Clientelism is traditionally viewed as a mechanism through which patrons exert control over clients. Drawing on qualitative data from three municipalities in Santiago, Chile, and building on literature that emphasizes client agency, this article explores a variant of clientelism in which clients initiate and enforce clientelistic relationships. The findings suggest that these two forms of clientelism can differently impact a crucial aspect of democracy: horizontal accountability. Client-driven clientelism compels patrons to seek resources for distribution, rendering them susceptible to influence by those who can grant them access to these resources. When patrons are tasked with accountability roles and the resource providers are subject to their oversight (as in the relationship between municipal councilors and mayors), the providers can deter these accountability functions. In contrast, patrons with independent access to resources can better preserve their autonomy.

Indigenous peoples in Latin America have produced some of the region’s strongest and most enduring social movements, drawing on a diverse repertoire of contention to pursue their goals. In the twenty-first century, social media have transformed the landscape of collective action, compelling Indigenous movements to navigate the evolving dynamics of digital platforms. There is an ongoing debate in the literature regarding the role of social media in mobilization. But we know relatively little about how social media fit into the tactical repertoires of Indigenous actors and what tasks these platforms are used for. This article addresses this gap through an examination of how Indigenous actors use social media during protest events. We conducted a comparative analysis of social media content produced by Indigenous social movement organizations during major protest events in three countries from 2018 to 2019. We find that the most common functions include activating supporters and exposing state violence. These functions support several of the organizations’ core mobilization tasks by providing actors with tools to complement collection action.

Marxian anthropology is a particular trend of “dark anthropology.” Michael Taussig has dedicated his work to understanding the connections of colonialism, capitalism, and local cultures under a Marxian-Benjaminian perspective. This article examines the meanings of hope and future concealed within Taussig’s “dark ethnographies” accomplished in Latin America. The purpose of this analysis is to echo Taussig’s concern to write efficiently against terror to acknowledge that even ethnographies of violence and social injustice can carry powerful cultural messages of hope.

This research note documents the revision of a dataset of real wages in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela during 1920-2011. This resource was originally published by this journal in Astorga (2017). The revision affected all eighteen basic wage series plus six weighted-average series, with varying degrees of modification. The revised dataset is made available as supplementary material. Regardless of changes to the data, the key findings and conclusions of the 2017 paper still hold.

In many developing countries where formal institutions fail to guarantee rule of law, criminal organisations have emerged as intermediaries between citizens and the state. In some cases, these armed non-state actors adopt repressive strategies to govern their territories and local populations. This study asks under what circumstances local actors mobilise against criminal governance. Focusing on the case of Michoacán, Mexico, I argue that the emergence of vigilante groups, known as autodefensas, was prompted by the breaching of a social contract – a set of formal and informal agreements and obligations – between organised crime and civil society. As criminal governance spread in Michoacán, so did predatory behaviour against local communities, which gave way to an elite-organised social movement structured by rural inequalities.

While global history’s emphasis on networks and its de-emphasis on the nation has brought about a fruitful platform for exploring interregional connections, this article argues that a global history recentered in the periphery and willing to draw from its rich national historiographies has the potential to reveal new forms of globalization and connection. It takes Argentina as an exemplary case to consider the ways in which tracing one nation’s many transnational and global orientations might bring to light motivations, geographical dimensions, and fields of power previously unseen.

This article examines the conditions that led the Argentine armed group Montoneros to establish a nursery in Cuba, in 1979, to care for the children of exiled members who had decided to return to the country to fight against a dictatorial regime characterised by the crime of enforced disappearance and supported by continental and global alliances. The analysis focuses on the dilemmas children posed for militants and the organisation and how those concerns were in part addressed by setting up a facility to care for the children. The article then considers how that childcare effort by the Montoneros connected with Cuba's internationalist and refugee policies and with continental struggles, as well as looking at how the children involved experienced it. This reconstruction offers a new approach to thinking about political conflicts in the heated Cold War scenario in Latin America, through the lens of children's history and by exploring how love and politics are intertwined.

Mounting evidence shows that authoritarian orientations exert a powerful influence on public opinion attitudes and candidate support. The 2018 Brazilian elections brought to power Jair Bolsonaro, a candidate with an open disregard for democracy and democratic institutions. This study examines Brazilian voters’ differences in authoritarianism and electoral support for a right-wing authoritarian candidate. It employs the AmericasBarometer national survey data to demonstrate that authoritarianism is politically important in Brazil because of its association with attitudes toward the use of force as well as with conservative social and political attitudes. The effect of authoritarianism on the probability of voting for Bolsonaro is as large as that of other relevant political behavior variables such as ideology, negative partisanship, or religiosity, whereas nonauthoritarian voters spread their votes across other candidates. Although these other variables are also relevant to Bolsonaro’s victory, his candidacy was uniquely able to mobilize a coalition of authoritarian voters. Whether or not authoritarianism remains a salient cleavage in the electorate is considered along with the consequences of this potential divide for political competition in Brazilian politics.

