A widely accepted argument among scholars of Latin American presidential regimes is that interbranch cooperation is impaired when the president's party falls short of a majority of seats in the legislature. This argument fails to consider three factors that affect the performance of minority presidents: the policy position of the president's party, the president's capacity to sustain a veto, and the legislative status of the parties included in the cabinet. This article argues that the greatest potential for conflict in a presidential regime occurs when the president's party lacks the support of both the median and the veto legislator and no cabinet coalition holding a majority of legislative seats is formed. This hypothesis is supported using data on executive-legislative conflicts and on interrupted presidencies in Latin America during the period 1978–2003.

Robert Putnam extolled the virtue of social capital by arguing that social networks, civil society, and trust contribute to democracy. Subsequent research, however, identified a weakness in the social capital “model” in its underspecification of the mechanisms by which social capital affects political systems. This article proposes the concept of political capital as a likely product of social capital that links civil society participants to the political system. The article tests this two-stage model of social capital and political capital and their effects on democratization using survey data from eight Latin American nations. Results find that civil society engagement in 2004 affected political capital variables, which, in turn, had positive effects on system-level democracy measures in 2010. The article thus shows that political capital serves as an intervening variable between social capital and democracy and democratization.

This article seeks to determine the main predictors of political participation in a newly democratic regime: Mexico. Compared to other nations, Mexico fills a moderate position in terms of the volume of political participation. Following the literature on participation, this study develops a set of participant modes—voting, communal activity, petitioning, direct action, and political organization membership—and then seeks to determine the socioeconomic, demographic, attitudinal, and social capital factors that best explain participation. Distinct resource inequalities limit the participation of the less educated, the poor, women, and workers, although peasant participation is robust. The strongest determinant of political participation of all kinds is involvement in social capital–generating activities: belonging to nonpolitical organizations and engaging in charitable work, activities typically dominated by the middle class. Building social capital is essential to promoting robust rates of political participation in Mexico.

Observers say that drug production fuels violence in Colombia, but does coca production explain different levels of violence? This article examines the relationship between coca production and guerrilla violence by reviewing national-level data over time and studying Colombia by department, exploring the interactions among guerrilla violence, exports, development, and displacement. It uses historical analysis, cartographic visualization, and analysis of the trends in four high coca-producing and four violent Colombian departments, along with a department-level fixed effects model. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the department-level analysis suggests that coca production is not the driving force of contemporary Colombian guerrilla violence. Instead, economic factors and coca eradication emerge as prominent explanatory factors.

This article examines the implications of the Ecuadorian Indian movement for democratic politics. During the 1990s, the movement successfully fostered indigenous and popular participation in public life, influenced government policies, and became a contender in power struggles. But in the institutional domain, the participatory breakthrough had mixed effects. While the movement fulfilled functions of interest representation and control of state power, its involvement in a coup attempt demonstrated that its political socialization had not nurtured a sense of commitment to democracy. The evidence is discussed by reference to the proposition that civil society actors may or may not contribute to democracy. The article argues that the study of the democratic spinoffs of civil activism requires a context-specific approach that considers the particularistic orientations of civil associations and pays attention to their definition of means and ends, the institutional responses evoked by their initiatives, and the unintended consequences of their actions.

This article focuses on the role of multinational corporations in the Colombian conflict, particularly how they contributed to the escalation of land conflicts and to the violent transformation of the rural economy into one based on rentier capital. It also explores how these companies helped in fomenting and financing the war system, an element that could partly explain the protracted persistence of the Colombian conflict.

Contrary to the predictions of “power sharing” to mitigate ethnic conflicts, multicultural rights recognition can actually increase the frequency of local postelectoral mobilizations. This article demonstrates that the adoption of an ethnic rights regime for electing local government representatives may actually increase conflict if these multicultural laws are not carefully circumscribed to avoid violating human rights. Focusing on the 1995 multicultural rights reforms in Oaxaca, it presents evidence that legal changes purportedly implemented to recognize indigenous rights actually increased postelectoral disputes due to conflicts between county seat communities and peripheral population hamlets over access to funding by the central government. Based on this finding, the article addresses normative implications of “power-sharing” multiculturalism, recommending that multicultural laws be implemented only together with legal mechanisms to solve postelectoral disputes.