The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America

The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America PDF Author: Daniel M. Brinks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108803172
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

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Book Description
Analysts and policymakers often decry the failure of institutions to accomplish their stated purpose. Bringing together leading scholars of Latin American politics, this volume helps us understand why. The volume offers a conceptual and theoretical framework for studying weak institutions. It introduces different dimensions of institutional weakness and explores the origins and consequences of that weakness. Drawing on recent research on constitutional and electoral reform, executive-legislative relations, property rights, environmental and labor regulation, indigenous rights, squatters and street vendors, and anti-domestic violence laws in Latin America, the volume's chapters show us that politicians often design institutions that they cannot or do not want to enforce or comply with. Challenging existing theories of institutional design, the volume helps us understand the logic that drives the creation of weak institutions, as well as the conditions under which they may be transformed into institutions that matter.

The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America

The Politics of Institutional Weakness in Latin America PDF Author: Daniel M. Brinks
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108803172
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 359

Get Book Here

Book Description
Analysts and policymakers often decry the failure of institutions to accomplish their stated purpose. Bringing together leading scholars of Latin American politics, this volume helps us understand why. The volume offers a conceptual and theoretical framework for studying weak institutions. It introduces different dimensions of institutional weakness and explores the origins and consequences of that weakness. Drawing on recent research on constitutional and electoral reform, executive-legislative relations, property rights, environmental and labor regulation, indigenous rights, squatters and street vendors, and anti-domestic violence laws in Latin America, the volume's chapters show us that politicians often design institutions that they cannot or do not want to enforce or comply with. Challenging existing theories of institutional design, the volume helps us understand the logic that drives the creation of weak institutions, as well as the conditions under which they may be transformed into institutions that matter.

Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1900

Democracy in Latin America, 1760-1900 PDF Author: Carlos A. Forment
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226257150
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
Carlos Forment's aim in this highly ambitious work is to write the book that Tocqueville would have written had he traveled to Latin America instead of the United States. Drawing on an astonishing level of research, Forment pored over countless newspapers, partisan pamphlets, tabloids, journals, private letters, and travelogues to show in this study how citizens of Latin America established strong democratic traditions in their countries through the practice of democracy in their everyday lives. This first volume of Democracy in Latin America considers the development of democratic life in Mexico and Peru from independence to the late 1890s. Forment traces the emergence of hundreds of political, economic, and civic associations run by citizens in both nations and shows how these organizations became models of and for democracy in the face of dictatorship and immense economic hardship. His is the first book to show the presence in Latin America of civic democracy, something that gave men and women in that region an alternative to market- and state-centered forms of life. In looking beneath institutions of government to uncover local and civil organizations in public life, Forment ultimately uncovers a tradition of edification and inculcation that shaped democratic practices in Latin America profoundly. This tradition, he reveals, was stronger in Mexico than in Peru, but its basic outlines were similar in both nations and included a unique form of what Forment calls Civic Catholicism in order to distinguish itself from civic republicanism, the dominant political model throughout the rest of the Western world.

Party Systems in Latin America

Party Systems in Latin America PDF Author: Scott Mainwaring
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107175526
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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Book Description
This book generates a wealth of new empirical information about Latin American party systems and contributes richly to major theoretical debates about party systems and democracy.

Government at a Glance: Latin America and the Caribbean 2020

Government at a Glance: Latin America and the Caribbean 2020 PDF Author: OECD
Publisher: OECD Publishing
ISBN: 9264455469
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
This third edition of Government at a Glance Latin America and the Caribbean provides the latest available evidence on public administrations and their performance in the LAC region and compares it to OECD countries. This publication includes indicators on public finances and economics, public employment, centres of government, regulatory governance, open government data, public sector integrity, public procurement and for the first time core government results (e.g. trust, inequality reduction).

The Resilience of the Latin American Right

The Resilience of the Latin American Right PDF Author: Juan Pablo Luna
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421413906
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 392

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Book Description
Students and scholars of both Latin American politics and comparative politics will find The Resilience of the Latin American Right of vital interest.