Many areas in applied econometric research within political economy fail to come up with conclusive findings. This is the case, for example, with studies on the determinants of public social spending in Latin America, a key area of research given the impact of social programs on poverty, inequality, and welfare more generally. In this area, as in others, it is hard to identify clear answers regarding the impact of economic processes and political institutions. Two reasons explain this lack of knowledge accumulation. First, each study uses different data sources and analytical models. Second, some of the empirical strategies required to solve various econometric problems may affect the results. This article questions the role of econometric research as the only method to explore political economy questions and highlights the importance of promoting conversations between complementary methods of both quantitative and qualitative traditions.

The Ford Foundation's involvement with the social sciences in Brazil coincided with the early years of the military regime that ruled the country between 1964 and 1985. The paper studies how changed political circumstances in the United States and abroad induced the Foundation to gradually abandon the technocratic approach that had governed its overseas programme since the 1950s, thus introducing a critical shift in its policies toward the developing world. A grant proposal to the University of Brasília, which had been subject to repeated military interventions since 1964, highlighted the ethical dilemmas raised by the goal of fostering policy-relevant research in an authoritarian political context. Relying on a pragmatic decision-making framework that converted ethical and ideological considerations into cost–benefit exercises, the Foundation finally moved away from the maxims of modernisation theory to embrace new strategic priorities like human rights, democracy and intellectual pluralism.

Fatherhood is a key but missing component of research on welfare regimes. What do states formally demand from fatherhood across Latin America? Using a novel data set of coded legal and policy provisions for 19 Latin American countries, this article offers a conceptual framework to examine state interventions targeting biological, caregiving and breadwinning dimensions of fatherhood. My findings show that, regardless of how robust their social policies are, most countries presume fatherhood to be complementary rather than co-responsible to motherhood. By making a conceptual, empirical and practical contribution to studying the state regulation of fatherhood, this article contributes to a more comprehensive view of welfare regimes.

Within the last two decades, the international expansion of Latin American companies has undergone remarkable growth. This phenomenon has attracted scholarly attention, however, most of the available research is focused on companies that have already engaged in foreign direct investment (FDI), meanwhile, Latin American firms in pre-FDI stages remain mostly understudied. This article uses an explanatory case study design to analyze the corporate reputation and decision-making process related to international expansion of a set of ten Latin American companies. Both archival and primary data were used in the individual and cross-case analyses stages for 22 months. Our study identifies and establishes analytical generalizations when examining and contrasting the findings with the previously revised theoretical frameworks. More specifically, we identified that these companies exhibit similarities with the behavior of Jaguars, the Latin American wild feline; especially because of (i) their preference to remain in their regional market to exploit current capabilities and advantages, and eventually enter developed markets to upgrade capabilities and surpass strong competitors at home; (ii) their strategies to disguise their country of origin and lack of experience when operating internationally; and (iii) their solitary behavior and reluctance to engage in partnerships and/or strategic alliances unless they have a specific interest in building legitimacy and enhancing reputation.

Research on the politics of skills formation in Latin America is severely underdeveloped. This article offers a novel characterisation of the supply of skills in the region or ‘skills supply profiles’, taking inspiration from the comparative capitalisms literature. We identify four configurations of skills supply profiles – universalising, dual academic-oriented, dual VET-oriented and exclusionary – and analyse their historical dynamics. By doing this, we challenge general assessments of Latin America's skills formation systems as pertaining to one overarching type. This sets the stage for a deeper understanding of the politics of skills in the region and their connection with different development alternatives.

Latin America is one of the world's only regions to have witnessed a fall in income inequality during the 2000s. This paper evaluates the role fiscal policy played in this change. Recent scholarship has examined this in individual countries; lacking is a regional perspective. We examine the effects of nine fiscal instruments on income inequality in 17 countries between 1990 and 2014. Fiscal policy had a positive – albeit small – effect in reducing income inequality, especially from 2003, working best at the urban level. Public spending on education, personal income taxes and social contributions were especially instrumental in reducing income inequality.

