This article analyzes the discourse of Brazil's foreign policy toward South America from 1995 to 2010 by means of quantifying, codifying, and weighting all speeches registered in the homogeneous and periodic official documentation of Brazil's Ministry of Foreign Affairs using a discourse analysis approach. The aim is to investigate discourse patterns in order to qualify Brazil's foreign policy as either hard power or soft power and to identify the orientation and differences in its discourse of foreign policy regarding each country of South America during the presidential terms of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–2002) and Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (2003–2010).

This article seeks to explain why electoral support for the Venezuelan opposition has increased substantially, using Venezuelan public opinion survey data from LAPOP and an opt-in sample collected through the online vote advice application Brújula Presidencial Venezuela. It analyzes why Venezuelans who had either voted for Chávez or abstained in 2006 defected and started to support the opposition in subsequent elections. It proposes several reasons: negative voter evaluations of the economy, concern for public safety, and dissatisfaction with Venezuelan democracy. While the finding that negative policy evaluations boost support for the opposition aligns with theoretical expectations, this study finds a strong relationship between having different evaluations of the quality of democracy and supporting Chávez, which shows that the advocacy of two competing visions of democracy by the incumbent and the opposition also affects voting patterns in Venezuela.

This article examines key ideological, economic, and institutional preferences of the Brazilian political elite in the first 25 years of the country's present democratic regime. Introducing the unified dataset of the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, it examines several crucial dimensions of politicians' attitudes, including elite placement on a traditional left-right scale, preferences concerning the fundamental economic model, direct comparisons of the recent Cardoso and Lula governments, and orientations toward Brazil's global and regional projection. On many of the central issues, attitudes have remained stable, but on the dimensions that have seen notable change, nearly all the change has been in the direction of decreasing polarization. In contrast to the experience of some neighboring countries, the Brazilian case demonstrates that the sustained practice of democracy can lead to attitudinal convergence and macro-political stability, even when the initial political and socioeconomic conditions appear daunting.

Defining the rights that must be protected in a democracy is an integral component of the process of democratization. In the case of Argentina, the definition of these rights results partly from important debates between human rights organizations (HROs) and the state. Argentine HROs have framed their demands for state protection of human rights in terms of the need to protect the family. Yet HROs' successes in using international courts as arbiters may be reducing their need to present their demands in this framework.

The standard account of military dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990) portrays the case as a personalist regime, and uses the dynamics associated with this type of regime to explain General Pinochet's control of the presidency, the enactment of the 1980 Constitution, and the longevity of military rule. Drawing on records of the decisionmaking process within the military junta, this article presents evidence for a different characterization of the dictatorship. It shows that Pinochet never attained the supremacy commonly attributed to him, that the commanders of the other branches of the armed forces retained significant powers, and that the 1980 Constitution was not enacted to project Pinochet's personal power. More generally, this study suggests that personal power is not a necessary condition for regime longevity; collective systems can also produce cohesion and stability.

This article documents a U.S. Cuban foreign policy cycle that operated in tandem with the presidential electoral cycle between 1992 and 2004. During these post–Cold War years, when Cuba posed no threat to U.S. national security, influential, well-organized Cuban Americans leveraged political contributions and votes to tighten the embargo on travel and trade, especially at the personal level. U.S. presidential candidates, most notably incumbent presidents seeking re-election, responded to their demands with discretionary powers of office. When presidential candidates supported policies that made good electoral sense but conflicted with concerns of state, they subsequently reversed or left unimplemented Cuba initiatives. After describing the logic behind an ethnic electoral policy cycle and U.S. personal embargo policy between 1992 and 2004, this article examines Cuban American voter participation, political and policy preferences, lobbying, political contributions, and the relationship between the ethnic policy and presidential election cycles.