Measuring Judicial Performance in Latin America

An increasing number of development scholars and policymakers are recognizing the importance of Latin American judicial reforms in shaping the ultimate outcome of the region's "dual transition." We can hardly begin to assess the conditions in which judicial systems are likely to improve, however, unless we have a means to measure judicial performance systematically across countries. This article offers just such a comprehensive cross-national measure of judicial performance for Latin America. Drawing from a survey of Latin American legal scholars and practitioners from 17 countries in the region, it seeks to establish a more valid, and therefore more useful, assessment of the performance of Latin American judiciaries than existing measures, in order to advance efforts to understand the causes and consequences of effective judicial reforms in the region.     

Civil Service Reform in Latin America: External Referents Versus Own Capacities

In the context of state reform and democratisation in Latin America, reinforcing public institutions becomes critical to sustaining and consolidating realised gains. In this area, civil service reforms are critical. But civil service reform initiatives in Latin American countries were designed with different degrees of compatibility with countries’ administrative traditions and with the role played by the civil service within the political system. The results of different initiatives are described in a brief review of six key features of nine Latin American civil services. Discussion of these results allows us to draw conclusions about the capacity to generate learning dynamics. A new conception of the civil service and its role in the political system appears more evident, unless the required political consensus for implementing and consolidating the new reform strategy for most Latin American public administrations is not confirmed.     

Beyond Orthodoxy: Asserting Latin America's New Strategic Options Toward the United States

This essay explores the possibility that Latin America may deploy new strategic options in its relations with Washington at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. It starts by evaluating what have been the five major foreign policy models of the region with regard to Washington since the end of the Cold War. It proceeds by evaluating the recent dynamics of Latin American insertion into world affairs. Then it introduces three new alternatives for handling U.S. Latin American relations in the coming years. It concludes by pointing out the importance of understanding the scope of the hemispheric challenges for both the region and Washington.     

Democracy Without Parties? Political Parties and Regime Change in Fujimori's Peru

Political parties are critical to Latin American democracy. This was demonstrated in Peru, where an atomized, candidate-centered party system developed after Alberto Fujimori's 1992 presidential self-coup. Party system decomposition weakened the democratic opposition against an increasingly authoritarian regime. Since the regime collapsed in 2000, prospects for party rebuilding have been mixed. Structural changes, such as the growth of the informal sector and the spread of mass media technologies, have weakened politicians' incentive to build parties. Although these changes did not cause the collapse of the party system, they may inhibit its reconstruction.     

Transculturation: Contrapuntal Notes to Critical Orthodoxy1

Transculturation is a frequent point of reference in Latin American cultural studies, but overuse is tending to create a new critical orthodoxy, and inattention to precise definition may be compromising effectiveness. This article assesses current deployments of the term and, through a close reading of the theoretical section of Ortiz’s Contrapunteo cubano, seeks to establish an understanding of what is involved in the cultural and human experience of transculturation. It concludes by examining recent critiques of the term and suggests a sceptical view of the potential for and limits on transculturation in the global context of Latin American cultures.     

Old Tools and New Movements in Latin America: Political Science as Gatekeeper or Intellectual Illuminator?

This article argues that social democratic and orthodox Marxist conceptualizations of politics are unable to "engage in solidarity" with many new forms of Latin American popular politics. Such movements challenge the politics of representation, the market economy, and the state form by reinventing territorialized experiments in self-government, which politicize place, subjectivities, and social relations. Developing a critique of these frameworks of political analysis, this article argues that conceptual categories combining the insights of autonomist or open Marxism and poststructuralism and the critical reflections and theorizations by Latin America's newest social movements enable a deeper engagement with such movements. This critique challenges academics committed to progressive social change to reexamine long-held notions about the nature and agents of social transformation and the epistemological categories that orient our research. It argues that if we fail to do this, then we risk becoming gatekeepers of the status quo.     

The Political Economy of Policy Volatility in Latin America

Why are some Latin American states plagued by persistent policy volatility while the policies of others remain relatively stable? This article explores the political economy of natural resource rents and policy volatility across Latin America. It argues that, all else equal, resource rents will create incentives for political leaders, which will result in repeated episodes of policy volatility. This effect, however, will depend on the structure of political institutions. Where political institutions fail to provide a forum for intertemporal exchange among political actors, natural resource rents will result in increased levels of policy volatility. Alternatively, where political institutions facilitate agreement among actors, resource rents will be conducive to policy stability. This argument is tested on a measure of policy volatility for 18 Latin American economies between 1993 and 2008. The statistical tests provide support for the argument.     

