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Article

Latin American Public Administration  

Mariana Chudnovsky

The reality of Latin American public administrations has surpassed many of the categories that could be derived theoretically. In fact, a common feature of most public administrations in the region is, precisely, their internal heterogeneity. The alternation of “fashions and models” has left various (and at times contradictory) organizational remnants: accumulated “geological layers” of different instruments (and modes) of management—replaced by other “prettier and better” ones before concluding their cycle; frustrated and/or interrupted reforms that generate daily confusion as a result of the tensions caused between management systems; and half-implemented regulations patched up with new laws that seek to resolve the failures of the previous ones, causing complex regulatory mosaics for the future implementers of the new reforms. The difficulty of professionalizing the civil service in the region is a good indicator of the (continued) absence of consolidated Weberian administrative bureaucracies and a clear expression of the coexistence of different public administration models and development strategies.

Article

The Latin American Puzzles for the Study of International Relations  

David R. Mares

Puzzles for the scholar of international relations abound in Latin America, whether one focuses on unexpected outcomes or examines purported causal variables that, when properly specified, do not lead where theory expects. In fact, the Latin American experience is a great case to illustrate two problems in the empirical application of international relations theories: theoretical formulations tend to be poorly developed and articulated, and the empirical evaluations of those theories are not rigorously designed. The empirical record of Latin American interstate violence is more present and varied than generally accepted by scholars and policy makers. The relationship between conflict and the region’s use of international fora to peacefully resolve some conflicts obscures this record. Puzzles also arise when explaining why the region has the empirical record it does since the causal logic underlying the variables is generally misspecified in studies of Latin American security relations. These analytic errors render most explanations offered in the literature drawing on Latin American cases incorrect. Indeed, the failed explanations themselves offer new puzzles for scholars of international relations. Scholars of international relations can, therefore, benefit from studying the actual empirical history of Latin American interstate relations with the correctly specified causal variables offered by the various theories of international relations.

Article

Public Policies Toward LGBT People and Rights in Latin America  

José Fernando Serrano-Amaya, Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez Rondón, and Natalia Daza-Niño

In the last 20 years, several countries in Latin America have sought uneven and disparate legal transformations affecting the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals and collectives. These new legal measures have taken place simultaneously, with deepening structures of social, gender, and sexual injustice challenging their view as indicators of progressive change. In this contradictory context, LGBT social policies have emerged as a specialized field of state action because of two parallel trends: the macro political politics affecting the region, and the accumulated experience of gender and sexual social mobilizations in their interactions with the state. There are many variations of this emerging field of social policies because it is shaped by the meaning provided by local actors such as interest groups, activists, and policy makers, and their translation into policy lobbying, policymaking, and policy negotiation. As result of these innovations, gender identity and sexual orientation have nowadays entered into the language of policymaking and policy implementation. These legal measures have opened spaces for social and political participation that were not there before. Nevertheless, LGBT policies are new regimes of governmentality that control the inclusion of gender and sexual social mobilizations into citizenship and democracy.

Article

Clientelism in Latin American Politics  

Ezequiel Gonzalez-Ocantos and Virginia Oliveros

Clientelism is a type of nonprogrammatic linkage strategy that political parties deploy to win elections. Specifically, the concept refers to the personalized and discretionary exchange of goods or favors for political support. Scholars of comparative politics investigate variation in the prevalence of clientelism across countries, as well as the organizations that parties create to distribute personalized gifts and favors. A large body of work also studies the types of voters more commonly targeted by machines. The debates about the determinants of clientelism and specific targeting patterns are important because they inform broader discussions about democratic quality in Latin America and other developing regions, where nonprogrammatic linkages such as clientelism are common. In particular, the literature on clientelism has implications for discussions about the use and misuse of public and private funds to support electoral efforts. It also raises questions about the ability of citizens to vote their conscience and hold politicians accountable in the privacy of the voting booth.

