Political decentralization has been promoted as a way to devolve responsibility, bring government closer to citizens, and improve accountability. The shift prompted new local elections, but were the elected officials responsive to citizens or to national party elites? This study examines unique survey data from 125 Colombian mayors to identify the factors they believe were critical in their victories and thereby to identify the people to whom they believe they owe loyalty: citizens or party leaders. Examining the relative value mayors assign to their own actions versus those of the party, combined with information on how they financed campaigns, sheds important light on subnational electoral dynamics in Colombia.

Parties throughout Latin America have recently addressed two distinct kinds of electoral reforms: primary elections and national-level gender quota laws. This study examines how these reforms interact, their mutual compatibility, and their effect on the nomination of men compared to that of women. It develops a series of hypotheses about this relationship by analyzing the 2003 legislative elections in Mexico, a case in which the three main parties relied on both gender quotas and primaries to select their candidates. Although the percentage of women elected to the Mexican Chamber of Deputies rose, the Federal Electoral Institute interpreted the gender quota law in a way that weakened its effect on women and limited the degree of openness in the primaries that were held.

In the United States, an important literature shows that legislators use interest groups, courts, and budgets to assert political control over bureaucrats. Similar theories can be applied to study the scores of new democracies that have emerged in recent decades. In Argentina, politicians in the first administration of Carlos Menem (1989-95) rewrote administrative procedures and relied on both “police patrol” and “fire alarm” oversight to realign the behavior of tax bureaucrats in conformance with their own policy preferences. Whereas U.S. legislators generally prefer complex administrative procedures, different electoral incentives led their Argentine counterparts to support reforms that significantly streamlined those procedures. This finding challenges theories that attribute legislators' bureaucratic preferences to the separation or fusion of powers between the executive and legislative branches.

Mexico and Ireland, traditionally countries of emigration, experienced pronounced multinationalization of their economies during the 1990s. In Ireland net emigration declined, but in Mexico it remained quite high, suggesting that Ireland advanced in the mobility transition while Mexico did not. Several reasons are offered to explain this, reflecting Mexico's relationships with the United States, multinational corporations, and local income and social conditions in Mexican regions. In Ireland and its relationship with the United Kingdom, by contrast, these factors generally took the reverse direction. This article uses the comparison to examine the relationship between declining emigration and multinational investment and the question of whether Mexico may be expected eventually to reverse its present trends.

Many studies suggest that mixed-member electoral systems produce different attitudes and behaviors among representatives. This article assesses how this type of electoral system shapes Bolivian legislators' perceptions of their roles as representatives, their district activities, and their relationships with their political parties. It examines these dimensions using elite survey data and interviews with legislators and their personal assistants. The results show that the electoral system does not produce a uniform impact. It shapes how legislators perceive their role as representatives and the nature of the relationship they build with their political parties, but it does not produce differences in the kinds of activities that both types of legislators carry out in their districts.

Irresponsible fiscal behavior by subnational units is a concern for federal or decentralized systems, especially in the developing world. States' expenditures in Brazil have been no different. Still, spending varies considerably among the Brazilian states, even after controlling for their financial resources. This article provides a political explanation for the variation in current spending, focusing on intergovernmental political relationships. It argues that credit claiming for pork distributed in a state plays a crucial role and that governors elevate state spending in order to make up for their loss in political credit from the pork distributed by the president. Analyzing data from the period 1996–2005, it finds that expenditures decrease as the relative number of federal deputies from the state governor's party increases compared to the number of deputies from the president's governing coalition when the national agenda encourages federal pork distribution in the states.

Unlike indigenous social movements in several other Latin American countries, Mayan movements in Guatemala have not formed a viable indigenous-based political party. Despite the prominence of the Mayan social movement and a relatively open institutional environment conducive to party formation, indigenous groups have foregone a national political party in favor of a more dispersed pattern of political mobilization at the local level. This article argues that the availability of avenues for political representation at the municipal level, through both traditional political parties and civic committees, and the effects of political repression and violence have reinforced the fragmentation and localism of indigenous social movements in Guatemala and prevented the emergence of a viable Mayan political party. The result has been a pattern of uneven political representation, with indigenous Guatemalans gaining representation in local government while national political institutions remain exclusionary.

In his article “Taming the Tiger: Voting Rights and Political Instability in Latin America,” Josep Colomer proposes to go beyond the “singlecountry stories… typical… of the existing historiography” on Latin American elections and politics and to develop instead “an explicitly comparative, theory-driven analysis, which is more characteristic of the social sciences literature.” I am all for such comparative analysis, although I would guard myself from belittling the achievements of historians who have examined national experiences in painstaking detail or the merit of a highly analytical comparative history such as that presented in Eduardo Posada-Carbó’s recent work (2000). But theory-driven comparative analysis is difficult to do well. One has to know the historical experiences one is comparing very thoroughly, and one has to know how to develop the concepts that will build the theoretical argument in a dialogue with the evidence. The result should be to provide a better understanding of the evidence in ways that even those who know the histories well will find both useful and illuminating.

When delegating governing tasks to a coalition partner, the president would like to give a minister ample administrative powers to be able to effectively accomplish the political mission. Due to information asymmetries, the president runs the risk that this discretion might be used to pursue policy outcomes that may harm the president's preferences. This trade-off between delegation and control is key to understanding governance strategies the president chooses to minimize agency risks and coordinate public policies. With Brazil as a case study, this article demonstrates that presidents have strategically made frequent use of junior ministers as watch-dogs of coalition partners, especially when coalition allies are ideologically distant from the president's preferences. Yet neither the portfolio salience nor the president's decision to share powers with coalition partners proportionally seems to interfere in such strategic decisions.