This response memo offers a critical reassessment of the claim that ideological self-placement in Chile reflects a form of social identity. While the article under discussion provides compelling evidence of ideological stability, it risks conflating political linkage with social identity formation. In contexts of partisan decline, such as Chile’s post-authoritarian landscape, ideological categories may persist not as thick communal identities but as affective rejection fields. Drawing on insights from political psychology and Latin American party system research, this memo proposes an alternative hypothesis: ideological stability is structured by negative partisan identities—emotionally charged, ideologically coherent rejections that shape voter behavior without requiring strong organizational anchors. A stylized conceptual map illustrates the geometry of rejection in Chile’s political space. These affective coordinates help explain voter alignment in the absence of coherent in-groups or traditional parties. While preliminary, this framework underscores the importance of moving beyond ideological self-placement as a proxy for social identity and calls for renewed attention to the emotional architecture of opposition. In doing so, it invites a broader research agenda on how negative partisanship operates across fragmented democracies in Latin America.

This rebuttal responds to the argument that negative partisan identities, such as opposition to past regimes or to specific political parties, provide the primary explanation for political stability in contexts of partisan decline. While rejection dynamics do shape some voting behavior, especially in second-round contests, we contend that they cannot account for the persistence of structured electoral competition over time. Our evidence shows that many voters are defined not only by whom they reject, but also by the ideological families they belong to. We provide survey evidence demonstrating that, when ideology and negative partisanship are measured on comparable terms, the apparent advantage of the latter in explaining vote choice disappears. Recent electoral cycles further illustrate that candidates with clear ideological identities consistently capture the majority of electoral support, whereas alternatives lacking a defined ideological anchor struggle to gain traction. We conclude that ideology, understood as a social identity, is the central force generating long-term stability in electoral competition, while negative partisanship intensifies conflict in short-term, high-stakes contests.

How can electoral competition remain stable despite a weak party system? We argue that ideological identification can stabilize electoral behavior, serving as a substitute for weak or delegitimized political parties. Focusing on Chile, we combine repeated cross-sectional surveys, a conjoint experiment, and text analysis. We find that while partisanship has declined sharply over the past three decades, ideological self-placement remains remarkably stable. Conjoint results show that ideological alignment outweighs issue alignment in shaping vote choice. Drawing on survey questions and topic modeling of open-ended responses, we uncover emotionally charged and moralized language tied to ideological groups, suggesting that ideology in Chile displays features of a social identity, including intergenerational transmission, symbolic boundaries, and in-group affect. We also examine how intense political events, such as a plebiscite to end a dictatorship, shape long-term ideological attachments. Our findings offer insight into how electoral competition can remain ideologically structured even in the absence of strong parties, a pattern increasingly relevant in contemporary democracies.

Why are some legislators more effective than others in fragmented presidential systems? I argue that in Brazil’s fractionalized party system, legislative member organizations (LMOs) supply policy and political information that parties often lack, enabling lawmakers to advance bills. I test this claim using novel legislative effectiveness scores (LESs) for sponsors and rapporteurs in Brazil’s lower chamber. Quantitative results show that LMO affiliation is associated with higher effectiveness, but only in highly structured organizations. Public security LMOs boost both sponsorship and rapporteurship, while agribusiness LMOs increase rapporteurship effectiveness. Weakly organized LMOs show null effects. Party affiliation matters, but parties do not consistently provide information and coordination. Qualitative data identify two mechanisms by which strong LMOs operate: placing aligned members in key positions and leveraging expertise to shape agendas and voting cues. These findings recast effectiveness in Brazil as a function of cross-party informational networks rather than parties alone and identify scope conditions under which LMOs matter in other multiparty presidential democracies.

How does the form of community dissent shape public support for coercive state policies? This article addresses this question through a vignette experiment on coca forced eradication in Colombia. Participants were randomly assigned to scenarios in which communities either verbally objected to or mobilized against coercive eradication efforts. Exposure to mobilization, compared to verbal objection, reduces support for both unconditional eradication and outright opposition. By contrast, it increases support for eradication conditioned on community consent. These effects are consistent across racial frames, suggesting that the impact of dissent form may transcend ethnic boundaries. We interpret these findings as evidence that visible, organized community dissent can shift public preferences toward more community-centered and conditional approaches. These findings contribute to research on protest, state coercion, and public opinion by showing that the form of dissent shapes support for coercive state interventions.

