While financial globalization has created powerful incentives for Latin American governments to privatize old age pension systems, reliance on short-term capital flows has also constrained the ability of cash-strapped governments to enact that reform. Analysis of the technocratic process of pension reform in Argentina and Brazil provides evidence. Instead of simply generating unidirectional pressures for structural pension reform, financial globalization has created a double bind for Latin America's capital-scarce governments, fostering long-term incentives to privatize pension systems while heightening the risk of punishment in the short term.

The postmaterialist thesis has spurred a large body of literature and debates, yet postmaterialism has not been studied among political elites. Empirical studies of the legislatures and legislators of Latin American nations in general and Puerto Rico in particular, moreover, are sorely lacking. This article examines postmaterialist values among Puerto Rican legislators. It finds that Puerto Rican legislators have high levels of postmaterialism and that they order the components of the postmaterialism scale in ways similar to those of the mass publics of other countries, including those of Latin America. More important, the postmaterialist scale proves of little use in explaining the positions legislators take on a host of issues, many of which are closely associated with postmaterialism. An alternative explanation is that the scale really measures attachment to democratic norms.

Many democratic governments in Latin America have implemented broad judicial reforms, some of which are aimed at making criminal law and legal institutions more transparent and modern. Although such reforms are important for democratic development, scholars debate whether the reforms result in more rights for defendants and whether they jeopardize citizens' perceptions about security. Using two original datasets and a fixed-effects model, this study shows that groundbreaking criminal law reforms in Chile have improved certain aspects of defendants' rights by decreasing the number of individuals in pretrial detention. Chileans' perceptions about crime and violence in regions where the reforms were implemented also have improved. Chile's success appears to be due to the government's commitment to the reforms, as well as to concerted and consistent efforts by the police to fight crime. These results have implications for other countries implementing similar significant reforms.

This article examines efforts to increase taxation of highly concentrated, undertapped income and profits in Latin America in the aftermath of structural adjustment. Argentina has advanced further than Chile in two policy areas: corporate taxation, which taps firm-level profits; and tax agency access to bank information, which helps reduce income tax evasion. These outcomes are explained by drawing on the classic concepts of business instrumental power, which entails political actions, and structural power, which arises from investment decisions. In Chile, strong instrumental power removed reforms in both areas from the policy agenda. In Argentina, much weaker instrumental power at the cross-sectoral level facilitated corporate tax increases. Bank information access was expanded after Argentina's 2001 crisis weakened the financial sector's instrumental power and reduced structural power.

Despite weak partisanship and considerable political change in the wake of the 2002 election, three-quarters of Brazilian voters supported a presidential candidate in 2006 from the same party they had backed in 2002. This article assesses the factors causing both electoral stability and electoral change with a transition model, a model testing whether the effects of respondents' evaluative criteria depend on their initial vote choices. Social context—personal discussion networks, neighborhood influences, and the interactions of social networks and municipal context—is the major force promoting stability and change, while the impact of partisanship is limited to a small share of voters.

This article argues that the common narrative of a Bolivian backlash against neoliberalism should be reconsidered in light of the continuities and mutual constraints between popular mobilization and neoliberal policy reforms. The study draws on literature that conceptualizes neoliberalism as a particular construction of state and social forms; but unlike those works, it includes an analysis of International Monetary Fund policy shifts to understand how popular mobilization constrains policy implementation. Responding to popular mobilization between 1985 and 2006, the IMF came to accept divergence from orthodox policy in order to encourage political stability. The government of Evo Morales and the IMF are mutually constrained by concern for the investment climate. This study further advocates that analysts probe beyond simple binary divisions between “neoliberalism” and “alternatives” and look more seriously for pragmatic strategies for negotiating neoliberal spaces.

Focusing on the social movement that resisted the privatization of health care in El Salvador in 2002–3, this article asks how the movement's multisectoral composition influenced news coverage of the health care policy debate. Specifically, it examines whether the diversity of perspectives in the alliance was reflected in the media's source selection and framing of the policy issues. A content analysis of Salvadoran newspapers' coverage shows that the media relied mainly on just two movement actors to represent the antiprivatization position: the striking doctors and the leftist opposition party. It also reveals that a period of elite dissensus on the policy issues opened a temporary opportunity to insert movement messages in the coverage. The study indicates that a multisectoral alliance does not enhance movement influence through the news media, though broad alliances confer strategic advantages for the movement's broader communication work.

Costa Ricans have worked hard to weave the norms and principles of sustainable development into their nation's environmental policies, especially with respect to natural renewable resources, such as the forest. As a result, the nation is known as a leader in innovative environmental initiatives. But sustainable development is a complex, evolving concept. This paper analyzes how the emphasis on biodiversity conservation during the 1990s and early 2000s has, rhetoric notwithstanding, neglected the social equality, or livelihood, component of sustainable development. This trend stands in sharp contrast to earlier periods, when decisionmakers crafted policies and institutions that supported social ecology. The article concludes with a few observations on building political will to revive the grassroots development component of sustainable development.