Chile's (Inter)National Identities: Framing the Relations with Bolivia and Peru

National identities play a significant role in Latin American international relations. They affect the ways in which policy‐makers view themselves and others, as well as influencing the ways in which their policies are ‘received’ abroad. In this way, identities create opportunities and constraints for foreign policy‐making, framing the relations between Latin American countries. The author argues that, since 1990, three main patterns of Chilean identity recently affected the country's relations with its northern neighbours Bolivia and Peru: a ‘neoliberal identity’, a ‘legalistic identity’ and a ‘progressive identity’. These three patterns of identity have created opportunities for cooperation as well as causes for conflict.     

Inter-parliamentary European Union–Latin American Caribbean (EU-LAC) relations and the increasing political convergence among Latin American regional parliaments (2006–15)

Europe and Latin America present a long-standing tradition of parliamentary diplomacy and particularly in the development of regional parliaments. Since the 1970s, inter-parliamentary relations between the two regions have been institutionalized, first by the regular dialogue of the European Parliament with the Latin American Parliament (Parlatino) and more recently, in 2006, with the creation of the Euro-Latin American Parliamentary Assembly (EuroLat). Apart from representatives of Parlatino, EuroLat includes in the European Union-Latin American Caribbean (EU-LAC) parliamentary dialogue members of other regional assemblies created in recent decades, such as the Andean Parliament, the Central American Parliament and the Mercosur Parliament. However, recent EuroLat meetings have made evident a polarization of positions on regional politics between European and Latin American sides, especially regarding the political and human rights situation in Venezuela. In this sense, the present paper analyzes the impact of EU-LAC relations on the political convergence of Latin American parliaments concerning regional political issues. The aim is to discuss how institutionalized relations with the European Parliament, through EuroLat, increased convergence among Latin American parliamentarians. This argument is exemplified by the joint defensive position on the Venezuelan political situation adopted by Latin American parliamentarians vis-à-vis the European Parliament's condemnatory position.     

The Organizational Consequences of Politics: A Research Agenda for the Study of Bureaucratic Politics in Latin America

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.     

Global Crisis and Latin America

This essay examines Latin America's experience in the crisis and restructuring of world capitalism from the 1970s into the twenty‐first century, with particular emphasis on the neo‐liberal model, social conflicts and institutional quagmires that have engulfed the region, and the rise of a new resistance politics. The empirical and analytical sections look at: Latin America's changing profile in the global division of labour; the domination of speculative finance capital; the continued debt crisis, its social effects and political implications; capital–labour restructuring, the spread of informalisation and the new inequality; the passage from social explosions to institutional crises; the new popular electoral politics and the fragility of the neo‐liberal state. These issues are approached through the lens of global capitalism theory. This theory sees the turn‐of‐century global system as a new epoch in the history of world capitalism, emphasising new patterns of power and social polarisation worldwide and such concepts as a transnational accumulation, transnational capitalists and a transnational state. Finally, the essay argues that global capitalism faces a twin crisis in the early twenty‐first century, of overaccumulation and of legitimacy, and explores the prospects for social change in Latin America and worldwide.     

Ignorance and ‘Habitus’: Blinkered and Enlightened Approaches Towards the History of Science in Latin America

In broad terms, European students of the history of Latin America have concentrated their researches upon colonial policies, interactions between Europeans (and their American‐born descendants) and indigenous peoples, economic and commercial structures, and political life (whether of elites or, more recently, of subaltern groups). The last two decades have witnessed a significant expansion in Britain and elsewhere of research into gender studies and cultural studies. Although the latter discipline embraces an awareness of the importance of the history of science, this has tended to be rather narrowly focussed upon travel writing, and the extent to which there were links between the promotion of scientific travel and both imperial and national projects, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However, like the great British scientific travellers of the nineteenth century in Latin America, the works of cultural studies specialists tend to reveal more about European attitudes and misconceptions than Latin American reality.     

