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Regime transitions often raise expectations for sweeping policy change-yet those expectations are not always realized. Focusing on the mechanisms linking regime type and policy, Policy in Transition explains how, and under which conditions, policy changes are likely to occur after a regime transition. Whether policies change depends on how the transition reshapes the space for contestation and on the visibility of the policy in question. This finding argument is supported through an in-depth comparative historical analysis of the evolution of housing and financial policies across regime types changes in Argentina and Brazil since the 1960s. Drawing on extensive archival materials, public records, historical media, and interviews with key actors, the book studies policymaking across different authoritarian and democratic regimes providing nuanced insights into the relationship between political regimes and policy change.
The Classic Maya civilization (250–925 CE) in Mesoamerica innovated a hieroglyphic script that was written and read by people spread across hundreds of square kilometers and dozens of autonomous kingdoms over the course of more than a millennium. Yet, unlike other regions of the ancient world where writing was independently invented, the Maya area was never politically unified. In Religion, Writing, and the Shaping of the Classic Maya World, Mallory E. Matsumoto draws on hieroglyphic texts, imagery, and archaeological finds to reconstruct interactions through which the Classic Maya exchanged knowledge about their hieroglyphic script and how to use it. She argues that religion and ritual practice were central contexts for maintaining a coherent, mutually intelligible writing system in the absence of political centralization. The Classic Maya case challenges long-standing assumptions about the social forces underlying the origins of early writing. It also reveals religion's potential to shape human culture and technology. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
The Viceroyalty of the New Kingdom of Granada (present-day Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Western Venezuela) was one of the largest global gold producers during the late colonial period. A distinctive commerce-oriented society emerged that diverged from the silver economies of Mexico and Peru. This study examines how the crossflow of precious metals fostered monetization, productive specialization, and financial complexity across New Granada societies. It interweaves a unique, broad set of quantitative sources to analyze the direction, magnitude, and dynamics of interregional flows of precious metals, domestic staples, and global goods. Combining Social Network Analysis and innovative sources, this is one of the first attempts to provide a quantitative assessment of monetary and commodity flows in any region of the former Spanish Empire.
The Romani Atlantic is the first comprehensive look at Romani experiences in the Atlantic World. Together, the essays detail the Romani people's transatlantic circulations, interactions, connections, and exchanges, reinforcing the view that the Atlantic was a zone of contact where identities interlaced and transformed. The geographical points and flows covered include imperial Spain and Mexico, Lusophone Angolan slave trading ports, Ellis Island immigration controls, South-Eastern European villages, and Canadian community centers. Each case study illustrates the migratory flow and reflow of people, ideas, and processes, showing that Romani people have strategically engaged with state instruments, cultivated Romani distinctiveness, and built resilient communities. The Romani Atlantic traces the underexplored history of Romani migration and highlights the ways that Romani agency has shaped the modern world. This title is available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Brazil has captivated global audiences through its vibrant multiculturalism, manifesting in music, football, and gastronomy. However, beyond figures such as Pelé, and cultural staples such as bossa nova and caipirinha, Brazilian culture boasts a distinguished literary tradition, exemplified by writers such as Machado de Assis, Clarice Lispector, and Guimarães Rosa. This volume provides readers with a comprehensive engagement with Brazilian literature, tracing its development in tandem with the nation's social history. The chapters emphasize literary analysis while critically incorporating the sociohistorical contexts that have shaped Brazil's rich cultural landscape. Covering the trajectory from the emergence of the Brazilian novel to contemporary works within the genre, this book guides readers through a broad spectrum of themes, including Blackness, Jorge Amado, Indigeneity, Macunaíma, political violence, feminism, and Graciliano Ramos. Each chapter balances scholarly depth with accessibility, catering both to newcomers to Brazilian studies and to seasoned academics.
