After nearly 20 years of democratization, residents of Rio's favelas suffer high levels of civil and human rights abuse at the hands of both police and drug traffickers. The government is generally unable to guarantee the political order necessary to protect the rights of residents in these communities. Existing theories of democratization and advocacy networks offer little to explain how the types of endemic violence that affect poor neighborhoods in the developing world can be brought under control. Based on more than two years of participant observation and interviews in Rio de Janeiro, this article examines how democratic order can be extended to favelas. It argues that networks can link favela residents to organizations in civil society, and state actors can play a critical role in reducing violence and establishing democratic order.

This article examines the World Bank's role in the market policy reform experiences of Mexico and Argentina. It argues that while reform was driven by domestic elites, the bank played an important role, providing technical advice and financial support and helping to spread market reform ideas. The nature of the bank's involvement, however, differed substantially in the two countries because of their distinct political arrangements, histories, and geopolitical positions in regard to the United States. In the recent era of second-generation reforms, the World Bank's involvement in compensatory policy development has become more focused, although still more intense in Argentina than in Mexico. This involvement has important implications for the quality of democracy, insofar as the 1990s market reforms were formulated by insulated international policy networks unaccountable to the public. Recently, the bank has declared its commitment to involve civil society in its lending policies, a move that may have important implications for democratic development.

Venezuelan Evangelicals' responses to candidates in that country's 1998 presidential election seem to confirm the view that their political culture is inconsistent, contradictory, and paradoxical. Not only were they just as likely to support nationalist ex–coup leader Hugo Chávez as was the larger population, they also rejected Venezuela's one Evangelical party when it made a clientelist pact with the infamous candidate of Venezuela's discredited Social Democratic party. This article uses concepts from recent cultural theory to analyze qualitative data from these two cases and make sense of the contradictory nature of Evangelical politics.

This study aims to explain the victory of Hugo Chávez and his party in the 2000 Venezuelan elections, to analyze the factors that made this victory possible, and to examine the consequences for future developments in the Venezuelan political system. The decay of traditional party loyalties without the emergence of new parties deeply rooted in society (dealignment without realignment); underdevelopment; and an institutional setting dominated by a president elected by a plurality electoral system have opened the door to personality-centered politics and weak parties, which are the main features of the current political situation. Compared to the 1993 and 1998 elections, the 2000 elections once again confirm an increase in personality politics and the decay of parties as instruments for articulating interests, representation, and governance. As a consequence, this article argues, instability is likely to remain a feature of Venezuela's party system for some time.

This essay argues that neoliberalism has strengthened the sustainability of democracy in Latin America but limited its quality. Drastic market reform seems to have abetted the survival of competitive civilian rule through its external and internal repercussions. By opening up Latin American countries to the world economy, neoliberalism has exposed them to more of the international pressures for preserving democracy that intensified with the end of the Cold War. At the same time, the move to market economics has weakened leftist parties, trade unions, and other proponents of radical socioeconomic reform, reassuring elites and preventing them from undermining democracy. But tighter external economic constraints limit governments' latitude and thereby restrict the effective range of democratic choice; and the weakening of parties and interest associations has depressed political participation and eroded government accountability. The available evidence therefore suggests that neoliberalism has been a mixed blessing for Latin American democracies.