Taking Freedom of Information into the Commonwealth: The Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative at Work

Abstract

This article outlines the commitment of the Commonwealth and its institutions to a public right to official information, its promotion of the enactment and effective implementation of freedom of information (FOI) legislation, and progress to date in member states. It identifies obstacles to more widespread introduction of access to information laws, and describes the work of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative through years of advocacy for the adoption of such laws, the training of bureaucrats, lawyers and parliamentarians from around the Commonwealth, and collaborations with civil rights organisations, coalitions and activists. It stresses that engendering a regime of transparency is more complicated than merely enacting an FOI law. Citing successes of the Indian grass-roots movement in promoting the right to information, and successfully encouraging the use of enacted statutes through the dissemination of information about its provisions and usage, it calls for capacity building in both civil society and the media to work towards successful outcomes elsewhere in the Commonwealth.     

Power‐Sharing in the World's Largest Democracy: Informal Consociationalism in India (and Its Decline?)

India is one of the most diverse countries of the world but operates with a majoritarian Westminster constitution and simple plurality electoral system, albeit also with a federal structure. It was eventually coded as consociational by Arend Lijphart (1996) but this coding was questioned by authors such as Wilkinson (2000) and Adeney (2002). This article assesses the nature of both de jure and de facto power‐sharing in India over its 70 years of independence and tracks the evolution of de jure and de facto power‐sharing in relation to four dimensions of diversity: religion, caste, territory and language. It questions whether the electoral success of Hindu nationalism and the increasing acceptance of ethnic majoritarianism has reduced the degree of power‐sharing in India.     

Contra‐Associational Strategy in a Hybrid Regime: Ecuador, 2007–2015

Over the last decade, political scientists have identified Ecuador as one of Latin America's hybrid regimes. This article examines how President Rafael Correa combined legal reforms, bureaucratic controls and other policies in a contra‐associational strategy aimed at extending executive control over civil society. While the strategy significantly altered the operational environment for civil society groups, it did not completely strip them of their capacity to oppose the regime. Ecuador's experience underscores the ambiguity at play in hybrids; in pursuit of regime legitimation, regimes must cede some space to opponents while simultaneously sabotaging civil liberties.     

Resilience and Renewal: The Enforcement of Labor Laws in Brazil

What happens to a country's system of labor laws when its government embraces market‐oriented reforms? In a twist on the prediction that labor regulations will be repealed, researchers find that laws remain in place but are not faithfully enforced, a phenomenon known as de facto flexibility. This article examines the case of Brazil to understand its near‐opposite; namely, resilience and renewal in the enforcement of labor regulations. It finds that labor unions have combined the corporatist authority they gained under state control with the autonomy they acquired under democratization to devise new modes of action and to safeguard existing regulations. Meanwhile, labor inspectors and prosecutors rely on existing laws to combat precarious work conditions and promote formal employment relations, which strengthen the unions. This mutually supportive arrangement is neither perfect nor free of tension, but it shows how workers can be protected even when employers are subjected to global competition.     

Latin America's Neocaudillismo: Ex‐Presidents and Newcomers Running for President… and Winning

Latin Americans have been voting for a surprisingly large number of ex‐presidents and newcomers in presidential elections since the late 1980s. This article looks at both the demand and supply sides of this phenomenon by focusing on economic anxieties and party crises as the key independent variables. Sometimes the relationship between these variables is linear: economic anxieties combined with party crises lead to rising ex‐presidents and newcomers. At other times the relationship is symbiotic: the rise of ex‐presidents leads to party crises, economic and political anxieties, and thus the rise of newcomers. This article concludes that the abundance of ex‐presidents and newcomers in elections—essentially, the new face of Latin America's caudillismo—does not bode well for democracy because it accelerates de‐institutionalization and polarizes the electorate.     

Hooking Workers and Hooking Votes: Enganche,Suffrage, and Labor Market Dualism in Latin America

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.     

Legal Inequality and Federalism: Domestic Violence Laws in the Argentine Provinces

This article shows that the institutional design of Argentine federalism allows for differences in the protective scope of the provincial domestic violence laws. It holds that the broad legislative capacities of subnational districts enable the working of political and social local factors, which, in turn, determine heterogeneity in these laws’ protective scope. It analyzes, compares, and measures 37 laws on domestic violence sanctioned between 1992 and 2009. It advances a methodology to measure their differences and it evaluates the impact local factors have on legal variations across jurisdictions. The article shows that the protective scope of these laws is determined by the intensity of the local electoral competition and by the strength of women's organizational capacity. Results also show that time matters insofar as it allows for the diffusion of more protective laws.     

