Volatility is a central theme of the scholarship on party competition. At the extreme, entire systems collapse. Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela each went through a protracted period of change with the crash of old parties and the rise of new ones, including one representing the “new left.” Average electoral volatility grew by more than 50 percent and remained high for a decade or more. Can this churning surface of party death, birth, and change obscure undercurrents of stabilization in individual voting behavior? This project decomposes electoral volatility into two subtypes: system-level volatility—long-term spatial and temporal trends of change in support (e.g., realignment)—and individual volatility—fluid and cycle-specific fluctuations in support (e. g., electoral swing). It shows that the high volatility through the transformation has been at the system level, not the individual level. The cause is the stronger partisan and ethnic bonds mobilized by the new left.

This article investigates the effect of local economic conditions on voting behavior by focusing on the export-oriented agricultural areas of Argentina during the commodities boom. It assesses the marginal effect of export wealth on electoral outcomes by studying the impact of soybean production, the main Argentine export product during this period. The combination of rising agricultural prices and a salient national tax on exports allows us to evaluate how wealth and tax policy shape local electoral behavior. This study relies on a spatial econometric analysis of the vote across Argentine departments for the 2007–15 period, along with qualitative evidence from interviews and a descriptive analysis of government appointments.

This article analyzes the uneven expansion of social policy, using evidence from Chile. It explicates the Chilean case to understand differences between two specific areas of social policy: pensions and healthcare. Most macroexplanatory factors, which the literature proves are crucial for cross-country analysis, are left constant. Instead, it focuses on accounting for differences in the scope of expansion across sectors. It carries out a hypothesis-generating type of case study and relies on inductive process tracing. The goal is to generate hypotheses that may be useful for theory building in the realm of intersectoral dynamics of social policy expansion. The findings suggest that three explanatory factors combine to account for such differences: policymakers’ perceptions of the budgetary constraints and fiscal costs of producing (or failing to produce) a reform; the composition, cohesion, and ideas of technical teams; and the relative power of nongovernmental, prowelfare actors in relation to market stakeholders.

The literature studying the behavioral effects of political corruption is rapidly growing. While some studies explore the contextual and institutional factors that can neutralize the effects of corruption, this article addresses a different mechanism for weak electoral accountability for corruption: citizen (de)mobilization. It uses a vignette experiment embedded in a nationally representative AmericasBarometer survey in Colombia to isolate the causal effect of political corruption on electoral participation. The results suggest that receiving credible information about the corrupt behavior of politicians running for office decreases the likelihood of participation in elections. It also shows that corruption demobilizes voters even when corrupt politicians are able to provide public works to their constituencies, which casts doubt on the idea that citizens exchange integrity for favorable policy outcomes.

Presidents rely on their trusted advisers to collect, analyze, coordinate, and present information in a timely fashion. However, Latin American presidents often fail to form majority governments and must use cabinet appointments to secure legislative coalitions to pursue their policies. This article suggests that presidents strategically redesign their executive offices to address the ministry drift. Presidents who can transform the organizations attached to their executive office have additional tools to monitor their ministers’ flexibility. The article argues that the greater the number of ministers in the cabinet from parties different from the president’s, the greater the transformations to the presidential office. Using time-series analysis, hypotheses are tested with an original dataset of organizational changes to the presidential center in Colombia, 1967–2015. The findings indicate that the percentage of ministers from other parties is a good predictor of the transformations undertaken in the executive office of the president.