Article

Courts in Latin American Politics  

Ezequiel Gonzalez-Ocantos

In the aftermath of the third wave of democratization, Latin American courts left behind decades of subservience, conservatism, and irrelevance to become central political players. They now serve as arbiters in struggles between the elected branches, and increasingly affirm fundamental rights. Indeed, some rulings champion highly controversial rights and have huge budgetary implications, sending shock waves across these new democracies. What explains this unprecedented expansion of judicial power? In trying to answer this fundamental question about the functioning of contemporary democracies, scholars of Latin America have developed a truly vibrant and theoretically dynamic body of work, one that makes essential contributions to our knowledge of judicial politics more generally. Some scholars emphasize the importance of formal judicial reforms initiated by politicians, which resulted in more autonomous and politically insulated courts. In so doing, they address a central puzzle in political science: under what conditions are politicians willing to accept limits to their power? Inspired by rational choice theory, other authors zoom in on the dynamics of inter-branch interactions, to arrive at a series of propositions about the type of political environment in which courts are more capable to assert their power. Whereas this approach focuses on the ability of judges to exercise power, a third line of scholarship looks at how ideas about the law and judicial role conceptions affect judges’ willingness to intervene in high-stakes political struggles, championing some values and interests at the expense of others. Finally, more recent work asks whether assertions of judicial power make a difference in terms of rights effectiveness. Understanding the consequences of judicial decisions is essential to establishing the extent to which more assertive courts are actually capable of transforming the world around them.

Article

Legislatures and Representation in Latin American Politics  

Emilia Simison

The variation offered by Latin American legislatures makes them empirically and theoretically relevant to the field of legislative studies. Since the 1980s, the study of these legislatures has experienced significant growth, widening the range of topics covered and the territorial scope of the analysis. Legislative-executive relations, elections and careers, and legislative behavior continue to be the most studied topics. In addition, by the 2010s a greater number of empirical analyses have made use of cross-national comparisons of the region and studied both subnational legislatures and how internal processes and institutions shape legislative outcomes. This academic interest still coexists with a low level of citizen confidence in the legislatures, which are considered to be ineffective in policymaking. In between lies representation. Its study has attracted increased attention in a context of significant changes in descriptive representation in the region, such as the increased presence of women and minorities in legislative bodies. Taking this into account, substantive representation and its limits have been analyzed in terms of (a) the representation of women, minorities, and social classes; (b) bills’ territorial scope and subnational influences; and (c) how legislative organization impacts representation. This connection between citizens and congress members affects citizens’ perceptions of congresses as well as other democratic institutions. Despite its policy implications, this connection is still understudied, as are issues such as interest representation, amendments, and legislative speeches.

Article

Environmentalism in Latin America  

Guillermo Castro H.

The environment is considered here as the product of the human interventions in natural systems through socially organized work processes. These processes also produce environmental conflicts, when different human groups try to make mutually exclusive uses of the same ecosystem. As a consequence, every society has a characteristic environment associated with particular landscapes, as well as a peculiar environmental culture, developed along time. Environmentalism, in this perspective, expresses the cultural values and political conducts of different social sectors resulting from the contradictions inherent to their role in the production of the environment, as well as those between the natural conditions necessary for the production of goods and the reproduction of human societies. In Latin America, this has led to the formation of at least three different environmentalisms: a liberal technocratic one, closely related with international organizations, centered on the concept of sustainable development; an ecological one, centered on the conflicts associated with the fracture of the social metabolism of nature due to an extra-activist approach to human and natural resources in the region, and a popular de facto environmentalism, associated both with peasant and indigenous groups that resist the transformation of their natural legacy into natural capital, and urban popular demands for the access to basic environmental conditions of life, such as potable water, sanitation, clean air, and public spaces.

Article

Work and Labor Movements in Latin America  

Omar Manky Bonilla

Labor studies in Latin America have undergone important transformations in the early 21st century. Workers in several countries have contested the flexible processes of labor and work that were common through the 1980s and 1990s and the labor movement has transformed some of its traditional strategies. As a consequence, the field is witnessing important debates, such as those linked to the spatiality of labor strategies, the emergence of a broader notion of work, and the potential networks among labor and other struggles.

