Project MUSE®: Latin American Politics & Society - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Latin American Politics & Society.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 46 (2004) - vol. 49 (2007)Latest Articles: Latin American Politics & SocietyTWOProject MUSE®Latin American Politics & Society1548-24561531-426XLatest articles in Latin American Politics & Society. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Clientelism and Social Funds: Evidence from Chávez's Misiones
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225192
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This was the description that Chávez provided in his weekly televised program to explain to the population the content of his social programs.By 2005, PDVSA had not concluded the audit of its financial and operational statements for 2003 and 2004. In early 2006, PDVSA announced that by the end of February it would make public the financial statements for 2004, properly audited by the accounting firm KPMG. This report was formally introduced to the Securities and Exchange Commission in New York in late 2006. According to that report, PDVSA had invested in social development 5.558 billion dollars in 2004 (Ecoanalítica 2006). According to the Ministry of Finance, in 2003 and 2004, PDVSA financed directly more than 70
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259/image/coversmallClientelism and Social Funds: Evidence from Chávez's Misiones2007-12-13text/htmlen-USClientelism and Social Funds: Evidence from Chávez's Misiones2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®426102026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13State and Society in Conflict: Comparative Perspectives on Andean Crises (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225193
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Drake and Hershberg's edited volume is a welcome addition to what begins to look like a sizable collection on Andean politics. This recent outpouring of comparative work on the Andes rightfully corrects an overly simplistic view of Latin America's rich diversity, offering a much-needed understanding of a little-known set of cases; namely, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela.
This sudden interest in the Andean nations undoubtedly springs from the perception that the region is in deep trouble: volatile, unstable, violent, turbulent—all are terms commonly used to describe its social and political dynamics. The volume under review here is no exception: Drake and Hershberg's introductory chapter opens
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259/image/coversmallState and Society in Conflict: Comparative Perspectives on Andean Crises (review)2007-12-13text/htmlen-USState and Society in Conflict: Comparative Perspectives on Andean Crises (review)2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®125052026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Broken Promises? The Argentine Crisis and Argentine Democracy (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225194
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This collection of essays intends to examine the effects on Argentina's democracy of the crisis that exploded in December 2001. To this end, the editors' introductory chapter offers a working definition of that crisis. Their argument navigates between a subjective, endogenous perspective and an objective, exogenous view of how to identify a crisis. On the one hand, the authors postulate that the word crisis refers to "the effects of sharply worsening perceptions held by the citizenry as a whole (or by some strategic subgroups) of then prevailing political conditions"; on the other hand, they assert that "a sense of crisis" would persist until "a new pattern emerged that became widely known and accepted" (p. 4). To
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259/image/coversmallBroken Promises? The Argentine Crisis and Argentine Democracy (review)2007-12-13text/htmlen-USBroken Promises? The Argentine Crisis and Argentine Democracy (review)2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®134022026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Difficult Partnerships: The World Bank, States, and NGOs
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225195
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The construction of government-nongovernmental "partnerships" in developing countries was a norm that arose at the World Bank in the 1980s. It was first envisioned for ostensibly practical reasons: nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and civil society actors were seen as important sources of expertise, skills, and resources for development. Over time, however, many bank staff came to privilege NGOs as partners in the political activity of strategy design and policymaking. Including NGOs in these processes was viewed as an implicit means to promote a more open and accountable model of governance. World Bank staff began to promote these partnerships actively under President James Wolfensohn (1995–2005). In the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259/image/coversmallDifficult Partnerships: The World Bank, States, and NGOs2007-12-13text/htmlen-USDifficult Partnerships: The World Bank, States, and NGOs2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®1408372026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Globalization and Pension Reform in Latin America
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225196
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Since 1980, more than 25 governments around the world have implemented some form of market-oriented pension reform, or "privatization." More than a third of these reforms have been conducted in Latin America; 10 governments had implemented some form of pension privatization by 2005. Although the specific design of pension privatizations has varied considerably across the region, this trend is striking as much for its geographic and temporal clustering as it is for the deeply transformative implications of the privatization measure, which fundamentally rewrites the basic social bargain of old age income protection in privatizing countries. Pension privatization, moreover, is costly to implement, both in financial
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259/image/coversmallGlobalization and Pension Reform in Latin America2007-12-13text/htmlen-USGlobalization and Pension Reform in Latin America2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®1528252026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Regionalism and Governance in the Americas: Continental Drift (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225197
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Sick and dying, Simón Bolívar proclaimed in 1830 that "those who have served the revolution have plowed the seas." The same might have been said about regional integration in the Americas, Bolívar's other central political cause. One of Bolívar's central frustrations and the key issue in the past, present, and probable future of regionalist projects and ideas in the Americas was and continues to be the role of the United States, either as an external actor in exclusively Latin American forms of regionalism or, more frequently, as the hegemonic player in hemispherewide regional projects. As Richard Feinberg notes in the preface to this book, "unequal national power sets the context for the Western Hemisphere dialog"
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259/image/coversmallRegionalism and Governance in the Americas: Continental Drift (review)2007-12-13text/htmlen-USRegionalism and Governance in the Americas: Continental Drift (review)2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®128162026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13The Crisis of Democratic Representation in the Andes (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225199
