Labor market dualism—the segmentation of workers between formal, legally protected employment and informal, unprotected status—has long drawn attention from scholars and policymakers in Latin America. This article argues that lasting patterns of economic and political segmentation of workers arose earlier in the region’s history than has previously been understood, well before the classic “incorporation” period. Late-nineteenth-century practices for the recruitment and retention of workers shaped Latin America’s first sets of labor laws, most notably those governing union organization and individual worker job stability. Subsequently, these first laws served as important templates for development, constraining and conditioning the labor codes adopted under mass-based politics. Using historical data drawn from Chile, Peru, and Argentina, this article shows how differing recruitment practices and variation in the extension of effective suffrage rights and electoral participation shaped early legal labor market segmentation and inequality in Latin America.

Studies of Latin American civil society tend to assume that popular organizations promote “high-intensity” forms of political participation while political parties mainly encourage voting. This study compares the influence of these two forces in the urban informal sector. Association involvement, low in both samples, is related to “higher-intensity” participation, but the differential influence of associations and parties holds only for Costa Rica; Nicaragua’s revolutionary FSLN has fostered a more politically active citizenry.

The 1946 election for Venezuela's National Constituent Assembly marked the beginning of democratic electoral processes and the modern party system in that country. Although interrupted by ten years of dictatorship (1948-1958), nine national elections for president and parliament have been held since 1946. In conjunction with these elections, the Venezuelan party system has passed through four stages: a predominant party system (1945-1948), a limited multiparty system (1958-1973), an attenuated two-party system (1973-1993), and recently, the return to a limited multiparty system (1993-) (Sartori 1976).

Spiritism is well on the way to becoming the most national of the religions practiced in Brazil. Yet apart from Christian clergymen, social scientists, and of course Spiritists themselves, few educated people pay much attention to its rapid and wide spread. Although they must see the sensational picture stories frequently appearing in magazines and on screens, they fail to realize that Brazil has become the acknowledged capital of the spiritualistic world in the West. At most they may know that Brazil's most famous mediums get invitations to travel abroad North of the equator and in the Far East a ready coterie awaits these mediums whose best-selling psychographed works find foreign publishers. Spiritist journals, however, play on news of their travels to work up nationalist pride in Brazil as “Heart of the World, Homeland of the Gospel.” That self-regarding expression is the title of a popular national history psychographed (dictated by the Spirit of a deceased person to a medium who writes it down in trance) in 1938. Since then Brazilian Spiritism has grown hugely in national ardor and in numbers.

The Malvinas (Falklands) war of April-June 1982 has generated little attention among international scholars largely because neither its causes or consequences are. assumed to have great power significance.

The thesis of this article is that the timing of the Malvinas invasion, and the subsequent miscalculation that the United States would tacitly assist Argentina, were partly shaped by U. S. policies. Although the principal motive for the invasion was to vindicate a claim stretching back to the early 19th century (U.S. House 1982c: 50-51; Etchepareborda, 1983:48-58), the abruptness of Argentina's actions was conditioned by Reagan administration overtures towards a grand “anti-Communist” alliance (Maechling, 1982:75-82; Sunday Times, 1982: 63); an increase in the frequency and prestige of high-level contacts between the U.S. and Argentina between 1980-1982; the cultivation of official links between Galtieri and high-ranking U.S. national security officials (U.S. House, 1982d: 67; Hastings and Jenkins, 1983:46); the intense, personal diplomacy of former Secretary of State Haig during the conflict (Hastings and Jenkins, 1983: 104-113); and by covert efforts by Argentina to extend and strengthen U.S.-Argentine ties (Cardoso et al., 1983: 60-61).

Why do some protest movements in Latin America succeed in rolling back privatizations while others fail? This article argues that protests against privatizations have tended to succeed under two conditions. First, privatization’s opponents form linkages (or “brokerage”) across multiple sectors of society. Broad coalitions are more likely to achieve their goals, while groups acting alone, such as labor unions, are more easily defeated or ignored by governments. Second, civil rights are protected but political representation is weak. In that case, opponents have the legal right to protest, but are unlikely to have opportunities for communicating their concerns through formal institutions, which prompts them to channel their demands outside of existing political institutions. Using case examples and logistic regression, this study confirms these arguments and discusses the implications for democracy in the region.