This article explores the underlying causes of vigilantism, moving beyond existing explanations to propose a novel perspective: state absenteeism. Drawing upon an original dataset collected at the subnational level in Guatemala, the study utilizes police station data as a proxy measure of state presence. This research article sheds light on the intricate dynamics driving vigilantism by analyzing the interplay between state actions, security provision, and the emergence of extralegal justice mechanisms. Empirical findings suggest that existing theories do not fully explain the surge in vigilantism, underscoring the importance of considering state provision of security at the subnational level. This theoretical and empirical contribution highlights the role of uneven state presence in shaping responses to insecurity and calls for more equitable and locally responsive security provision to address the root causes of extralegal justice.

The transition to democracy in Chile, which took place under the rules established in the authoritarian constitution, led political parties and voters to align along an authoritarian/democratic divide. In the campaign for the constitutional plebiscite in 2022, some of those in favor of a new constitution linked their position to democratic values and labeled those opposed to the new draft as lacking democratic values. Many of those opposed to the new constitution purposely distanced themselves from the authoritarian legacy. We rely on a pre-electoral poll to explore democratic values in the vote choice in the plebiscite. When factoring for economic perceptions, ideological identification, and sociodemographic traits, while holding authoritarian values was positively associated with voting Reject, expressing democratic values had a weak association with voting Approve. The authoritarian/democratic divide in the party system in the early 1990s was not a relevant determinant of vote choice in the 2022 plebiscite.

The traditional narrative of Europe’s first wave of democratization is that elites extended the franchise in response to revolutionary threats and reformed majoritarian electoral systems to limit rising working-class parties. This stylized account does not fit early twentieth-century South America, where democratization was driven by internal competition within incumbent parties, without strong working-class parties to contain. I study Argentina’s 1912 electoral reform that introduced elements of democracy (secret and compulsory voting) and simultaneously changed the electoral system from multi-member plurality to the limited vote. To study the motivations behind the electoral system change component of the reform package, I analyze expert surveys, legislative debates, and a 1911 public opinion poll. Granting representation to political minorities was regarded not as an electoral containment strategy to benefit incumbents, but a progressive measure to make opposition parties more competitive. An analysis of roll-call votes shows that legislators who supported the reform were those expecting to not be adversely affected.

We analyze how new technologies can be used to foster individual engagement that limits deliberation and reduces people’s capacity for political action within parties. We present the results of an analysis of the case of the Argentinean Propuesta Republicana (PRO). Using data from in-depth interviews with key actors—party elites and political consultants—we show that new technologies helped to mobilize almost 1 million volunteers in presidential elections, without transforming them into party stakeholders. This incorporation, though successful for organization and mobilization, reinforced the existing distribution of power within the party, by activating new adherents without engaging them in a collective organizational structure.

The article examines the patterns of turnover of Latin American legislators. It contributes (1) by introducing a large original dataset of turnover rates in 204 elections between 1985 and 2023 based on manually coded lists of all Latin American legislators elected since 1985, (2) by describing the cross-national and temporal patterns of turnover in Latin America, and (3) by examining empirically the relationship between turnover rates and temporal institutional arrangements designed to regulate the time horizons of legislators. The data reveals that turnover rates in Latin America are extremely high on average (around 70%) compared to democracies in other regions, although with significant variation. Institutional determinants governing time horizons of politicians are associated with turnover, with term limits, the presence of staggered elections and term length being positively associated with elevated turnover rates.

The enforcement of labor informality is subject to electoral motivations, and political parties on the left and right have different incentives to do so. While leftist governments are more lenient not to harm their informal electorate, right-wing incumbents face an electoral dilemma: the part of its constituency that benefits from informal work is in favor of a permissive attitude, but another section demands a tough hand to deal with the unfair competition that informal work represents. Taking Chile as a case study and drawing on panel data on labor inspections, this article explores the electoral drivers behind enforcement. Our estimations, robust to fixed-effect and panel event-study approach, reveal that the left does not forbear, but the right carries out selective enforcement, concentrating inspections in competitive districts and accelerating the pace of control as presidential polls approach. The article concludes with policy recommendations to limit the electoral bias.

Under what conditions do South American states create regional institutions that consolidate or undermine the liberal international order (LIO)? To address this question, we compare two cases of contestation of the LIO through counter-institutionalization in the domains of migration and election monitoring, both of which are closely related to the LIO’s core political principles. We argue that the variation in the effects of counter-institutionalization—LIO-consolidating in the case of migration and LIO-undermining in the case of election monitoring—results from the interaction of two explanatory factors: the source of dissatisfaction with the LIO’s norms and institutions in a specific domain, and the preferences of the state that exercises regional leadership in support of counter-institutionalization. The article sheds light on the coexistence of liberal and illiberal tendencies in South America’s regionalism and contributes to the debate on the determinants and effects of contestations of the LIO in the Global South.

