1990 to 2010, this country note examines and measures the effect of political, social, and cultural capital on the access of certain individuals to strategic positions in the political field, comparing the legislative and executive branches as represented by deputies and ministers. The empirical analysis includes logit models.