Multinational enterprises (MNEs) transfer their corporate strategies to subsidiaries globally, and in so doing, embark on a translation process. Despite the prevalence of MNEs and their investments in emerging economies, little is known about how local factors affect key actors when translating corporate talent management (CTM) strategies to these regions. This study draws from the translation and talent management literatures to explore the travel of ideas in the context of CTM. Relevant frames (narratives that emerge around actions) and actors are proposed and explored empirically in a qualitative study of 76 employees across an Australian mining MNE with subsidiaries located in Latin America. The findings support extant literature as well as uncovering new frames (categorized in external or corporate, and internal or local) and actors (including non-managerial) as part of the translation process. The findings suggest the need to balance talent management strategies between corporate and subsidiaries by being aware of internal and external frames including in both urban and rural locations. This understanding provides further clarification of the global versus local paradox faced by MNEs. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

At a general level of neoliberal repudiation or expansion of social policies, most post-neoliberal Latin American governments in the 2000s have exhibited similarities. However, coalitions with popular actors have displayed a lot of variation. In order to compare popular-sector coalitions the article constructs a framework with two central dimensions: electoral and organisational/interest; in post-import substitution industrialisation (ISI) Latin America the latter is composed of both unions and territorial social movements (TSMs). It contends that the region witnessed four types of popular coalitions: electoral (Ecuador and Chile), TSM-based (i.e. made up of informal sector-based organisations, Venezuela and Bolivia), dual (i.e. composed of both unions and TSMs, Argentina and Brazil) and union/party-based (Uruguay). The study argues that government–union coalitions are largely accounted for by the relative size of the formal economy, and by the institutional legacies of labour based-parties. Coalitions with informal sector-based organisations are rooted in the political activation of these TSMs during the anti-neoliberal struggles of the 1990s and early 2000s.

This paper examines educational inequality in nine Latin American countries at the sub-country level from the 1950s to the 1990s. Educational inequality is measured by the difference in schooling years between the taller and the shorter half of the female population. Schooling years significantly increased across birth cohorts, especially before the 1980s, regardless of socio-economic stratum, region or country. However, educational inequality persisted. This finding reflects the achievement of the import substitution industrialisation era in educational development and its failure in mitigating the unequal distribution of education rooted in Latin America's social structure. Trade liberalisation and educational expansion are found to reduce educational inequality in capital and urban regions, whereas democracy and tax reform increased it. By contrast, educational inequality in rural regions was hardly influenced by policy changes. This finding urges future explorations into whether the persistence of educational inequality in rural regions is due to endemic social structure.

Through the analysis of Argentina-World Bank (WB) relations between 1971 and 1976, this article examines how democracies and dictatorships, as well as political and economic constraints did (or did not) impact WB lending to Latin America. This period is especially revealing. Between May 1971 and September 1976, the WB did not grant any new loans to Argentina, thereby generating an exceptional and unusually long break in WB lending to the country. Drawing on previously undisclosed files from the WB Archives and additional primary sources from Argentina and the United States, this article unveils the actual mechanisms, criteria and justification that stood behind the decision to lend or not to lend to Argentina. It maintains that the WB’s self-imposed principle of «neutrality» played a crucial role in facilitating the WB’s relations with Argentina during the politically and economically unstable early 1970s.

The recent European debt crisis has renewed interest as to why debtor countries honour their foreign debts and subscribe to respectively burdensome rescheduling conditions. While the cost of defaulting in a domestic financial system has been recognised as a main motive for repayment, the factors that cause sovereign states to refrain from debt repudiation are not fully understood. This article investigates the reasons behind the repayment decision and weak negotiating position of the Mexican government following the 1982 debt crisis. It shows that leading commercial banks had considerable amounts of external loans in their books, and that Mexican policymakers lacked the foreign exchange access they needed to secure the stability of the domestic banking system. The high exposure of domestic banks to Mexican debt and their heightened dependence on foreign capital worked as mechanisms that allowed international creditors to enforce their claims and deterred Mexico from declaring a unilateral default.

This article discusses the available sources of information on the value and volume of Peru’s exports and estimates the current value of exports, the index of export prices and the quantum of exports using a wide variety of sources. By relying on several sources, I estimate the first complete series of the current value of exports for Peru for 1830-1930. Importantly, I adjust other studies’ estimates by taking into account the deficiencies of foreign sources and by distinguishing between exports of specie and of minerals. The estimations show that exports experienced substantial growth in the 1850s and 1860s, during the Guano Era. Exports stagnated in the 1870s and dropped during the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) before recovering in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, especially during World War I.