This article examines the challenges and opportunities of indigenous justice for women in Ecuador. The legal recognition of indigenous justice is a major component of democratization in the region. Yet it also raises the risk of institutionalizing detrimental gender biases within indigenous forms of law. Taking the Remache case as a point of departure, this article identifies some of the fault lines in legal pluralism and women's conflicted relationship with it. Rather than rejecting customary law, however, women advocate for their rights within it—lobbying for gender parity within indigenous justice in the 2008 Constitutional Assembly. As women's support for indigenous justice relocates legal authority, it also challenges conventional practices of state sovereignty. To understand the attractiveness of legal pluralism for women and its impact on the state, this study explores the confines of feminist alliances, the accessibility of indigenous justice, and its implications for state sovereignty.

Beginning in the 1980s, social and political actors across Latin America turned to courts in unprecedented numbers to contest economic policies. Very different patterns of high court–elected branch interaction over economic governance emerged across the region, with crucial implications for economic development, democratic governance, and the rule of law. Building on both institutional and strategic accounts of judicial politics, this article argues that high court “character,” a relatively stable congeries of informal institutional features, channels interbranch struggles into persistent patterns. Two case studies illustrate the argument. In Argentina, the high court's political character encouraged a pattern of court submission to elected leaders marked by periodic bouts of interbranch confrontation over economic governance. In Brazil, the high court's statesmanlike character induced interbranch accommodation. This study demonstrates that even in politically unstable settings, institutional features can shape law and politics.

This article explores the conditions that allow judicial councils and impeachment juries to promote judicial autonomy. In theory, these bodies intervene in the appointment and removal of judges in order to reduce executive control over court composition, thereby promoting judicial independence. Using the case of Argentina at the federal and the subnational levels, this study demonstrates that competitive politics enhances the capacity of judicial councils and impeachment juries to bolster judicial autonomy. Interparty competition provides incentives for the executive to develop a meaningful system of checks and balances, which includes an independent judiciary that can check executive power. In contrast, monolithic party control—defined as a prolonged period of unified government under a highly disciplined party—permits the executive to maintain a monopoly on power and thereby control judicial appointments and removals.

The potential democratizing effect of political decentralization reforms has been a matter of substantial theoretical and empirical debate. This article analyzes the effect of local democratic institution building on the political attitudes and behavior of citizens living in small towns in Uruguay. More specifically, using a natural experiment design, this research seeks to establish the causal impact of recently established elections of local authorities on individuals' political engagement. It develops a comparative case study analyzing the consequences of this institutional innovation in two towns. It shows that individuals from the town where citizens have the opportunity to elect their local authorities have more positive attitudes toward politics than those from the town without such elections.

Over time, the Organization of American States has become institutionally and normatively more capable of defending democracy in the region. Yet the OAS is as selective in its interventions on behalf of democratic promotion today as it was in the early 1990s. To explain this puzzle, this study disaggregates democratic dilemmas according to issue areas, threats, and contingencies. It finds that the OAS responds more forcefully when the problem presents a clear and present danger both to the offending state and to other members. As threats become weaker or more ambiguous, the OAS tends to act more timidly, unless domestic constituencies cry out for its assistance or the United States puts its full weight behind the effort. Case study capsules provide empirical evidence to illustrate these arguments.

Twenty years after governments across Latin America began implementing neoliberal reforms in earnest, concern is growing about their impact on the quality of democracy in the region. This article examines this issue in the case of Mexico by exploring how patterns of political participation, especially among the rural and urban poor, have changed since the implementation of free market reforms. It asks whether the institutional innovations associated with free market reforms make it easier or more difficult for the poor to participate in Mexico's political process. The answer is not encouraging. Despite democratic openings, the new linkages between the state and citizens established as a result of the transition to a free market development model stifle the voice of the poor not through the threat of force or coercion, but by creating obstacles and disincentives for political mobilization that affect the poor more severely than other groups.

This article examines, through a two-level game model, the case of the first investment dispute under NAFTA between a private U.S. firm and the Mexican government. It argues that the clue to understanding why the Mexican president could not cooperate with the U.S. president lies in Mexico's domestic “ratification” process. The analysis yields two theoretical propositions. First, federalism represents an important variable in explaining foreign economic policy. Second, two-level game logic should not be applied only to formal international negotiation situations; instead, by specifying the dependent variable as cooperation or noncooperation, these models connecting domestic and international politics can be productively applied to study foreign economic policy.

This article examines the politics of how drug traffickers resolve disputes and maintain order in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Much popular discourse and some scholarly studies argue that drug traffickers play a major role in controlling crime and minimizing conflicts there. This article shows that traffickers enforce community norms under a variable political calculus in which well-connected and respected residents are less likely to be punished for rule violations than are individuals who are marginal to the life of the community. This allows many favela residents who conform to local norms to feel a degree of control over their own safety, a “myth of personal security” in otherwise violent neighborhoods.