Article

Urban Environmental Activism in Latin America  

Marcelo Lopes de Souza

If environmental activism revolves around problems and challenges related to the socioecological context of a collectivity (that is, the material framework in which it exists, from the point of view of access to resources and infrastructure, conditions of public health ,and embeddedness in ecosystems and naturogenic processes and dynamics), urban environmental activism can be characterized as activism in which the agendas, actors, and conflicts involved are specifically related to the urban space and its peculiarities, considered from a broad socioecological perspective. Considering the immense body of literature that has accumulated over the last 30 years on the environmental problems of Latin America, it is disappointing to see that only a comparatively small part of it refers specifically to urban environmental conflicts and activism. This is disturbing, because already in 2007, 78% of Latin America’s population lived in cities or other geographical entities classified as urban. Moreover, although in some core capitalist countries, too, there are many kinds of urban environmental problems, caused by omission, irresponsibility, or structural causes linked to class differences and asymmetries of power, Latin American problems and conflicts—above all those related to environmental injustice—are far more dramatic. Symptomatically, environmental struggles have been massive and have typically involved basic rights and the non-satisfaction of basic needs in the cities of the region. At the end of the day, it is clear that there have always been two basic types of urban environmental activism in Latin America: on the one side, a kind of environmental activism (and ecological discourse) that masks contradictions and class struggle, as it adopts a strict “preservationist” perspective that reveals itself to be insensitive to human needs and rights; on the other side, however, there are radical social struggles that are at the same time environmental struggles, particularly those explicitly or implicitly related to environmental justice. This diversity demonstrates both the richness and the contradictions of a contested sociopolitical landscape, where terms like sustainability and environmental protection have been instrumentalized for different, sometimes mutually incompatible, purposes.

Article

Foreign Direct Investment and Its Politics in Latin America  

R. Douglas Hecock

The open economic policies Latin American countries adopted in the wake of the debt crisis of the early 1980s were expected to bring a variety of benefits. Trade liberalization and privatization make domestic firms more competitive, and deregulation helps to create an efficient business climate. Notably, such policies are also likely to spur foreign investment seeking new opportunities, and Latin American countries did indeed begin to see large inflows in the 1990s. Foreign direct investment (FDI) is thought to be particularly complementary to economic development. Compared to portfolio investment in stocks and bonds, FDI consists of the construction or purchasing of physical assets including manufacturing facilities, retail outlets, hotels, and mines. FDI should spur local economic activity and bring with it jobs and technology transfers. Furthermore, because divestment takes planning and time, direct investment is relatively long-term, so investors are expected to display greater commitments to the economic and political futures of their hosts. As a result of these substantial potential benefits, a body of scholarship has emerged to try to understand the political dynamics of FDI. Is investment more likely to flow to democratic or authoritarian regimes? Are direct investors seeking countries with few labor protections and weak environmental regulations or are they attracted to public investments in human capital? Do they eschew governments with poor human rights records or do they see abusers as potential partners in managing a compliant workforce? What are the effects of FDI flows on the political contexts of their hosts? Among others, these questions have received significant scholarly attention, and while we have learned a great deal about the behavior and effects of FDI, considerable potential remains. Having received massive inflows averaging more than $100 billion between 2000 and 2017 and consisting of countries with broadly similar development trajectories, Latin America offers a rich landscape for such analysis. In particular, finer-grained examinations of FDI to Latin American countries can help us understand how it might affect political systems and which types of investment best complement national development projects. In so doing, studies of FDI flows to Latin America are poised to make major contributions to the fields of international political economy, development studies, and comparative politics.

Article

Identity in Latin American Regionalism: The Andean Community  

Germán C. Prieto

Latin America is usually referred to as a homogeneous region that shares a collective identity based on common history, language and culture in general. As a result, it is broadly expected that collective identity should underpin and facilitate regional integration among Latin American states. However, the idea of a Latin American identity can be problematized, arguing that the concept of “Latin America” is more an exclusionary one than an integrator. Moreover, addressing collective identity as a social construction among state elites reveals the political disputes that lay at the backdrop of regionalism as a political enterprise. The relationship between identity and regionalism in Latin America can be discussed using a study of the role of collective identity in the unfolding of three case studies of the Andean Community. A constructivist approach can be engaged to show that it is possible to observe three dimensions of collective identity in the Andean Community, whose interplay led to advancing regionalism in certain ways but also caused disagreements and failures. Instead of taking a simplistic view of identity as the sharing of similarities, disentangling collective identity into cultural, ideological, and intergroup dimensions helps in understanding that identity is mostly a political issue and therefore a disputed one, and that analyzing the relationship between these three dimensions contributes to explaining the unfolding of regionalism in terms of advance and stagnation.

