The 2016 peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP, and the demobilization of the latter, dismantled the governance structures in regions formerly under rebel control. Drawing from a relational security framework, this article explores how, across three case-studies, communities use their former experience of rebel governance as a framework through which they could express expectations and dissatisfaction with new types of order. This blueprint is also used to make specific demands to new or reconstituted armed groups and to take direct action to address governance gaps, reproducing and co-constructing order post-demobilization. However, we observe that both the organization of the community and the capacity and ideology of armed groups could also be limiting factors to the community’s reproduction of order post-demobilization. From a peacebuilding perspective, this means that there can be pressure from below in favor of remobilization, as a predictable insurgent order may be preferable to uncertainty.

What is the relationship between clientelism and political participation in popular urban neighborhoods? This article addresses the question based on qualitative research in two popular neighborhoods of Buenos Aires, drawing on participant observation and interviews with residents, activists, and party brokers. Adding to a growing literature on “participatory clientelism,” we argue for greater attention to the urban context through which this unfolds. To date, research into participatory clientelism has predominantly considered specific practices—participatory innovations or contentious politics—and been limited to the survival of the urban poor and the demand for political support by party brokers. While these are crucial practices, they are not exhaustive of the relations that sustain participatory clientelism, particularly in contexts of territorialized politics. Based on the socio-spatial approach of Henri Lefebvre, influential in urban studies, we define three interconnected dimensions of participatory clientelism and identify them in the cases under study.

In Brazil, numerous participatory institutions have been suspended over the past decades, including many participatory budgeting (PB) programs at the municipal level. Since the introduction of PB in Porto Alegre in 1989, extensive literature has discussed its effects on the way urban social movements make demands. However, the suspension of many PBs across Brazil raises a new question: how do these movements adapt following the loss of an arena that had become central to their efforts? Looking at the pioneering experience of Porto Alegre’s PB, whose progressive erosion started in 2002, I argue that urban movements have since shifted away from institutionalized participation routines, and adopted new routines that combine bureaucratic activism with proximity politics. Focusing on these movements’ repertoires of interactions I argue that the erosion of PB led to the deinstitutionalization of urban social movements.

Latin American governments are increasingly adopting mano dura initiatives to combat gangs, organized crime, and insecurity. While mano dura has been a concept of increasing empirical interest, there seems to be limited conceptual clarity about the wide spectrum of strategies developed to combat crime and associated fear. This article proposes a definition of mano dura that has three different dimensions, each of them containing specific elements. The form of mano dura depends on formal, informal, and rhetorical practices. Drawing on 46 scholarly works in the social sciences, we develop our definition anchored in the knowledge of Latin American policing strategies, contributions on responses to crime in the region, and the conceptual development literature. With the purpose of supplementing our effort to standardize the usage of the term with the need to retain a degree of conceptual differentiation, we also offer a stylized model to better classify policing strategies in Latin America. In our stylized model, the numerous ways policies and narratives as well as their implementation (or not) interact can be grouped into four broad categories: full mano dura, institutional mano dura, performative mano dura, and covert mano dura.

Since the so-called war on drugs began in Mexico in 2006, the military has been the leading actor in charge of the government’s public security policy, undertaking tasks that should be carried out by the police. Analyses of this security strategy are based on quantitative methods and have focused on its results: e.g., an increase in the homicide rate or the committing of human rights violations. In contrast, based on in-depth interviews, this article explores the testimony of military personnel to understand what they experience in the field. Contrary to what the existing literature argues, which maintains that the military acts with a logic of war, this article shows that the situation is far more complex: they act in a scenario characterized by improvisation, facing the dilemma between acting and being accused of human rights or not acting and being accused of disobedience.

The traditional narrative of Europe’s first wave of democratization is that elites extended the franchise in response to revolutionary threats and reformed majoritarian electoral systems to limit rising working-class parties. This stylized account does not fit early twentieth-century South America, where democratization was driven by internal competition within incumbent parties, without strong working-class parties to contain. I study Argentina’s 1912 electoral reform that introduced elements of democracy (secret and compulsory voting) and simultaneously changed the electoral system from multi-member plurality to the limited vote. To study the motivations behind the electoral system change component of the reform package, I analyze expert surveys, legislative debates, and a 1911 public opinion poll. Granting representation to political minorities was regarded not as an electoral containment strategy to benefit incumbents, but a progressive measure to make opposition parties more competitive. An analysis of roll-call votes shows that legislators who supported the reform were those expecting to not be adversely affected.

