Why are some Latin American states plagued by persistent policy volatility while the policies of others remain relatively stable? This article explores the political economy of natural resource rents and policy volatility across Latin America. It argues that, all else equal, resource rents will create incentives for political leaders, which will result in repeated episodes of policy volatility. This effect, however, will depend on the structure of political institutions. Where political institutions fail to provide a forum for intertemporal exchange among political actors, natural resource rents will result in increased levels of policy volatility. Alternatively, where political institutions facilitate agreement among actors, resource rents will be conducive to policy stability. This argument is tested on a measure of policy volatility for 18 Latin American economies between 1993 and 2008. The statistical tests provide support for the argument.

This article examines two decades of strengthening, expansion, and diffusion of gender quota laws in Latin America. The analysis departs from studies of quotas' adoption, numerical effectiveness, or policy impacts, instead focusing on states' use of coercive power to integrate women into public and private institutions. Viewing these policies in light of feminist theories of the poststructuralist state reveals how state institutions act to restructure government and promote gender equality. In building this argument, the article presents an up-to-date empirical survey and conceptual understanding of quota evolution in Latin America, including recent developments in countries such as Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Uruguay.

The literature on voting behavior has generally accepted that party identification largely determines voter choice. While many studies have found that party identification is largely transmitted through social learning, less studied are the processes of the construction of party identity by way of group membership. This study seeks to understand how group identity influences party identification among Mexican workers through an analysis of the effects of union affiliation on political behavior. It assesses the utility of corporatist legacies in explaining party identity in Mexico and provides a first assessment of party affinities among independent unionists. The evidence draws from original survey data collected during six demonstrations in Mexico City. The study finds that union membership does condition the party identity of corporatist workers but not that of independent unionists.

This article presents both a theoretical framework and a methodology that attempt to capture the complex interactions among labor markets, families, and public policy that currently constitute Latin American welfare regimes. Drawing on cluster analysis based on available data for 18 countries, the study identifies three welfare regimes. Two are state welfare regimes: protectionist (e.g. Costa Rica) and productivist (e.g. Chile); one is nonstate familiarist (e.g. Ecuador and Nicaragua). In a region where people's well-being is deeply embedded in family relationships, closer scholarly attention to how social structures interact with public policy bears not only academic interest but also policy implications, particularly for adapting particular welfare regimes to the local welfare mix.

Legitimation is a fraught process for private security companies operating in Mexico and other countries in the Global South where the police have a poor reputation. Mexican private security companies have an ambivalent relationship with the police, which causes firms to engage in two seemingly contradictory practices. Companies attempt to gain legitimacy by aligning with the image of the police to earn a sense of “symbolic stateness” while simultaneously distancing themselves from Mexico's actual police forces so as to disassociate from the institution's poor reputation. Consequently, collaboration between public and private security is limited, despite official attempts by the Mexican state to foster positive contact between them. Overall, this study contributes to the growing literature on private security by providing novel insights into the strategies private security firms utilize to navigate within states possessing delegitimated security forces, and the resulting lucrative political economy landscape.

PRD politicians and officials widely use clientelism to structure their relationships with citizens. This is due not only to the entrenchment of clientelism in Mexican politics or to high rates of poverty and inequality, but also to the limited institutionalization of democratic rules inside the party. The last stems largely from the party's electoral strategy in its formative years, and has resulted in uncontrolled factional battles that play out through clientelism. The Brazilian PT faced external and internal conditions quite similar to those of the PRD, but its early focus on organization building and policy change allowed it to avoid clientelism to a greater degree. This analysis problematizes the trend of using minimalist definitions that assume clientelism to be nondemocratic because these approaches result in conceptual stretching and decreased explanatory power.

The victory of the FMLN in El Salvador's presidential elections of March 2009 has been considered remarkable, given the dominance of ARENA in four consecutive presidential races from 1989 to 2004. Using individual-level data, this article examines the determinants of electoral support for both parties over the past 15 years. Several statistical models illuminate some of the factors that led to ARENA's dominance and ultimate defeat. A combination of variables associated with different theoretical models of voting helps explain the choices made by Salvadoran voters over the years. The most consistent predictors of vote have been voters' self-reported ideology and their evaluation of the incumbent government's performance. The 2009 turnaround relates to fundamental changes in the national and international context, and also to the selection of candidates.

This article assesses popular mobilization under the Chávez government's participatory initiatives in Venezuela using data from the AmericasBarometer survey of 2007. This is the first study of the so-called Bolivarian initiatives using nationally representative, individual-level data. The results provide a mixed assessment. Most of the government's programs invite participation from less active segments of society, such as women, the poor, and the less educated, and participation in some programs is quite high. However, much of this participation clusters within a narrow group of activists, and a disproportionate number of participants are Chávez supporters. This partisan bias probably reflects self-screening by Venezuelans who accept Chávez's radical populist discourse and leftist ideology, rather than vote buying or other forms of open conditionality. Thus, the Venezuelan case suggests some optimism for proponents of participatory democracy, but also the need to be more attuned to its practical political limits.

This article offers a critical assessment of the first postneoliberalism development framework that emerged in Latin America after 1990. The ability of neostructuralism to present an attractive narrative about a twenty-first-century “modernity with solidarity” is based on abandoning key tenets of ECLAC's structuralism and the thinking of Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado; namely, a focus on the distribution and appropriation of economic surplus and a framing of Latin American development problems in a world capitalist system. This article argues that Latin American neostructuralism's discursive strengths, as well as its analytical weaknesses, stem from the marginalization of power relations from key dimensions of the region's political economy. Since 2000, neostructuralism has exacerbated its descriptive, short-term perspective, further dulling its analytical edge, by focusing on policies that promote social cohesion and state intervention in the cultural and the socioemotional realm.