The article analyzes executive-legislative relations in Uruguay between 1985 and 2005. It demonstrates that even after controlling for ideological affinity and acknowledging that ideology affects presence in the cabinet, legislators whose factions hold ministerial positions behave in a more progovernment way than their ideology would predict. This result not only shows that coalitions “work” but suggests that they work because the presidents use resources under their control to attract support from legislators. This article presents a systematic analysis of executive-legislative relations in multiparty settings that builds on the finding that nonideologically contiguous coalitions often form to separate the ideological from the strategic determinants of legislative behavior. It also contributes to the literature by presenting a new set of roll call data and, more generally, highlights the risks of attempting to infer ideology directly from legislative behavior in presidential multiparty settings.

This article seeks to determine the main predictors of political participation in a newly democratic regime: Mexico. Compared to other nations, Mexico fills a moderate position in terms of the volume of political participation. Following the literature on participation, this study develops a set of participant modes—voting, communal activity, petitioning, direct action, and political organization membership—and then seeks to determine the socioeconomic, demographic, attitudinal, and social capital factors that best explain participation. Distinct resource inequalities limit the participation of the less educated, the poor, women, and workers, although peasant participation is robust. The strongest determinant of political participation of all kinds is involvement in social capital–generating activities: belonging to nonpolitical organizations and engaging in charitable work, activities typically dominated by the middle class. Building social capital is essential to promoting robust rates of political participation in Mexico.

Comparing the Aylwin and Frei administrations, this article probes the question of why civilian authorities did not always use the legal and political tools they had acquired to respond to the military’s institutional and political demands. Actors’ preferences, leadership style, and strategic decisions influence the way civilian leaders use those tools. Civilian responses have important and sometimes unintended consequences for the stabilization of the civil-military relationship in new democratic regimes.

The 1980s Witnessed a series of halting, tenuous but, nonetheless, widely—hailed transitions from military regimes to constitutional democracies throughout South America. Yet, despite the initial optimism, the political newcomers faced formidable tasks. Not only had memories of democratic rule and practices grown dim in the years of disuse, but, with few exceptions, new governments found themselves threatened by a deteriorating economy with bleak prospects for the future. Equally — perhaps even more — threatening was the fact that though the military regimes may have relinquished their position, they had not necessarily relinquished their power, which raised the possibility that their civilian successors might not be able to stay in office long enough to confront their multifarious problems.

In Argentina, the risk of a return to military rule was perhaps even greater than in some of its neighbors as the country had experienced a mosaic of alternating military and civilian governments ever since 1930.

Honduras Has Emerged as a cocaine transshipment point between Colombia and the United States. One informed source suggests that as much as fifty tons of cocaine have moved through the country during the last fifteen months. This paper examines the politics of drug trafficking in Honduras. Special attention is given to the relations between drug trafficking and the Honduran political environment, the emergence of a new “powder elite, ” and the manner in which US and Honduran authorities are addressing these problems.

One of the hemisphere's poorest countries by almost all standards of development, Honduras has a population of about 4.5 million people and an area the size of Tennessee. Unlike neighboring Guatemala and El Salvador where a national oligarchy has enhanced its wealth through an extensive coffee industry, Honduras first emerged in the international economy through its foreign-owned banana enterprises which still are a leading source of foreign exchange.

To what extent has the North American Free Trade Agreement contributed to strengthening and deepening international environmental management in the Americas? Should the system be broadened to incorporate other nations? While a complete answer to these queries is currently beyond reach, there should be little doubt that NAFTA has influenced and continues to influence the direction of environmental management in North America and the hemisphere at large. The agreement has spawned a series of new institutions that are already reshaping current practices and that have considerable promise for broadening the range of international commitments to environmental management in the Americas. The most prominent and most relevant of these is the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).

When Alberto Fujimori campaigned for president of Peru W i n 1990, he ran on a platform in which he promised to institute a moderate program of gradual economic stabilization, including the privatization of certain state-owned enterprises. These promises were instrumental in his scoring an upset victory over writer Mario Vargas Llosa, who had been the odds-on favorite to win just three months earlier — and, thus, to become Peru's third popularly elected president in his country's ten years of continuous democracy.