Combining compelling field research with sharp analysis, The Politics of Healthcare Expansion unravels why efforts to expand equitable healthcare so often fall short – and why some succeed. Through comparative case studies from Chile, Mexico, and Peru, this book reveals how political party commitment, or the lack of it, shapes the design, implementation, and sustainability of healthcare reform. Moving beyond ideology, it demonstrates the crucial role of programmatic party engagement and analyzes the impact of technocrats and external actors when political parties are weak or disengaged. With timely lessons highlighted by the region's COVID-19 experience, this book offers rigorous insights and practical implications for anyone seeking to understand or influence social policy reform in emerging democracies.
Enslaved New World illuminates sixteenth-century Santo Domingo as the site of the Americas' earliest plantation and slave society and the first place where slavery became limited to people of African descent. Yet Santo Domingo was also home, Turits shows, to widespread continual flight from bondage and an ecology providing escapees with relatively easy refuge. This transformed the colony into a land in which predominantly self-emancipated Black people became the largest population group by the late seventeenth century, 150 years before slavery's abolition. Afterwards, slavery and legal racial hierarchy persisted, but the White elite often remained too poor and weak to overcome resistance and competing constructs of status and color emerged. By focusing on Santo Domingo's understudied African-descended majority population within novel frameworks, Turits opens up new understandings of Dominican history, slavery's racialization, race and racism's historical contingency, and an extraordinarily successful Afro-American trajectory of resistance.
Why are Latin Americans increasingly disillusioned with democracy, even as the region has made social progress? This book examines the paradox of widespread political discontent amid improvements in poverty reduction, education, and expanded rights. It shows how rising expectations and broken promises have generated social frustration and political reactions, which take two different forms: they can target all political elites (vertical discontent) or focus on opposing political coalitions (horizontal discontent). Each form poses unique challenges for democracy. Bringing together leading scholars in sociology and political science from Latin America and the United States, the volume offers a multidisciplinary and comparative perspective on the drivers of democratic erosion. Drawing on empirical case studies and a shared analytical framework, the book sheds light on the tensions between democratic aspirations and lived experiences, making it a valuable resource for understanding the forces reshaping Latin America's political landscape and the broader erosion of democracy.
In Nahua Singers, Peter Bjorndahl Sorensen provides a more than 300-year long history of the Aztecs from their departure from the Seven Caves (Chicomoztoc) to the close of the sixteenth century-centering Indigenous voices as they narrate their own past. Nahua singers preserved their histories in the form of popular song lyrics that have long been misunderstood. Sorensen employs a new approach to the lyrics, bringing them to life by spotlighting their performative elements, offering new and accessible translations, and explaining the lyrics' historical significance in a comprehensive yet concise way. Through fourteen complete translations and dozens partly translated, the songs featured cover topics including precolonial kings, the conquest of Mexico, and early examples of the adaption and adoption of Christian imagery.
Seeds of Solidarity is a study of British Guiana amid a wave of Caribbean uprisings that brought modern politics to colonial spaces during the 1930s. It explores the historical power of a movement forged by people at the edges of empire during economic, political, and environmental crises. African- and Indian-Guianese youth, women, and men who worked on sugar plantations led a series of labor uprisings, despite attempts to turn these racialized communities against each other. Rather than erasing identities, their 'overlapping diasporas' signify how solidary can emerge without sameness, and how this process challenged the British Empire and reshaped Caribbean politics. This important work unites Caribbean history, African Diaspora and South Asian Diaspora studies, histories of racial capitalism and labor movements, gender studies, and the politics of colonialism and empire in the post-indenture period. It offers a model of resistance in today's era of deepening racial and economic inequality, fascism, and climate emergency.
From the 1920s to the 1960s in Cuba, against the backdrop of revolutions, new constitutions, and rampant inequality, the Cuban Communist Party stood out as an unparalleled space for Black political leadership, activism, and advocacy. This party, led by Black political actors, including labor leaders, members of Black fraternal organizations and the Black intelligentsia, fought for an end to racial discrimination and used their voices to advocate for true equality. Analyzing US government surveillance records, Cuban newspapers, government records, party pamphlets, and more, Kaitlyn D. Henderson illustrates how the Cuban Communist Party created a unique space for an expression of Cuban Black nationalism and how communist parties in the western hemisphere strayed from traditional Marxist ideology. An important corrective, this book sheds light on the overlooked history of Black Communist leaders who fought for equality before the Revolution changed everything.
