Understanding how policy design and implementation differ under populist and non-populist governments is complicated by the fact that populism never exists in a pure form and is always attached to a more developed ideology. Leveraging the near-simultaneous election of left-wing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador in Mexico and right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, this article analyses populism’s effect on cash transfer programmes. Despite the diametrically opposed ideologies of their presidents, rather than diverging, Mexican and Brazilian cash transfer policies converged under populism. Both leaders rebranded the programmes they inherited and moved policy in an improvised, politicised and clientelistic direction.

While the effects of technological change on deskilling and upskilling of the contemporary labor force have been intensely debated among economists and sociologists, historians have been more or less silent. Here, we historicize this debate by applying a set of HISCO-based measures to a recently homogenized set of aggregated census data for men in Italy from 1871 to 2011, coded in HISCO, to study the effects of waves of technological changes. With the transition from agriculture, via industry to services, we identify the main subprocesses and study occupational diversity and specialization, class formation, and skill development. The first industrial revolution saw modest growth in lower-skilled work in Italy, and a decline in unskilled work; the second, growth in lower- and higher-skilled work, and a decline in medium and unskilled work; the third, growth in lower- and higher-skilled work.

This article analyses a complex period in Colombian history, from the electoral victory of the Liberal Party in 1930 to the end of the Frente Nacional (National Front) in 1974, from the perspective of constitutional politics and constitutional theory. During this period, Colombia transited from democracy to dictatorship (civilian and military) and back to democracy. We therefore divide the period according to changes in regime type and also to changes in the degree of institutional constraints on power. We show that, due to combinations of regime type and constraints on power, under the same Constitution of 1886 three different constitutionalisms ensued: abusive, window-dressing, and authoritarian constitutionalism. Our analysis on Colombia highlights the role of powerful actors, such as the armed forces and the Catholic Church, that breathed life back into key constitutional provisions when these served as focal points for coordinating their actions even under an authoritarian regime.

This article examines the role of Pedro Ibáñez Ojeda – a prominent Chilean politician and businessman – in the development of Chilean neoliberalism, with a focus on his international networks and the organisation of the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) regional meeting in Viña del Mar, Chile, in 1981. I argue that Ibáñez represented a distinctive pathway within Chilean neoliberalism, here termed the ‘coastal route’, which highlights the movement’s multi-scale and polycentric nature. This route is multi-scale in Ibáñez’s promotion of liberal ideas through interconnected national, Latin American and global actors, and polycentric in showcasing independent yet complementary initiatives that collectively shaped Chile’s neoliberal trajectory. These dynamics position Ibáñez’s route as part of a broader Latin American and global community.

Many of the cartographic and environmental terrains gathered under the area studies rubric of the Middle East and North Africa are seismic zones. Geological study defines seismic zones as areas where earthquakes tend to focus and classifies these zones into different levels of seismic hazard.1 World maps of seismic hazard show differently colored bands sweeping across the globe (Fig. 1). A continuous swath of varying colors winds across the northern coast of Africa, with the yellows, oranges, and reds that indicate increasingly elevated hazard concentrated on spans of the Middle and High Atlas Mountains, extending outward in greens and blues to surrounding plains and coasts. Long lines of orange and red trace the highest levels of hazard around Iran and Turkey. From there, some bands double back West across the northern Mediterranean. Others widen across the whole of central Asia, embrace the entire Pacific rim, and spill over Oceania. Interrupting the colored seismic zones are projections of nation–state borders, presenting a visual contrast between continuity and discontinuity that is suggestive of the way that seismicity may disrupt other geographical and conceptual terrains.

This article examines the development of offshore commercial and financial services in tax havens between 1955-1979. The geographic locus of this paper is the Caribbean region, mainly focusing on the island tax havens that had been part of the British empire prior to decolonization. The article examines the relationship between the development of tax havens and decolonisation, and explores questions of international capital movement, the institutional structure of tax havens, the development of banking and commercial services in tax havens, and other offshore business activities. The article presents new data on international capital investment and capital movement, and provides empirical evidence in relation to the structure and function of businesses located in tax havens. This evidence is used to engage with emerging debates with reference to the history of tax havens: specifically, the nature of capital movement and the importance of beneficial ownership rights, and the relationship between the (re)location of business to tax havens and the mitigation of political risk and instability. We demonstrate that the development of tax havens in this period was a consequence of substantial innovation by business and finance to create advantageous environmental conditions in relation to taxation and governance. This was supported by an isomorphic process that spread similarly favourable regimes of law and regulation between different tax havens, as well as the development of a range of supportive commercial and financial services. We conclude by discussing the implications for future research on this topic.