Recent research has shed light on the impact of pre-electoral coalitions on government formation in presidential democracies. However, the fact that pre-electoral coalitions are not automatically transformed into coalition cabinets has often gone under the radar. In this article, I argue that the importance of pre-electoral pacts for government formation depends on the degree of legislative polarization. When parties are distant from one another in the ideological spectrum, presidents face more difficulties in breaking away from the pre-electoral pact and rearranging their multiparty alliances. Conversely, when polarization is not pervasive, presidents have more leeway to build coalition cabinets different from the ones prescribed by pre-electoral coalitions. Drawing on a dataset of 13 Latin American countries, the results support my claim and suggest that the relationship between government formation and the concession of office benefits for pre-electoral coalition members is more nuanced than previously assumed.

Under what conditions do South American states create regional institutions that consolidate or undermine the liberal international order (LIO)? To address this question, we compare two cases of contestation of the LIO through counter-institutionalization in the domains of migration and election monitoring, both of which are closely related to the LIO’s core political principles. We argue that the variation in the effects of counter-institutionalization—LIO-consolidating in the case of migration and LIO-undermining in the case of election monitoring—results from the interaction of two explanatory factors: the source of dissatisfaction with the LIO’s norms and institutions in a specific domain, and the preferences of the state that exercises regional leadership in support of counter-institutionalization. The article sheds light on the coexistence of liberal and illiberal tendencies in South America’s regionalism and contributes to the debate on the determinants and effects of contestations of the LIO in the Global South.

The incidence of petty corruption in public service delivery varies greatly across citizens and geography. This paper proposes a novel explanation for citizen engagement in collusive forms of petty corruption. It is rooted in the social context in which citizen-public official interactions take place. I argue that social proximity and network centrality provide the two key enforcement mechanisms that sustain favor exchanges among socially connected individuals. Bribery, as a collusive arrangement between a citizen and a public official, relies on the same enforcement mechanisms. Using an original dataset from a household survey conducted in Guatemala, the analysis shows that social proximity and centrality allow citizens to obtain privileges through implicit favor exchanges and illicit payments. These findings are not driven by better access to information about the bribery market. This paper contributes to our understanding of the role of preexisting social relations in sustaining corrupt exchanges.

We analyze how new technologies can be used to foster individual engagement that limits deliberation and reduces people’s capacity for political action within parties. We present the results of an analysis of the case of the Argentinean Propuesta Republicana (PRO). Using data from in-depth interviews with key actors—party elites and political consultants—we show that new technologies helped to mobilize almost 1 million volunteers in presidential elections, without transforming them into party stakeholders. This incorporation, though successful for organization and mobilization, reinforced the existing distribution of power within the party, by activating new adherents without engaging them in a collective organizational structure.

The enforcement of labor informality is subject to electoral motivations, and political parties on the left and right have different incentives to do so. While leftist governments are more lenient not to harm their informal electorate, right-wing incumbents face an electoral dilemma: the part of its constituency that benefits from informal work is in favor of a permissive attitude, but another section demands a tough hand to deal with the unfair competition that informal work represents. Taking Chile as a case study and drawing on panel data on labor inspections, this article explores the electoral drivers behind enforcement. Our estimations, robust to fixed-effect and panel event-study approach, reveal that the left does not forbear, but the right carries out selective enforcement, concentrating inspections in competitive districts and accelerating the pace of control as presidential polls approach. The article concludes with policy recommendations to limit the electoral bias.

During the last decades, political distrust has seemingly become a common trend across Latin American democracies, however, differences in the levels of confidence among groups have also been identified. This article considers the potential effects of ethno-racial structures and their interactions with other forms of socioeconomic inequalities on political trust. Building on data from four waves of the Latinobarometer project and contextual measures from different sources, we analyze these relations and find that both socioeconomic and ethno-racial inequalities affect political trust and impact on the formation of different relations with the political system across Latin America. Furthermore, in particular it is found that at the individual-level interactions between inequalities shape political trust differently depending on the particular ethno-racial identification. These findings contribute to the understanding of ethnicity and race and its associations with other structural inequalities in shaping mass political culture.

Much scholarly attention has been paid to how great powers have used development finance as a tool for projecting power and shaping the international order, with less given to how smaller countries navigate these dynamics. This article investigates the conditions under which Latin American countries borrow from institutions led by the declining hegemon, the United States, or the rising power, China. Specifically, it uses mixed methods to analyze 518 loans from the World Bank and Chinese banks, and interviews with policymakers in Ecuador to highlight the mechanisms of decisions, outline interactions between different factors, and identify factors that cannot be readily tested statistically. Results show that countries are diversifying their development finance between the two great powers, motivated by domestic political considerations such as party ideology and economic development priorities, as well as by international structures including the balance of power and the borrowing country’s foreign policy alignment with the United States.