This book explains variations in the effectiveness of vote buying. Current theory assumes that vote buying is effective, rotting democracy's foundations. Yet evidence shows that it rarely succeeds. Against the Machine presents a partisan competition theory to explain why buying vote choices is typically ineffective, the conditions under which it occasionally succeeds, and why it persists despite meager electoral returns. Competitive elections arm voters with the psychological wherewithal to resist the influence of electoral gifts, deprive political machines of the information they need to target compliant clients, and reinforce belief in ballot secrecy. The success or failure of vote buying thus relies more on the capacity of parties that challenge machines rather than the prowess of political machines themselves. Against the Machine provides a new account of vote buying that paints a more optimistic portrait of elections, voter behavior, and the chances for political accountability in new democracies.
This volume argues that the rise of the far right in Latin America represents a reactionary response to the partial success of democratic regimes in incorporating historically marginalized groups. Despite persistent inequalities, Latin American democracies have gradually weakened the dominance of traditional elites over majority–minority relations, creating fertile ground for a backlash against political, social and cultural change. Like their counterparts in Europe and the United States, far-right actors in the region resist adapting to ongoing transformations, instead invoking an idealized national past and mobilizing exclusionary ethnic, cultural, and political appeals to construct a radically homogeneous community. This volume employs a theoretical framework informed by contemporary debates on the far right in Europe and the United States and brings together leading scholars to examine key country cases across Latin America. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Despite widespread reforms in recent years, expanded social welfare programs in Global South democracies still fail to reach many of those who need them most. Persistent Citizens draws on original focus group data from Brazil and Argentina to develop a new concept of 'state-centric persistence' to explain these gaps in access. State-centric persistence – unmediated, individualized pursuit of state benefits – is increasingly important in the Global South. The book connects existing research on claim-making and administrative burden to argue that self-efficacy, entitlement, and indignation encourage persistence. It analyzes original survey data to show evidence that these attitudes, along with knowledge of social rights, are associated with greater persistence. Persistent Citizens centers the experiences of poor citizens to offer an individual-level theory that contributes to our understanding of what influences social policy access across the globe.
Beyond the War reconstructs the often-overlooked history of the Falkland Islands before the 1982 conflict. Drawing on impressions of Argentine travelers and the island community, as well as British and Argentine diplomacy and politics, it reveals a world of mutual suspicions and tensions, but also of exchanges and collaborations, challenging the notion that war was inevitable. The book situates the islands within the broader history of the British Empire's reconfiguration during the UN-driven decolonization era, showing how global changes resonated in this remote setting. It examines decisive episodes, from the unprecedented period opened by the 1971 Communications Agreement to the influence of Argentine popular music, while analyzing competing Argentine nationalisms that shaped an “emotional community” around the islands. Based on new and little-explored sources, it offers a fresh perspective on evolving relations between islanders and Argentines, as well as postwar transformations that continue to shape the islands' identity today.
Chapter 1 introduces the book’s central puzzle: why some electoral management bodies earn public trust and develop real autonomy while others remain vulnerable to manipulation. It argues that formal institutional design alone cannot explain cross-national variation. Instead, de facto autonomy emerges through political negotiation, transparency, accountability practices, and structured partisan engagement. Drawing on fieldwork, elite interviews, and archival research across Latin America and Africa, the chapter outlines a new theoretical framework centered on partisan inclusion within administrative processes that can foster legitimacy, reduce uncertainty, and strengthen electoral integrity. The chapter also introduces the book’s cross-regional comparative strategy, explains case selection, and previews how the empirical chapters illustrate the mechanisms through which party consultation, institutional sequencing, and administrative practices jointly shape election quality. The chapter positions the book within broader debates on democratic resilience, institutional trust, and the conditions under which electoral authorities acquire real independence.