Article

The Drug Policy in the Americas From a Gender Perspective  

Helena Salim de Castro

In the early 21st century, the number of women incarcerated in Latin America for drug-related offenses has increased dramatically. Many women are engaging in drug trafficking for different reasons, and in most cases, they play inferior roles in the drug supply chain, working as couriers or carrying drugs inside their bodies, which make them vulnerable to the justice system. This increase in female incarceration is one of the consequences of a repressive and prohibitive framework against the use and trafficking of drugs in the Americas. The “War on Drugs” policy was developed in the 1970s by the U.S. government, almost 50 years ago. This policy spread a regional fight against drug use and trafficking, which was reinforced by the United Nations Conventions on Drugs and committees of the Organization of American States. Even though some international and regional organizations and government institutions have been alarmed by the increase in female incarceration rates, the discussions and documents concerning this issue have some gaps. As analyzed by a feminist and gender literature, stereotypes about femininity persist. The official documents consider women mere victims in the drug world and do not debate their reasons for entering criminality, as an economic necessity, for example. In the same sense, little effort has been made by governments to change the actual repressive anti-drug policy. Focusing just on the lowest level of the drug supply chain, the “War on Drugs” policy continues to drive many people, especially women, younger, and black poor people, to jail.

Article

Resistance to Extractivism and Megaprojects in Latin America  

Manuela L. Picq

It is extremely dangerous to resist extractive megaprojects in Latin America. The intensive accumulation of natural resources for export on global markets has long characterized Latin America, but the boom in exports of raw commodities since 2000 has accentuated a violent history of dispossession. As of 2020, Latin America represents 60% of nature defenders killed in the world. Governments license natural resources at unprecedented rates, pushing land- and water-grabbing to new levels. Resistance against mining, oil, hydroelectric, and agribusiness projects is framed as antidevelopment and repressed with brutal violence. Governments are expanding the extractive frontier fast, promoting megaprojects in the name of national development or to fund social policies, a so-called redistributive neo-extractivism. This extractive consensus has increased social conflict across the region; but it has also inspired new forms of resistance. Resistance, which is mostly Indigenous and largely female, is a political struggle against extractive industries that represent ongoing forms of colonial dispossession. Resistance against extractivism focuses on the defense of nature as much as on rights to self-determination, a central element to shape a postextractive world. Ecuador is a case in point. The country recognizes international rights to prior consultation and established the first rights of nature framework in the world, yet it criminalizes nature defenders as it continues to expand the extractive frontier. The emerging rights of nature framework, like mining bans, are alternatives to extractivism that offer insights into experiences of resistance in the highlands of Ecuador. The Rio Blanco mine, an iconic megaproject financed by China, was suspended in 2018 thanks to a solid network of resistance that secured a broad mobilization of rural communities and urban youth, lawyers and academics, blending street protest with legal action. The Rio Blanco case shows the complementarity of various strategies, the potential of courts as allies, and the powerful coordination between social movements and government to contest structural dispossession.