What explains voter attitudes toward immigration in Latin America? This article argues that increased refugee arrivals moderate the impact of social identities on immigration attitudes. We propose that informational cues associated with increased immigration make cosmopolitan identities less important—and exclusionary national identities more important—determinants of immigration preferences. Analyzing 12 Latin American countries from the 2017–2022 wave of the World Values Survey, we demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is positively associated with pro-immigration attitudes, but only in countries experiencing low-to-moderate refugee inflows. Conversely, nationalism is negatively associated with pro-immigrant attitudes, and increasingly so as refugee inflows increase. The uneven distribution of refugee migration has therefore reshaped public opinion in Latin America by moderating the effects of competing social identities (i.e., cosmopolitanism and nationalism). These findings contribute to broader debates on the behavioral impacts of immigration by highlighting an indirect mechanism by which increased immigration may generate anti-immigrant hostility.

This article explores the underlying causes of vigilantism, moving beyond existing explanations to propose a novel perspective: state absenteeism. Drawing upon an original dataset collected at the subnational level in Guatemala, the study utilizes police station data as a proxy measure of state presence. This research article sheds light on the intricate dynamics driving vigilantism by analyzing the interplay between state actions, security provision, and the emergence of extralegal justice mechanisms. Empirical findings suggest that existing theories do not fully explain the surge in vigilantism, underscoring the importance of considering state provision of security at the subnational level. This theoretical and empirical contribution highlights the role of uneven state presence in shaping responses to insecurity and calls for more equitable and locally responsive security provision to address the root causes of extralegal justice.

The transition to democracy in Chile, which took place under the rules established in the authoritarian constitution, led political parties and voters to align along an authoritarian/democratic divide. In the campaign for the constitutional plebiscite in 2022, some of those in favor of a new constitution linked their position to democratic values and labeled those opposed to the new draft as lacking democratic values. Many of those opposed to the new constitution purposely distanced themselves from the authoritarian legacy. We rely on a pre-electoral poll to explore democratic values in the vote choice in the plebiscite. When factoring for economic perceptions, ideological identification, and sociodemographic traits, while holding authoritarian values was positively associated with voting Reject, expressing democratic values had a weak association with voting Approve. The authoritarian/democratic divide in the party system in the early 1990s was not a relevant determinant of vote choice in the 2022 plebiscite.

In Latin American comparative politics, a tension exists between North Americanization and parochialism. While certain academic scholarship is published in Scopus-indexed journals that engage with “mainstream” Global North literature, other works are found in non-indexed outlets, focusing solely on their home countries and fostering parochial scientific communities. To assess this tension in graduate program curricula, we compiled an original dataset of comparative politics readings from 21 universities across nine Latin American countries. Our network analysis reveals a centralized structure influenced by mainstream readings, challenging the expectation of parochialism. In addition to the mainstream content, universities tend to incorporate readings from regional journals to facilitate cross-case comparisons. However, these materials are inconsistently shared, resulting in fragmentation of content from Latin American sources. Our findings contribute to and challenge the North Americanization versus parochialism debate, showing that future scholars receive similar mainstream training but encounter diverse regional materials during their PhD studies.

The article analyses an original database of 177 Latin American women activists killed that had some connection with feminist social movements from 2015 to 2023. A growing body of literature has focused on the killings of socio-environmental activists in Latin America and where they occurred. However, their activisms are under-researched, precisely because feminist social movements and activists have frequently been killed while advocating for women’s rights in the subcontinent. This article focuses on the circumstances, a few reasons portrayed in newspaper events, and the perpetrators of such violence. Based on a literature review, I argue that taking into account the recent narcodynamics of the region, it is possible to understand such violence within the context of drug-related violence, but also—and more likely—to consider those killings as political feminicides. Political feminicides are then examined largely through transfeminicides and peasant/communitarian activists.

The article examines the patterns of turnover of Latin American legislators. It contributes (1) by introducing a large original dataset of turnover rates in 204 elections between 1985 and 2023 based on manually coded lists of all Latin American legislators elected since 1985, (2) by describing the cross-national and temporal patterns of turnover in Latin America, and (3) by examining empirically the relationship between turnover rates and temporal institutional arrangements designed to regulate the time horizons of legislators. The data reveals that turnover rates in Latin America are extremely high on average (around 70%) compared to democracies in other regions, although with significant variation. Institutional determinants governing time horizons of politicians are associated with turnover, with term limits, the presence of staggered elections and term length being positively associated with elevated turnover rates.

Affective polarization (AP), a concept that summarizes intense partisans’ animosity towards opposing parties and positive feelings towards their own, has recently received increasing attention. Despite a growing interest in Latin American polarization, there are very few empirical studies on the range and depth of dislike and distrust towards political adversaries in the region, and how this impacts the quality of democracies. This research note uses survey data collected after ten election cycles in six countries to estimate the scope and depth of AP in the region. We measure the extent of polarization in Latin America compared to other Western nations, assess its evolution, and makes some inroads to explain who drives AP. On aggregate, Latin America does not show large AP scores, yet there are clear signs of an upward trend. More than a widespread social phenomenon, the evidence suggests that AP is driven by large intense minorities.