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 article assesses how much the emergence of civil society and private market activities are challenging Cuba's ruling communist regime. The assessment is based on a conceptualization of a “civil sphere,” constituted by civil society and private market activities (or the “second economy”), and how this affects democratic transitions from state-socialist societies, using Cuba as a case study. Examining the multiple sectors at play reveals an increasingly organized and vocal opposition, but one hampered by continued government repression. Considering several theoretical and historically possible scenarios, this study concludes that under current conditions, the civil sphere's significant challenge is still not enough for a regime change in the Cuban state.

The literature on the origins of democratic institutions is split between bottom-up and top-down approaches. The former emphasize societal factors that press for democracy; the latter, rules and institutions that shape elites' incentives. Can these approaches be reconciled? This article proposes competitive political parties, more so than degrees of modernization and associationalism, as the link between the two. Competitive political parties enhance society's bargaining power with the state and show dominant elites that liberalization is in their best interest; the parties are thus effective conduits of democracy. In the context of party deficit, the prospects for democratization or redemocratization are slim. This is illustrated by comparing Cuba and Venezuela in the 1950s and 1990s.

This article maintains that the recent wave of pension privatization has been spurred largely by rising pension expenditures and chronic capital shortages. Many policymakers in Latin America and around the world believed that privatizing their public pension systems would boost their domestic savings rate and resolve the systems' financial problems, thereby reducing their dependence on unstable foreign capital and freeing resources for other, more productive uses. There is no clear evidence that pension privatization will bring these economic benefits, however. To understand why policymakers held these beliefs, we must examine how ideas about pension privatization have formed. Two particularly important factors are the Chilean model and the World Bank's growing influence on pension policy. A probit analysis of the determinants of pension privatization provides support for these arguments.

Uruguay's stable, institutionalized party system has undergone substantial changes in recent years, both from the increasing electoral strength of the left and from changes made to the electoral system in 1996. Analyzing the debut of that new system in the 1999 national and 2000 municipal elections, this article concludes that Uruguay is moving from what was a fairly evenly divided three-party system to one in which the longstanding traditional parties will confront, as a bloc, the stronger left. The electoral analysis shows that the bloc dynamic took over whenever elections were close between the left and one of the traditional parties.