State Building in Latin America

State Building in Latin America PDF Author: Hillel David Soifer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316301036
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
State Building in Latin America diverges from existing scholarship in developing explanations both for why state-building efforts in the region emerged and for their success or failure. First, Latin American state leaders chose to attempt concerted state-building only where they saw it as the means to political order and economic development. Fragmented regionalism led to the adoption of more laissez-faire ideas and the rejection of state-building. With dominant urban centers, developmentalist ideas and state-building efforts took hold, but not all state-building projects succeeded. The second plank of the book's argument centers on strategies of bureaucratic appointment to explain this variation. Filling administrative ranks with local elites caused even concerted state-building efforts to flounder, while appointing outsiders to serve as administrators underpinned success. Relying on extensive archival evidence, the book traces how these factors shaped the differential development of education, taxation, and conscription in Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.

Music, Politics, and Nationalism In Latin America: Chile During the Cold War Era

Music, Politics, and Nationalism In Latin America: Chile During the Cold War Era PDF Author: Jedrek Mularski
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1621967379
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
To date, scholars have paid little attention to the role that music played at political rallies and protests, the political activism of right-wing and left-wing musicians, and the emergence of musical performances as sites of verbal and physical confrontations between Allende supporters and the opposition. This book illuminates a largely unexplored facet of the Cold War era in Latin America by examining linkages among music, politics, and the development of extreme political violence. It traces the development of folk-based popular music against the backdrop of Chile's social and political history, explaining how music played a fundamental role in a national conflict that grew out of deep cultural divisions. Through a combination of textual and musical analysis, archival research, and oral histories, Jedrek Mularski demonstrates that Chilean rightists came to embrace a national identity rooted in Chile's central valley and its huaso ("cowboy") traditions, which groups of well-groomed, singing huasos expressed and propagated through música típica. In contrast, leftists came to embrace an identity that drew on musical traditions from Chile's outlying regions and other Latin American countries, which they expressed and propagated through nueva canción. Conflicts over these notions of Chilenidad ("Chileanness") both reflected and contributed to the political polarization of Chilean society, sparking violent confrontations at musical performances and political events during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mularski offers a powerful example and multifaceted understanding of the fundamental role that music often plays in shaping the contours of political struggles and conflicts throughout the world.This is an important book for Latin American studies, history, musicology/ethnomusicology, and communication.

Latin American Party Systems

Latin American Party Systems PDF Author: Herbert Kitschelt
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139483846
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 416

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Book Description
Political parties provide a crucial link between voters and politicians. This link takes a variety of forms in democratic regimes, from the organization of political machines built around clientelistic networks to the establishment of sophisticated programmatic parties. Latin American Party Systems provides a novel theoretical argument to account for differences in the degree to which political party systems in the region were programmatically structured at the end of the twentieth century. Based on a diverse array of indicators and surveys of party legislators and public opinion, the book argues that learning and adaptation through fundamental policy innovations are the main mechanisms by which politicians build programmatic parties. Marshalling extensive evidence, the book's analysis shows the limits of alternative explanations and substantiates a sanguine view of programmatic competition, nevertheless recognizing that this form of party system organization is far from ubiquitous and enduring in Latin America.

The Resurgence of the Latin American Left

The Resurgence of the Latin American Left PDF Author: Steven Levitsky
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421401614
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 498

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Book Description
Latin America experienced an unprecedented wave of left-leaning governments between 1998 and 2010. This volume examines the causes of this leftward turn and the consequences it carries for the region in the twenty-first century. The Resurgence of the Latin American Left asks three central questions: Why have left-wing parties and candidates flourished in Latin America? How have these leftist parties governed, particularly in terms of social and economic policy? What effects has the rise of the Left had on democracy and development in the region? The book addresses these questions through two sections. The first looks at several major themes regarding the contemporary Latin American Left, including whether Latin American public opinion actually shifted leftward in the 2000s, why the Left won in some countries but not in others, and how the left turn has affected market economies, social welfare, popular participation in politics, and citizenship rights. The second section examines social and economic policy and regime trajectories in eight cases: those of leftist governments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela, as well as that of a historically populist party that governed on the right in Peru. Featuring a new typology of Left parties in Latin America, an original framework for identifying and categorizing variation among these governments, and contributions from prominent and influential scholars of Latin American politics, this historical-institutional approach to understanding the region’s left turn—and variation within it—is the most comprehensive explanation to date on the topic.

The Political Economy of Taxation in Latin America

The Political Economy of Taxation in Latin America PDF Author: Gustavo Flores-Macias
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108474578
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Offers a comprehensive, region-wide analysis of the politics of taxation in Latin America to make reforms politically palatable and sustainable.