Article

Indigenous Political Representation in Latin America  

Roberta Rice

Indigenous peoples have become important social and political actors in contemporary Latin America. The politicization of ethnic identities in the region has divided analysts into those who view it as a threat to democratic stability versus those who welcome it as an opportunity to improve the quality of democracy. Throughout much of Latin America’s history, Indigenous peoples’ demands have been oppressed, ignored, and silenced. Latin American states did not just exclude Indigenous peoples’ interests; they were built in opposition to or even against them. The shift to democracy in the 1980s presented Indigenous groups with a dilemma: to participate in elections and submit themselves to the rules of a largely alien political system that had long served as an instrument of their domination or seek a measure of representation through social movements while putting pressure on the political system from the outside. In a handful of countries, most notably Bolivia and Ecuador, Indigenous movements have successfully overcome this tension by forming their own political parties and contesting elections on their own terms. The emergence of Indigenous peoples’ movements and parties has opened up new spaces for collective action and transformed the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state. Indigenous movements have reinvigorated Latin America’s democracies. The political exclusion of Indigenous peoples, especially in countries with substantial Indigenous populations, has undoubtedly contributed to the weakness of party systems and the lack of accountability, representation, and responsiveness of democracies in the region. In Bolivia, the election of the country’s first Indigenous president, Evo Morales (2006–present) of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) party, has resulted in new forms of political participation that are, at least in part, inspired by Indigenous traditions. A principal consequence of the broadening of the democratic process is that Indigenous activists are no longer forced to choose between party politics and social movements. Instead, participatory mechanisms allow civil society actors and their organizations to increasingly become a part of the state. New forms of civil society participation such as Indigenous self-rule broaden and deepen democracy by making it more inclusive and government more responsive and representative. Indigenous political representation is democratizing democracy in the region by pushing the limits of representative democracy in some of the most challenging socio-economic and institutional environments.

Article

The Washington Consensus in Latin America  

Judith Teichman

Washington Consensus policies evolved over time, both in Washington and among Latin American policymakers. These policies, involving trade liberalization and privatization (among other measures), were widely adopted in the region by the early 1990s. A generation of scholarly work sought to explain how and why Latin American countries embarked on economic reforms that governments had strongly resisted in the past. While many researchers focused on the top-down nature of the market-liberalization process, others called attention to its pluralist character and argued that the process had considerable public support. When the original Consensus ideas proved ineffective in promoting growth and improved living standards, technocratic Washington added new policies. By the early 2000s, Washington’s goal became that of reducing poverty while ensuring the completion of the original Washington Consensus reforms. In Latin America, however, there was a growing disillusionment with the original reform agenda and a strong challenge to key reforms. With the rise of social mobilization critical of neoliberal reforms and the election of left regimes challenging their main precepts, scholarship turned to a discussion of the nature of the new regimes and the extent to which their policies deviated from the Washington Consensus (both its original formulation and the later expanded version). While most scholars identify the left leaders of Ecuador, Bolivia, and particularly Venezuela, as offering the greatest challenges to neoliberalism, there is no consensus on the extent of the challenge to neoliberalism presented by Latin America’s left regimes. Research has also given attention to the rising demand of China for Latin American commodities as a key ingredient in the region’s left turn away from neoliberalism. The fall in commodity prices, however, set the stage for a resurgence of the political right, its business supporters, and the re-introduction of some key aspects of the original Washington Consensus.

Article

The International Political Economy of Soy Agriculture in South America  

Mariano Turzi

International agricultural production has been transformed by the consolidation of the agribusiness model. Multinational chemical and trading companies leveraged their scientific and technological superiority over the producers to advance sales of agrochemical and biotechnological products at the same time that they integrated with traders and processors. By advancing financial scale advantages, international corporate actors established powerful buying positions, determined infrastructural developments, and established a globalized pattern of agricultural economic activity. This has been reinforced by converging demand trends of growing global population, a dietary transition in the emerging world that includes more animal products, a diversifying energy matrix that increasingly includes biofuels and the use of agricultural products as a financial asset class. The international political economy (IPE) of the soybean agribusiness model was articulated with the specific national political economies of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay. Differential institutional structures and different political economy coalitions and conditions processed these external conditions in different ways: coordination (Brazil), confrontation (Argentina), and colonization (Paraguay).