In a recent reinterpretation of political change in Peru between independence and World War I, Berg and Weaver (1978) suggest that the rise of guano export beginning in the 1840s led to important changes in socioeconomic relations within the country. In consequence, a centralized and powerful state emerged which asserted its authority over the formerly dominant provincial elites. On this point, Berg and Weaver's analysis is not inconsistent with existing literature on the period (Basadre, 1963; Pike, 1967; Bonilla, 1974). But their argument that by retaining control over guano export the state acquired the financial resources with which to establish its independence from newly emerging urban elites does not seem completely valid.

Because gender equality actors rarely have sufficient power to create new institutions, this article asks how they can achieve positive gender change in constrained circumstances when the creation of new rules is not possible. Building on a feminist institutionalist approach to analyzing gendered institutional dynamics, power, and resistance, we open the “black box” of one executive: Michelle Bachelet’s first presidency in Chile (2006–10). Using theory-guided process tracing and primarily qualitative data, we examine key reforms in three policy areas—health, pensions, and childcare—that were central to Bachelet’s first program. By analyzing how efforts to incorporate positive gender change fared differently in each area, this study shows how far utilizing, subverting, or converting existing rules—more “hidden” forms of change, often away from legislatures—can be effective, if limited, strategies when gender equality advocates face resistance.

Until quite recently, the study of Latin American politics existed in a relatively primitive stage. A crude empiricism, occupied with the straightforward description of events or formal institutions, was relieved only by occasional global generalization of an impressionistic character about the informal characteristics of politics. However, substantial advances have begun to be made in the last few years in the direction of more systematic elaboration of theory to account for the distinctive characteristics of politics in the area, and we have begun to see the confrontation with each other and with the data themselves of rival theoretical explanations. Needless to say, this mutual confrontation of rival interpretations is a healthy sign for the deepening of our understanding of Latin American politics.

How does a country's transition to democracy affect the state? This question is of great importance, given the crucial role that the state has played in the economic, social, and political development of most countries affected by the “third wave” of democratization. Yet this topic has received insufficient scholarly attention. Indeed, definitional assumptions may make this question appear a non-issue: because the state is regarded as more permanent than a political regime, which can change with disturbing frequency, democratic transitions are often assumed to leave the state unchanged. Latin America's “politicized states” (Chalmers, 1977; Power, 1991), however, lack institutional stability. Given the fluidity of state structures in the region, democratization may have a profound effect on the state. It may help institutionalize the state and make it more autonomous from established social forces, or, by contrast, it may further corrode the internal unity and undermine the strength of the state. Because the state has assumed an enormously wide range of responsibilities in Brazil, this country constitutes an especially good case for analysis.

Faced with limited opportunities for their primary-product exports, many developing countries have sought new strategies to develop manufactured products for export. Often lacking the necessary infrastructure for industrialization but possessing abundant labor resources, some developing economies have attempted to attract investment through assembly operations that promote domestic employment, exports, and local development.

The study of the bureaucracy in Latin America, within the study of politics, has long been little more than an afterthought. It is assumed to lie in the realm of public administration, distinct from other regional subfields that have increasingly gained the attention of political scientists. As a result, scholars' understanding of Latin American bureaucratic politics is limited. Here, we conduct a comprehensive survey of peer-reviewed articles to evaluate the state of this subfield. We find a thematically, analytically, and methodologically splintered discipline, but a prime one for exploitation and new avenues of research. This article summarizes salient trends in the literature, describes advances in the study of bureaucracy in Latin America, and discusses limitations in this scholarship. It suggests a roadmap for scholars by proposing a series of research questions and recommends a series of analytical and methodological approaches to address those questions.