Professionalization and Probity in a Patrimonial State: Labor Inspectors in the Dominican Republic

Are international labor rights campaigns making a difference in Latin America? This article reveals that Dominican policymakers and bureaucrats are responding to foreign pressure by redoubling their commitment to a distinctively Franco‐Iberian model of labor law enforcement, in which skilled labor inspectors use their discretion to balance society's demand for protection with the economy's need for efficiency. In so doing, they provide an alternative to traditional collective bargaining practices—which at least partly decouples both the intensity of the enforcement effort and the degree of worker protection from the level of unionization—and an example for the rest of the region. The article therefore concludes by reconsidering the Central American experience in light of the Dominican findings and discussing their joint implications for our understanding of administrative reform, industrial relations, and globalization, not only in the so‐called CAFTA countries but in Latin America more generally.     

Low Intensity Democracies: Latin America in the Post-dictatorial Era

In the context of the Cold War and accompanied by the doctrines of National Security, authoritarian and often repressive military or civil-military regimes emerged in a number of Latin American countries. However, military regimes were not the only ones contributing to the formation of societies mutilated by fear and terror. During the last four decades, the continent became affected by a cycle of violence that involved various armed actors, from the armed forces to the guerrilla, from the paramilitaries to the narcotics-trafficking Mafia, or from the committees of self-defence to the 'common' criminals. This article focuses on the persistence of military influence and organised political violence more general in post-authoritarian and indeed post-Cold War Latin America. After briefly reviewing the historical legacy of so-called 'political armies' in the region as a whole, I offer an assessment of the consequences of this legacy for the current agenda of democratic consolidation in Latin America. Two possible scenarios are examined: that of fairly progressive democratisation and civilianisation of politics, and that of the re-emergence of violence despite the formal rule of democracy. In the latter scenario, de facto harsh and violent regimes collide with a growing array of rival perpetrators of political and other forms of organised violence.     

Corporate Movements in Democratic Brazil: Informal Business Networks,Civil Activism,and Political Influence

Relations between business, state, and civil society in Latin America are conventionally discussed in antagonistic or hierarchical terms. This article challenges this position, developing a qualitative case study tracing the activities of an informal network of Brazilian businesspersons that, over the last three decades, promoted an agenda of sustainability, transparency, and civil society participation. Drawing from concepts in social movement theory, it is argued that a dynamic movement‐like behaviour combining civil activism, organisational entrepreneurship, and fluid political alignment, allowed the group to establish lasting collaborative alliances with core actors in Brazilian democratic politics, and access relevant elite and policy‐making circles.     

Military Entrepreneurs: Patterns in Latin America

Despite the recent shift to democratic regimes and market‐based economies, in many Latin American countries the military retains important economic roles as owner, manager, and stakeholder in economic enterprises. Such military entrepreneurship poses a challenge to the development of democratic civil‐military relations and, by extension, to the development of liberal democracy in the region. While scholars have noted this situation with concern, they have given little attention to distinguishing the different types of military entrepreneurship, which reflect distinct historical patterns and implications. This article identifies two major types of military entrepreneurs in Latin America: industrializers, determined to build national defense capabilities and compete for international prestige; and nation builders, seeking to promote economic development that can foster social development and cohesion. Case studies of Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Ecuador demonstrate important differences between these two types in their origins, paths, and political consequences.     

Welfare Regimes in Latin America: Capturing Constellations of Markets,Families, and Policies

This article presents both a theoretical framework and a methodology that attempt to capture the complex interactions among labor markets, families, and public policy that currently constitute Latin American welfare regimes. Drawing on cluster analysis based on available data for 18 countries, the study identifies three welfare regimes. Two are state welfare regimes: protectionist (e.g. Costa Rica) and productivist (e.g. Chile); one is nonstate familiarist (e.g. Ecuador and Nicaragua). In a region where people's well‐being is deeply embedded in family relationships, closer scholarly attention to how social structures interact with public policy bears not only academic interest but also policy implications, particularly for adapting particular welfare regimes to the local welfare mix.     

Social Policies and Center‐Right Governments in Argentina and Chile

Latin America's “left turn” expanded cash transfers and public services, contributing to lower poverty and inequality. Recently, right‐leaning candidates and parties have begun to win back seats in the legislature, and in some cases have captured the executive branch. This shift has sparked debate about the future of Latin America's welfare states. This article analyzes social policy reforms enacted by two recent right‐leaning governments: that of Sebastián Piñera in Chile (2010–14) and Mauricio Macri in Argentina (2015–). It finds that contrary to neoliberal adjustment policies of the past, neither Macri nor Piñera engaged in privatization or deep spending cuts. Instead, both administrations facilitated a process of policy drift in some sectors and marginal expansion in others. Policy legacies and the strength of the opposition help to explain these outcomes, suggesting that Latin America's political context has been transformed by the consolidation of democracy and the experience of left party rule.     