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Why the Andes? According to the editors and authors of this interesting compilation, recent political developments in the Andean region can also be discerned in other parts of the world; but the countries of this region have, more than other regions, a common historical trajectory and a sense of regional identity. These features have led to strong cross-national mutual influences in terms of the evolution of the relationship between the grassroots and the state, or as the authors would prefer to put it, between voters and votees. Aside from the long-term historical trajectory, this regional identity is expressed in the countries' participation in pan-Andean institutions and commercial agreements. Before the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259/image/coversmallThe Crisis of Democratic Representation in the Andes (review)2007-12-13text/htmlen-USThe Crisis of Democratic Representation in the Andes (review)2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®132572026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Frente Amplio and the Crafting of a Social Democratic Alternative in Uruguay
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225201
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See Filgueira 1999 for an extremely suggestive discussion of different sociostructural pathways yielded by different ISI configurations and their potential for structuring political competition today.Although the sociological overtones of Paper Stones were criticized both theoretically and empirically, the notion of electoral trade-offs remains analytically powerful. Here, the argument follows Kitschelt 1994, incorporating processes of collective political preference formation and party strategy while discussing trade-offs.For an excellent account of the Uruguayan party system, see González 1995.For reasons already argued by several authors (see, e.g., González 1995, 142, n. 10; Altman 2000, 278–79), the use of the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259/image/coversmallFrente Amplio and the Crafting of a Social Democratic Alternative in Uruguay2007-12-13text/htmlen-USFrente Amplio and the Crafting of a Social Democratic Alternative in Uruguay2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®519722026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Democracy from Above: Regional Organizations and Democratization (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225202
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It is well known that democratization has taken place in waves, meaning that groups of countries have undergone regime transitions more or less
simultaneously. It is also known that democratization has taken place in clusters, meaning that countries that experienced regime transitions were frequently located close to others that were undergoing the same process. Waves underline the significance of time as an explaining factor, whereas clusters underscore the importance of geography. This book deals with the latter: its main goal is to show how, as concerns democratization, geography matters; or rather, institutionalized geography. As is sometimes said, a good indicator of the probability for any given country
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259/image/coversmallDemocracy from Above: Regional Organizations and Democratization (review)2007-12-13text/htmlen-USDemocracy from Above: Regional Organizations and Democratization (review)2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®132812026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Institutional Weakness and the Puzzle of Argentina's Low Taxation
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225203
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“Tax handles”—sectors that are by their very nature easier to tax, such as foreign trade or mineral resources—combined with other variables are also good predictors of tax burden (Teera and Hudson 2004; Piancastelli 2001; Tanzi 1992; Bird et al. 2004).Torgler finds that the subjective perception of being caught is not statistically significant, whereas trust in the president is (see also Bird et al. 2004). However, the available data from the World Values Survey for Argentina and Brazil are very similar, 2.2 and 2.1 respectively, on a scale of 1 to 3. In the Latinobarómetro data set, in the period 1990–93, the tax morale indicator was higher for Argentina than for Brazil, and the gap increased between 1995 and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259/image/coversmallInstitutional Weakness and the Puzzle of Argentina's Low Taxation2007-12-13text/htmlen-USInstitutional Weakness and the Puzzle of Argentina's Low Taxation2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®814902026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Courts Under Constraints: Judges, Generals and Presidents in Argentina (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225205
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Why would otherwise dependent judges rule against the government? This is the central question that Gretchen Helmke addresses in Courts Under Constraints. Helmke presents a tightly argued, theoretically and empirically interesting explanation of why Argentine judges who operate in political conditions normally associated with judicial compliance rule, nevertheless, against the government's interests. Argentina has been characterized by executive control of judicial appointments and the replacement of Supreme Court judges with each turnover of power since the 1940s. In this political environment, judges might be expected to be deferential toward the government; yet Helmke finds a pattern of antigovernment rulings
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259/image/coversmallCourts Under Constraints: Judges, Generals and Presidents in Argentina (review)2007-12-13text/htmlen-USCourts Under Constraints: Judges, Generals and Presidents in Argentina (review)2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®130182026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Civil Society Engagement in Trade Negotiations: CAFTA Opposition Movements in El Salvador
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225206
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Research in El Salvador was supported by a grant from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of DePaul University; research assistance was provided by Graciela González. Internet research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant #0125068 to DePaul University.With the addition of the Dominican Republic in August 2004, the agreement officially became DR-CAFTA. Colloquially, it is often still referred to as CAFTA in both the United States and Central America.My use of the “critic negotiator” category roughly parallels Smith and Korzeniewicz’s “insider” designation; my “transgressive resister” category is similar to their subcategory of “rejectionist outsiders,” who, under the leadership of the Alianza
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259/image/coversmallCivil Society Engagement in Trade Negotiations: CAFTA Opposition Movements in El Salvador2007-12-13text/htmlen-USCivil Society Engagement in Trade Negotiations: CAFTA Opposition Movements in El Salvador2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®827942026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13Foreign Investment, Development, and Globalization: Can Costa Rica Become Ireland? (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/225207
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The subtitle of this book asks an interesting, though narrow, question; and although the book does indeed examine whether Costa Rica can break out of the development trap, embrace globalization, attract foreign direct investment (FDI), and undergo a stunning transformation similar to that of Ireland's economy over the last 20 years, its conclusions are much broader and applicable to all middle-income countries. The author's nuanced argument necessarily concludes without a solid road map for middle-income countries to follow and become "Ireland." Instead, the author answers the question with a resounding "possibly." The book contains 7 chapters, 44 tables, 5 figures, and 2 graphs. Chapter 1 lays out the puzzle of
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/259/image/coversmallForeign Investment, Development, and Globalization: Can Costa Rica Become Ireland? (review)2007-12-13text/htmlen-USForeign Investment, Development, and Globalization: Can Costa Rica Become Ireland? (review)2007-12-132007TWOProject MUSE®98362026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002007-12-13