Article

Party Finance in Latin America  

Kathleen Bruhn

Modern representative democracy cannot function without political parties, however rudimentary. Parties in turn cannot function without money. The subject of party finance is therefore central to the construction of contemporary democracies. Latin American countries have attempted to meet the challenges of preserving democracy while providing for political parties across three main areas of financial regulation: provision of public finance, regulation of private finance, and limiting campaign spending. In all three areas, transparency (reporting), oversight, and enforcement of existing legal regulations remain important problems for the health of the political system. In the late 20th century, Latin American countries increasingly turned to public finance as a way of supplementing existing systems of private contributions. This trend seems to have been inspired both by a desire to reduce the inequalities inherent in Latin America’s socioeconomic structure and by efforts to contain and prevent episodes of scandal and undue influence generated by private contributors. Public finance particularly benefits small parties and parties with fewer connections to the wealthy sectors that tend to dominate private contributions. Public finance may contribute to the institutionalization of both party organizations and party systems, but it may also weaken the dependence of parties on their members and supporters in ways that undermine representation. Private finance in Latin America remains largely obscure. We know that relatively few private donors account for the lion’s share of party donations, but it is unclear in many cases exactly who donates, or what their money buys. It is therefore difficult for voters (and analysts) to determine the structure of party obligations to donors and to hold parties accountable. Partly as a result, drug money is believed to have penetrated the political systems of many Latin American countries, especially but not exclusively at the local level. Campaign spending limits, including limits on the duration of campaigns and campaign advertising, have been employed in some cases to try to contain costs and thus reduce the incentives of parties to seek out private donations, especially of questionable origin. Lax enforcement, however, limits the impact of these initiatives.

Article

Party Leadership and Institutionalization in Latin America  

Diana Davila Gordillo and Kristin N. Wylie

In Latin America, a general discontent with political parties persists, fueling challenges to the quality of democracy. Two prominent limitations of Latin American democracies stem from the weakly institutionalized and unrepresentative character of many parties and party systems in the region. A regional overview of party longevity shows that older parties are the minority, and with few exceptions (Uruguay and Colombia), they control neither the government nor the opposition. Yet while earlier studies of party institutionalization in Latin America tended to focus on longevity, subsequent studies have emphasized the multidimensionality of the concept. Party institutionalization connotes not only longevity but also routinization of formal and informal procedures, organizational complexity and cohesion, and societal roots. As evidenced by parties throughout the region, those multiple dimensions are nonmutual. Even in inchoate party systems many Latin American parties have survived and routinized (sometimes informal) decision making procedures, often in the absence of organizational cohesion and societal roots. Although strong party organizations are important for democratic governance, they may be inversely related to party leadership, with strong leaders hindering party institutionalization. Leaders can alternatively play an important role in mobilizing voters and structuring party organizations, their routinization, and the party brand. While the region has been a global leader in the adoption of gender quotas and parity regimes and in women’s parliamentary representation, as of 2012, its party leadership remained dominated by men—the regional average in parties’ representation of women on their National Executive Commissions was just 20%. Willing party leaders in institutionalized parties are critical actors in the recruitment and support of candidates and can thus marshal party resources to help diversify party ranks. The inclusion of diverse voices in party leadership is important for responsiveness, legitimacy, and the quality of democracy more broadly.

Article

Surveys and the Study of Latin American Politics  

Ryan E. Carlin

To understand Latin American politics, one must view it through the eyes and minds of Latin Americans. Since the middle of the 20th century, pollsters in academia, government, and industry have fielded public opinion surveys in an attempt to do just that. Although they are not typically considered political institutions, polls and surveys influence a variety of political processes directly and indirectly thanks to the legitimacy they enjoy among academics, policymakers, and publics. Large strides have been made toward making surveys more methodologically rigorous and toward improving the quality of survey data in the region. Scholars have leveraged the data to advance the theoretical understanding of a range of topics, especially political support, partisanship, and voting behavior. Despite these gains, public opinion surveys face clear challenges that threaten their hard-won legitimacy. To the extent that these challenges are met in the coming decades, public opinion polling’s role in shaping Latin American politics will remain, if not strengthen.

Article

Executive–Legislative Relations in Latin American Politics  

Cecilia Martinez-Gallardo and Marcelo Camerlo

Presidentialism has long been associated with democratic instability. Conflict between the executive and the legislature is at the heart of this relationship. Traditional arguments link minority presidents with policy deadlock and inter-branch conflict, especially in contexts where presidential institutions deincentivize the formation of governing coalitions that can provide presidents with stable legislative majorities. The extent to which these premises are true, however, varies significantly across the presidential countries of Latin America, as does the potential for conflict and cooperation between the executive and the legislature. The prevalence of minority presidents hinges on the fragmentation of congress as well as other characteristics of the party and electoral systems; the relative powers of the president and congress vary widely, and in many places they have been adjusted precisely to reduce inter-branch conflict. Finally, even where minority governments are the norm, the formation of governing coalitions has helped presidents obtain majority support in congress.