Revelation or revolution: a Gramscian approach to the rise of political Islam

This article seeks to conceptualise the contemporary phenomenon of ‘political Islam’, or Islamic fundamentalism as it is usually classified in the West. This paper takes the view that those movements that utilise the ideology of political Islam are not primarily religious groups concerned with issues of doctrine and faith, but political organisations utilising Islam as a ‘revolutionary’ ideology to attack, criticise, and de‐legitimise the ruling elites and the power structure on which their authority and legitimacy is based. Since the one‐party authoritarian state is the norm in most of the Middle East, only Islam has been able to provide the marginalised, alienated, and disgruntled masses with an oppositional force capable of articulating their specific grievances and general displeasure with these regimes. A Gramscian framework helps to demonstrate that these organisations classified as ‘political Islam’, and promulgated by the core Islamic scholars of the twentieth century, are authentic counter‐hegemonic movements focussed on the overthrow of these despotic regimes and the acquisition of political, economic, and social power.     

The Role of the Inter‐American Drug Abuse Control Commission (CICAD): Confronting the Problem of Illegal Drugs in the Americas

The illegal drug trade has become a serious threat for the Americas. Is a multilateral approach to combat it possible? This article proposes that the United States and Latin America are finding ways to use multilateral organisms to confront this threat and examines as an example the role of CICAD in setting a cooperative agenda to develop an antidrug regime. CICAD has established common ground for long‐term cooperation in certain areas. But common drug strategies in the Americas require the support of the United States and the cooperation of Latin American states, both of which are still works in progress. Therefore the future of the CICAD‐inspired antidrug regime will depend on whether the United States and Latin America will cooperate to define the illegal drug threat in the same way and bestow on CICAD the authority necessary to address it.     

Populisms old and new: the Peruvian case⋆

President Fujimori is often seen as exemplary of the Latin American “neopopulist”. Having inherited a country in crisis, he managed to engineer profound changes in the economic sphere, legitimising his government through a direct rapport with the mass of the population that marginalised representative institutions. This article seeks to place this “neopopulism” in an historical context by focusing on the socio‐economic and political characteristics that have sustained a tradition of populism in Peru. It argues that “top‐down” styles of political mobilisation have long had a debilitating effect on the development of a representative party system, and that populist traits can be traced through regimes of widely differing ideological orientations.     

Turkish racial theories

Mainstream media have reported on ‘China in Uncle Sam's Backyard’ - Latin America - with considerable alarm in recent years. But is such alarm justified? This article aspires to lift the fog on China's engagement with Latin America. The article finds that mutual concerns over economic development, not military advantage, are the driving force behind closer Sino-Latin American relations. Nonetheless, it is indisputable that China's presence in the Southern Hemisphere impacts the region's geopolitical dynamics, with possible consequences for the US security position. That said, China's arrival in Latin America also harbours a positive strategic opportunity for Washington to re-engage, on a more equal footing, with a continent whose relations with the US have been historically troubled, and more recently, have suffered from a certain neglect.     

Reassessing the Causes of Nongovernmental Terrorism in Latin America

For years, nongovernmental terrorism in Latin America was considered an epiphenomenon of the Cold War. The persistence of this type of political violence in the 1990s, however, not only belied many assumptions about its causes but also led scholars to reexamine the phenomenon. This article investigates the validity of a number of hypotheses by applying a pooled time-series cross-section regression analysis to data from 17 Latin American countries between 1980 and 1995. Findings indicate that nongovernmental terrorist acts in Latin America are more likely to occur in poorly institutionalized regimes characterized by varying degrees of political and electoral liberties, a deficient rule of law, and widespread human rights violations. The analysis also shows that nongovernmental terrorism in the region tends to surface in cyclical waves; but it finds no association between economic performance or structural economic conditions and the incidence of nongovernmental terrorism.     

States as Gender Equality Activists: The Evolution of Quota Laws in Latin America

This article examines two decades of strengthening, expansion, and diffusion of gender quota laws in Latin America. The analysis departs from studies of quotas’ adoption, numerical effectiveness, or policy impacts, instead focusing on states’ use of coercive power to integrate women into public and private institutions. Viewing these policies in light of feminist theories of the poststructuralist state reveals how state institutions act to restructure government and promote gender equality. In building this argument, the article presents an up‐to‐date empirical survey and conceptual understanding of quota evolution in Latin America, including recent developments in countries such as Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.