Nevertheless, soon after Alán García relinquished the presidential office, in July 1990, to the newly-elected president, those election promises underwent a dramatic reversal. On the grounds that he had inherited a bankrupt country which left him no alternative (no habia otra cosa que hacef), the new president moved quickly to establish a stabilization program of classic orthodoxy in August 1990 (Fujimori, 1990).

This study focuses on Nicaragua's transition from a revolutionary state to one oriented toward democracy and the market, through the political lens of agricultural property rights. The national agenda on property rights after 1990 was dominated by elaborate arrangements to accommodate kinship-based factions of the agroindustrial elite, core Sandinista constituents, rural labor groups, and demobilized peasant combatants. Bargains, legislative initiatives, and constitutional reforms failed to clarify legal ambiguity over coveted assets. Persistent conflict thereby became embedded in official efforts to design a robust property regime. The case of Nicaragua suggests comparisons with other countries where protracted confrontation and social violence over property rights pose serious threats to unconsolidated democratic institutions.

It is estimated that approximately 40 percent of the Colombian population now lives in cities of 100,000 or more. Although the pattern of urbanization in Colombia is more dispersed than in most Latin American countries, the proportion of the urban population living in the four largest cities has steadily increased. Over the last 13 year period, this rate of growth ranged between 4.4 and 7.0 percent (Agency for International Development, n.d.: 17). For example, Bogotá had a population in 1950 of approximately 500,000, but estimates indicate that by 1975 it will have a population of 3,605,000.

What explains mayors’ collaboration with nongovernmental organizations in delivering public goods and services? While some successful collaborations are established, in other cases the call for NGOs to coordinate with governments goes unheeded. Collaboration minimizes the duplication of effort, maximizes information sharing, and builds capacity. Given the scholarly consensus on the importance of collaboration, we know little about it at local levels, where it may matter most. This article focuses on Bolivia, a country with deep decentralization reforms and an active NGO sector. It utilizes survey data on mayors from 2007 to provide insight into the variation in NGO–local government collaboration across a country. It argues that political context is important: mayoral turnover, greater community group engagement, and more municipal resources deter collaboration. The findings illustrate the strategic interplay between state and nonstate actors and explain the uneven geographies of partnerships in governance.

Developing a line of thought from an earlier essay (Morse, 1973: II, 11-55), this paper examines some points of departure for a comparative analysis of urbanization in Latin America and the United States during the nineteenth century. Two assumptions guide the inquiry: first, that the “external dependency” thesis so frequently invoked to explain Latin American urban development easily leads to dogmatism; second, that geoeconomic factors must be perceived as interacting with those of the sociopolitical order.

To set broad guidelines for our effort we might construe the economic and institutional development of the United States and Latin America along the lines of two tensions or counterpoints.

United States. Here the North and West with their commercial agriculture, trading energies, and industrialization faced the commercially and financially dependent South, its socioeconomic organization conditioned by the plantation system, slavery, and export agriculture.

Mexico's 3 × 1 Program for Migrants is a matching grant scheme that seeks to direct the money sent by migrant organizations abroad to the provision of public and social infrastructure and to productive projects in migrants’ communities of origin. To this end, the municipal, state, and federal administrations match the amount sent by hometown associations by 3 to 1. This article explores the impact on the operation of the 3 × 1 of a particular facet of Mexican political life: its recent democratization and the increasing political fragmentation at the municipal level. The study finds a lower provision of public projects in jurisdictions where a high number of political parties compete. This finding casts doubt on the claim that policy interventions such as the 3 × 1 Program actually improve local public goods provision at the local level under increasing political competition.

The article synthesizes contributions from the recent comparative research on civil war and the case-specific literature on Colombia to argue that too often, commentators on this conflict overlook some of its key dimensions. A comprehensive analysis shows that no fewer than six factors are fueling violent conflict in Colombia: economic forces, state weakness, landscape, U.S. policies, long-duration and spin-off violence, and malicious opportunism by non-combatants. The first three are the ones that matter most. The case made here is that when analysts disregard the range and interrelatedness of the factors involved, the result is a distortion of reality and a tendency to support policies that will not enhance the prospects for peace.

