The article examines the degree of institutionalization of the Guatemalan party universe across four areas: the pattern of interparty competition; the rootedness of parties in society; the legitimacy accorded to parties and democratic institutions; and the nature of internal party organization. Guatemala displays an extremely inchoate party structure across all these variables. There is no stability in the identity of the main parties in the polity. After more than two decades of electoral democracy, no single party has been able to avert a drift into electoral irrelevance or outright disappearance. With respect to the basic facets of internal party organization, Guatemalan parties exhibit a feebleness so pronounced that their very status as parties is questionable. In general, Guatemalan “parties” only fulfill Sartori's minimalist definition as organizations that field candidates for public office, but offer nothing more substantive.

Hip-hop music has become an important tool worldwide for poor, marginalized youth to reflect on their lived experiences. This article traces the genre's production from its spontaneous origins in the urban ghettos of New York to its commoditization for global consumption and its evolution in three different Latin American settings: Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico. The article explores how hip-hop has been appropriated in each country and has been used to express the performers’ reflections on social, political, and economic problems. It also looks at the interplay between the homogenizing tendencies of global hip-hop and its local reception.

In 2015, a center-left government introduced an electoral reform that replaced the binomial electoral system governing parliamentary elections since 1989 with a more proportional system. This article provides an account of the reform process, describes the new electoral law, and discusses the factors explaining the reform. We argue, first, that it was possible, due to the incentives the government provided, to secure the support of an ample majority of parliamentarians; also, a new and favorable political scenario had emerged, in which the support of the main right-wing parties was not necessary for the reform to pass. Second, we maintain that the reform sought mainly to resolve problems affecting the parties of the governing coalition related to negotiations of coalition lists for elections. As a complementary objective, the reform promoted a general interest by establishing rules that allowed a “fairer” system of representation and improved competitive conditions.

Theoretically based on Albert O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, this study examines three cases of rupture or exit by Mexican presidential contenders, in 1940, 1952, and 1988, and one “noncase,” in 1999, with a view to how dissidents' strategies shape political institutions. Mexico's PRI-dominated political system depended on its leaders' ability to create an equilibrium based on mutual incentives to remain loyal to the regime.

Party machines and brokers have been widely researched in political science since 1950, yet a full description of brokers' roles is still missing. This article contributes by describing in detail the many roles brokers perform for their parties and explaining why each broker performs all these roles. In particular, it shows that besides fulfilling clientelistic strategies, brokers perform important executive governability functions once their party is in power. Brokers multitask because they have the neighborhood knowledge required to successfully perform political activities at the local level. Moreover, performing nonclientelistic roles prepares brokers to perform clientelistic strategies. The article also presents a novel theoretical account for why voters abide by the clientelistic deal. Based on interviews with 120 brokers, it analyzes the complete set of brokers' strategies, and detailed narrative accounts show the clientelistic machine at work.

Problems of unity can affect an armed opposition group at many stages of its existence—during the war, in peace negotiations, and in its transition to political party. This article assesses how internal divisions affected the performance of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador. It finds that while the FMLN suffered significant internal divisions in the early years of the war, it remained remarkably unified from 1983 on. Significant divisions began to appear during the later war years but were not exacerbated until after the war's conclusion, when repeated fracturing occurred. The FMLN began to present itself as a programmatically coherent party only in 2005, and this ideological homogeneity allowed it to establish a series of partnerships with moderate, non-revolutionary sectors of Salvadoran society and to achieve victory in the 2009 presidential elections.