COVID-19 and Historical Global Rupture in Latin America

This article contrasts two significant ruptures in globalisation. World War I in 1914 was a significant break from the Latin American export-oriented development that was firmly connected to economic globalisation. This article uses the Argentine case study to reveal the ramifications of the post-1914 global breakdown for the republic's internationally dependent development. It draws comparisons with the current COVID-19 crisis as a significant departure from rapid globalisation. Both events altered the trajectory of international activity. Analysis of the 1914 rupture exposes the parallels with COVID-19 and its potential severity for Latin America's internationally connected development.     

“Corporatism With Adjectives”? Conceptualizing Civil Society Incorporation and Indigenous Participation in Latin America

Ethnodevelopment is a relatively new type of participatory policy that targets the poverty of marginalized ethnic groups with a focus on identity and self‐management. While observers have recognized the empirical significance of this new paradigm, little has been done to conceptualize ethnodevelopment. This article argues that national‐level ethnodevelopment implementation is a form of corporatism. Examining ethnodevelopment institutions in Ecuador, it shows that the state has structured, subsidized, and partially controlled the indigenous sector through ethnodevelopment policies and agencies. However, certain components of classical corporatism, such as monopolies of representation, do not characterize this paradigm. This article therefore classifies ethnodevelopment as a diminished subtype of corporatism. It challenges corporatism's long association with a particular historical period in the region and finds that Latin American states and social groups have called on historical institutional repertoires in responding to the newly salient ethnic cleavage in the region.     

Inequality,Ethnicity, Political Mobilisation and Political Violence in Latin America: The Cases of Bolivia,Guatemala and Peru*

The paper explores the relationship between political violence and ‘horizontal’ inequality in ethnically‐divided countries in Latin America. The cases studied are Bolivia, Guatemala and Peru. Preliminary results are reported on the measurement of horizontal inequality, or that between groups, defined in cultural, ethnic and/or religious terms. The Latin American cases are shown to be often more unequal than the cases from Africa and Asia included in the wider study of which the work forms a part. The complex relationship between such inequality, ethnicity and political violence is explored historically. Ethnicity is today rarely a mobilising factor in violence in the Latin American cases, but the degree of inequality based on ethnicity is shown to be highly relevant to the degree of violence which results once conflict is instigated. History explains why.     

Differing Effects of the Global Financial Crisis: Why Mexico Has Been Harder Hit than Other Large Latin American Countries

In this article, we argue that the economic and financial crisis that began in Mexico in 2008 has not been primarily caused by the US crisis that began in 2007, as many have argued. As we will show, years of misguided economic policies at the national level have been at the heart of the Mexican crisis. On the one hand, the dominance of foreign banks in the country's financial system and the minimal presence of the public banks have greatly limited the range of counter‐cyclical policy options available to authorities. On the other hand, in the face of the crisis, Mexico has continuously applied deflationary Washington Consensus policies that have deepened the economic contraction. This article will focus on Mexico's individual problems, which offer important lessons for other Latin American countries with a shared recent history of Washington Consensus policies.     

Towards Development-Oriented Foreign Policy in Latin America: The Cases of Ecuador and Chile

Latin American nations have, in varying degrees, struggled to form a foreign policy which successfully incorporates developmental issues. Through an institutional analysis, this article identifies the institutional frameworks within which a development-oriented foreign policy (DOFP) is more prone to emerge. It is argued that DOFP has not been able to be consolidated, as foreign policy has primarily remained a tool for regime survival. This is largely because of the institutional exclusiveness and presidentialism embedded in Latin American diplomacy – making foreign policy notoriously vulnerable to regime appropriation. By conducting a comparison between Ecuadorean and Chilean foreign policy, the article sheds light on the institutional components which have allowed the latter to successfully incorporate a development agenda and the former to stumble in its efforts.     

Frente Amplio and the Crafting of a Social Democratic Alternative in Uruguay

This study of Uruguay's Frente Amplio explores four central questions for the analysis of the “new Latin American left.” How did a leftist alternative emerge and grow inside an institutionalized party system? How do the socioeconomic and political factors that enabled the rise of the left in Uruguay differ from those observed in other Latin American cases? How did Frente Amplio adapt itself to profit from the opportunities that arose during the 1990s? What are the implications of the previous factors for governmental action by the FA? In answering these questions, this study integrates an analysis of the sociological and political-institutional opportunity structures consolidated during the 1990s with one of strategic partisan adaptation processes. This perspective is useful for explaining how, by 2004, Frente Amplio had built a dual support base from its historical constituency and a socially heterogeneous group alienated from traditional parties due to economic and political discontent.