This article explains the twentieth-century Latin American shift from majoritarian to proportional representation (PR) electoral systems. It argues that PR was introduced when the electoral arena changed significantly and threatened the power of the dominant party. The adoption of PR was therefore an effort by the established party to retain partial power in the face of absolute defeat. Majoritarian systems remained in place when the incumbent party was strong enough to believe that it could gain a plurality of the votes despite electoral changes. An empirical analysis of 20 countries over 104 years (1900–2004) provides support for this argument.

This article investigates political opportunities and constraints associated with incorporating the concept of universal citizenship into migration debates. Analyzing the speeches of Ecuador's president Rafael Correa over eight years, the article argues that Correa strategically crafted a narrative of universal citizenship to undergird politically beneficial policies. Political constraints from constituents and rivals, and the populist nature of his governing style, hollowed out progressive migration policy innovations to the point that universal citizenship became a rhetorical device more than a substantive policy agenda. Through this empirical case, the article develops a more nuanced critical understanding of universal citizenship discourses as sites for negotiating the relationship between states and migrants.

May 10, 1981, not only ushered in a political surprise for France, as well as for its European and American allies, but sent positive shockwaves throughout that part of the Caribbean which is still French. On that date François Mitterrand came to power in the Metropole of France at the same time that the Départements d'Outre-Mer (DOM or overseas departments) of Martinique, Guadeloupe and Guiana rejected his candidacy with a unanimity as stunning as it is rare in West Indian politics. Ever since the DOM have been coping with Socialism in France, decentralization in the Caribbean, and an unprecedented antilleanization of local culture, institutions, and politics. The result has been a paradox of heightened social liberalism combined with intensified political violence; but paradox has always been at the heart of the French Antilles.

The Process of Redemocratization, the “return” to democratically elected government, has been a major trend in much of the developing world in the 1980s. In particular, this trend has been strong in Latin America. The list of countries returning to the democratic fold is indeed impressive: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, Ecuador and Peru. Even Haiti, in the Caribbean, witnessed the fall of the Duvalier regime and some initial movement, though halting, toward democracy. It appears in 1988 that Suriname could be rejoining the “democratic club” after several years of near-authoritarian rule, characterized by executions of opposition leaders, curtailment of press freedom, and a protracted insurrection.

The violence in Central America has displaced an unprecedented number of people in the area. While the majority of the approximately two million displaced individuals remain within their native countries, hundreds of thousands have fled to neighboring countries and to the U.S. where they create serious economic and political problems for the host governments. This article explores Mexico's policies toward the estimated 250,000 Central Americans who are seeking protection from the violence of their homelands.

There is considerable controversy over whether these individuals are political refugees. The 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees defines refugees as those individuals who “due to a well-founded fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion have left their country of origin.” The convention's emphasis on individuals singled out for political persecution would seem to disqualify many of the Central Americans fleeing generalized conditions of violence.

Since the early 1990s, World Bank officials in many countries have pressed their government borrowers to include nongovernmental organizations as development partners. What impact has this new partnership norm had in the bank's borrower countries, and why? This article investigates these questions through longitudinal analysis of three cases: Guatemala, Ecuador, and the Gambia. In their first iteration in the 1990s, these bank-sponsored efforts generally failed to take root; yet by the 2000s, NGOs and state actors were engaged in multiple partnerships. This article suggests that over time, bank officials' repeated efforts to embed these new ideas fostered a social learning process that led NGOs to adopt more strategic partnership practices and government officials to see NGO partners as useful. Several factors may affect this learning process: levels of professionalism and the growth of professional networks, the presence of effective “bridge builders,” and the level of historical conflicts.

Almost every day our newspapers feature accounts of student ferment on one or another of the university campuses in both the “developed” and “developing” nations around the globe. University students appear to have become extremely active in recent years in attempting to influence policy decisions taken by both administrators of higher education and government officials. In Brazil, however, such student political activism is clearly not just a recent phenomenon. While Brazilian university students have played an increasingly important role in national politics since World War II, most recently in their outspoken opposition to the military-dominated governments of the late Castello Branco and that of President Artur Costa e Silva, they enjoy an important tradition of student political activism that cannot be overlooked. In fact, accepting the suggestions made with real insight by E. Wight Bakke regarding the causes of student activism, we find that an examination of the student tradition in Brazil helps to explain current student agitation.