Before the 1980s, LGBT groups in Latin America were largely (though not entirely) excluded from the state. This article argues that a combination of factors—democratization, social movement demands, neoliberal globalization and its accompanying discourse of modernity—has led many state actors to seek to incorporate LGBT groups into the state. Considering two cases of self-proclaimed revolutionary parties, Mexico's PRI and Nicaragua's FSLN, the article examines how and why these parties incorporated LGBT organizations and what impact such incorporation had on the LGBT groups themselves. In both countries, LGBT groups benefited from clientelistic resources at the same time that they found themselves deradicalizing, often forced to accept visibility without rights. But in Nicaragua, a more recent revolutionary experience and ties to a combative, autonomous feminist movement have allowed some LGBT activists to resist the state's efforts to co-opt their movement.

In October 2016, the proposed peace agreement between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) was narrowly defeated in a referendum that sought its public approval. This article examines how previous structured political predispositions and attitudes shape voters’ preferences in a referendum. In a combined survey—a face-to-face sample in Bogotá and an online sample—conducted before the plebiscite, it identifies voter cleavages using principal component analysis (PCA). It finds three consistent components with profiles reflecting whether an individual is a progovernment citizen, a right-conservative voter, and a citizen with an evangelical religious identity. The findings suggest that voters are heterogeneous and that different predispositions and attitudes cluster in specific types of voters, which shaped these voters’ willingness to endorse the proposed peace agreement.

Long Wracked by Civil strife and turbulence which seemingly defy resolution by either political or military methods, Colombia also has suffered economic setbacks through a series of guerrilla attacks on its main petroleum pipeline. During the first half of 1988, more than 6 million barrels were lost, at an estimated cost of one-quarter billion dollars. Recognizing its inability to curb the attacks — largely the work of the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) — the government in Bogotá in early June proposed construction of a new pipeline with Venezuela. According to Minister of Mines Oscar Mejia, it would carry Colombian crude across the border well to the south of ELN territory, thence to be shipped to Venezuelan seaports for export to international markets.

A crucial feature of political life in twentieth-century Brazil has been the growing role of the state as the central regulator of social, economic, and political life. One aspect of the expansion of the public sector in Brazil, as elsewhere, has been the accumulation by the state of a number of important social and economic functions previously exercised outside the public domain. One important function adopted by the state in Brazil is that of social protection, in the form of an elaborate and complex social insurance system. Presently some form of social protection reaches almost the entire rural population and some 78 percent of the urban population. The main social protection organization—Instituto Nacional da Previdência Social (INPS)— boasts the second largest budget in the nation (in 1975 CR $43 billion in contrast to the federal budget of Cr $113 billion) and a bureaucracy of over 102,700 employees.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, the collapse of civilian democracies in several of Latin America's most socioeconomically developed nations and the rise of highly institutionalized, repressive regimes raised serious questions about the nature of political development and political decay in that region. Neither advanced social indicators (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay), nor an extensive, modern-industrial economic sector (Argentina, Brazil), nor a sustained period of representative government (Chile, Uruguay) seemed to be guarantees of continued civilian-democratic rule. Indeed, scholars such as Guillermo O'Donnell have suggested that the nature of economic growth and industrialization in Latin America—most notably in the “Southern Cone”— had resulted in increased class conflict, intense political strains, and the rise of bureaucratic-authoritarian (B-A) regimes.

This article assesses the 1976-1981 price stabilization and restructuring program and its impact on major macro- and microeconomic variables in Argentina. More specifically, it concentrates on examining the attempt simultaneously to control inflation and to redirect the economy towards a more marketoriented structure with a rapidly changing combination of domestic and external economic measures. After discussing the objectives and implementation of the program, the development of major macroeconomic variables between 1976 and 1981 is briefly examined. Since several of the macrovariables give conflicting evidence, a more detailed analysis of the program's impact on agriculture and industry was undertaken, which stresses the need to differentiate among the various actors within the major subsectors of the economy.