Much scholarly attention has been paid to how great powers have used development finance as a tool for projecting power and shaping the international order, with less given to how smaller countries navigate these dynamics. This article investigates the conditions under which Latin American countries borrow from institutions led by the declining hegemon, the United States, or the rising power, China. Specifically, it uses mixed methods to analyze 518 loans from the World Bank and Chinese banks, and interviews with policymakers in Ecuador to highlight the mechanisms of decisions, outline interactions between different factors, and identify factors that cannot be readily tested statistically. Results show that countries are diversifying their development finance between the two great powers, motivated by domestic political considerations such as party ideology and economic development priorities, as well as by international structures including the balance of power and the borrowing country’s foreign policy alignment with the United States.

The 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP, and the demobilization of the latter, dismantled the governance structures in regions formerly under rebel control. Drawing from a relational security framework, this article explores how, across three case-studies, communities use their former experience of rebel governance as a framework through which they could express expectations and dissatisfaction with new types of order. This blueprint is also used to make specific demands to new or reconstituted armed groups and to take direct action to address governance gaps, reproducing and co-constructing order post-demobilization. However, we observe that both the organization of the community and the capacity and ideology of armed groups could also be limiting factors to the community’s reproduction of order post-demobilization. From a peacebuilding perspective, this means that there can be pressure from below in favor of remobilization, as a predictable insurgent order may be preferable to uncertainty.

In Brazil, numerous participatory institutions have been suspended over the past decades, including many participatory budgeting (PB) programs at the municipal level. Since the introduction of PB in Porto Alegre in 1989, extensive literature has discussed its effects on the way urban social movements make demands. However, the suspension of many PBs across Brazil raises a new question: how do these movements adapt following the loss of an arena that had become central to their efforts? Looking at the pioneering experience of Porto Alegre’s PB, whose progressive erosion started in 2002, I argue that urban movements have since shifted away from institutionalized participation routines, and adopted new routines that combine bureaucratic activism with proximity politics. Focusing on these movements’ repertoires of interactions I argue that the erosion of PB led to the deinstitutionalization of urban social movements.

The incidence of petty corruption in public service delivery varies greatly across citizens and geography. This paper proposes a novel explanation for citizen engagement in collusive forms of petty corruption. It is rooted in the social context in which citizen-public official interactions take place. I argue that social proximity and network centrality provide the two key enforcement mechanisms that sustain favor exchanges among socially connected individuals. Bribery, as a collusive arrangement between a citizen and a public official, relies on the same enforcement mechanisms. Using an original dataset from a household survey conducted in Guatemala, the analysis shows that social proximity and centrality allow citizens to obtain privileges through implicit favor exchanges and illicit payments. These findings are not driven by better access to information about the bribery market. This paper contributes to our understanding of the role of preexisting social relations in sustaining corrupt exchanges.

What explains voter attitudes toward immigration in Latin America? This article argues that increased refugee arrivals moderate the impact of social identities on immigration attitudes. We propose that informational cues associated with increased immigration make cosmopolitan identities less important—and exclusionary national identities more important—determinants of immigration preferences. Analyzing 12 Latin American countries from the 2017–2022 wave of the World Values Survey, we demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is positively associated with pro-immigration attitudes, but only in countries experiencing low-to-moderate refugee inflows. Conversely, nationalism is negatively associated with pro-immigrant attitudes, and increasingly so as refugee inflows increase. The uneven distribution of refugee migration has therefore reshaped public opinion in Latin America by moderating the effects of competing social identities (i.e., cosmopolitanism and nationalism). These findings contribute to broader debates on the behavioral impacts of immigration by highlighting an indirect mechanism by which increased immigration may generate anti-immigrant hostility.

In Latin American comparative politics, a tension exists between North Americanization and parochialism. While certain academic scholarship is published in Scopus-indexed journals that engage with “mainstream” Global North literature, other works are found in non-indexed outlets, focusing solely on their home countries and fostering parochial scientific communities. To assess this tension in graduate program curricula, we compiled an original dataset of comparative politics readings from 21 universities across nine Latin American countries. Our network analysis reveals a centralized structure influenced by mainstream readings, challenging the expectation of parochialism. In addition to the mainstream content, universities tend to incorporate readings from regional journals to facilitate cross-case comparisons. However, these materials are inconsistently shared, resulting in fragmentation of content from Latin American sources. Our findings contribute to and challenge the North Americanization versus parochialism debate, showing that future scholars receive similar mainstream training but encounter diverse regional materials during their PhD studies.