In Bolivia, expectations for a decolonised society turned into a political crisis in the autumn of 2019. Discussing the limitations of progressive politics in cultivating democracy, this article identifies three narratives of authoritarianism – liberal democratic, developmentalist and colonial – which the opponents of Evo Morales use to frame their disillusionment with his rule. It argues that these multiple narratives lend meaning to contradictory experiences in a context in which hopes for a major decolonising state-transformation process have devolved into a deep polarisation of Bolivian society. The events in Bolivia are discussed in the context of rising authoritarianism throughout Latin America.

Do large-scale and unexpected events, such as natural disasters, affect elections? This article studies the political dimension of the 19-S earthquake that hit Mexico City in 2017, a few months before the 2018 elections. Using fine-grained geospatial data, the results show that candidates from the city-level incumbent Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) had a small increase in vote share in 2018 compared to the previous election in precincts more exposed to damaged caused by the earthquake (in terms of both distance-based and per capita measures), accounting for the seismic profile and socioeconomic characteristics of the neighborhood. The article shows that the implementation of disaster-recovery policy explains part of this relationship. Moreover, voters were as electorally responsive to a future risk reduction strategy as to a reconstruction credit.

Although partisan bias – when an authority transfers discretionary public resources to a politically aligned receiver − has been extensively studied, less is known about how this practice is affected by the voting regime − compulsory or voluntary voting. In this article, I study partisan bias in Chile, using administrative data of transfers from the central authority to local governments, highlighting two relevant scope conditions: the electoral cycle, and electoral uncertainty caused by the adoption of voluntary voting. I found strong evidence of partisan bias, especially in election years and in electorally riskier municipalities. This suggests that the uncertainty introduced by this electoral reform induced politicians to allocate a large share of resources to risky municipalities, because such resources would play a more significant role in the electoral outcome. Overall, these results imply that voluntary voting has a large impact on the way that resources are allocated across subnational units.

Following the ends to the civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala, the revolutionary coalitions that had led the fight against authoritarian regimes began to fracture. However, none of the splinter parties that broke from the Sandinista National Liberation Front, Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, and Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit has succeeded on their own as political parties. In this article, I argue that there is no single reason to explain the poor performances of the Democratic Party (PD), the Renovating Movement (MR), and the Democratic Front Party (FDR) in El Salvador, the Sandinista Renovation Movement (Renovate-MRS) and the Movement to Rescue Sandinismo (Rescue-MRS) in Nicaragua, and the New Nation Alliance (ANN) in Guatemala. However, their limited financial resources, alliances with non-revolutionary centrist and centre-right parties, and voter tendency to overlook internal ideological and personal debates within the original political parties, especially the FSLN and FMLN, have not helped.

Scholars have paid considerable attention to the connection between Washington's withdrawal from intervention and the emergence of dictatorship in Central America during the 1930s. The current article seeks to enhance our understanding of those interconnected developments through the investigation of the US Foreign Service and its role in the early 1930s presidential campaigns in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. It shows that the dynamic interaction between actors in both Washington and Central America set in motion a process that would produce decades of authoritarian rule in the isthmus.

Peru, in contrast to neighbouring Bolivia and Ecuador, has neither an important indigenous party nor a strong indigenous movement. Nevertheless, in recent years a growing gap has emerged in the voting patterns of indigenous and non-indigenous areas. This article maintains that this gap has developed because some Peruvian politicians, including Alberto Fujimori, Alejandro Toledo and Ollanta Humala, successfully wooed indigenous voters with a combination of ethnic and populist appeals. Like traditional populist leaders, they denounced the political elites, focused their campaigns on the poor and presented themselves as the saviours of Peru, but also forged ties to indigenous leaders, invoked indigenous symbols and embraced some ethnic demands. Although neither Fujimori, nor Toledo, nor Humala self-identified as indigenous, they successfully presented themselves as more ethnically proximate to the indigenous population than their main competitors, who represented the white Lima elite.