Latin American Politics and Society最新文献

The ideational definition of populism proposes that a narrative is populist if it is characterized by a Manichean cosmology that divides the political community between a “people,” conceived as a homogeneously virtuous entity, and an “elite,” conceived as a homogeneously corrupt entity. Departing from that conceptualization, this work first investigates the specific stories that Andrés Manuel López Obrador uses to spread his populist worldview, which we call “storytelling.” We define the idea of storytelling as the art of telling a story where emotions, characters and other details are applied in order to promote a particular point of view or set of values. Second, we explore whether some of those stories produce greater negative affective polarization, here defined as the extent to which rival sociopolitical camps view each other as a disliked out-group. Findings suggest that some specific stories—in particular, what we call “stories of conspiracy” and “stories of ostracism”—indeed tend to induce more polarized attitudes among citizens.

During the past few decades, Latin American governments’ recurrent attacks against journalists have contributed to the erosion of press freedom in the region and, relatedly, of the quality of democracy. Yet what pushes governments to harass journalists? We argue that governments are more likely to harass journalists when popular support for them drops. Due to the ability of journalists to influence public opinion, governments could perceive the harassment of journalists as a means to punish and silence those individuals who are seen as contributing to their decline in public support or as obstacles to regaining popularity. We test our argument on a sample of Latin American countries observed from 1990 to 2019. We find that declines in governments’ popular support lead to more harassment of journalists. Our research contributes to the debate on the determinants of press freedom and sheds further light on the current decline of democratic quality in Latin America.

Brazil, for many scholars and pundits, showcased the risk of democratic breakdown with the election of a far-right populist like Jair Bolsonaro. Against pessimistic expectations, however, not only has Brazilian democracy survived but politics has returned to business as usual. What can explain this supposedly unanticipated outcome? This article provides an analytical assessment of this this puzzle and offers an alternative explanation. We argue that both the diagnoses of Brazilian institutions and the predictions made were misguided. We explore the role played by the Supreme Court, party system, media, and congressional politics in restricting Bolsonaro’s illiberal initiatives.

Despite the salience of corruption in elections in Latin America and beyond, it remains unclear what makes certain candidates attractive to voters as solutions to address corruption. Building on studies about the effect of candidates’ professional affiliation on voting behavior, we hypothesize that police and military officers are perceived to be more competent to address corruption. We test our theoretical expectations through an online survey of Brazilian voters with an image-based factorial experiment that presents respondents with three randomly generated handbills, varying candidates’ professional affiliations and potential confounders, such as economic policy, insider versus outsider status, and demographic features. Our results demonstrate that candidates affiliated with the police or the military are perceived to be more effective at reducing corruption, all else equal. The effect of police or military professions on candidates’ perceived effectiveness to fight corruption varies according to respondents’ ideology and is particularly significant among conservative voters.

While invalid voting is often treated as protest behavior in an electoral context, its association with actual political protests has not yet been empirically demonstrated. The relative scarcity of research on the topic is likely due to the hybrid nature of invalid voting as a both formal and informal political gesture. The novel availability of event-based data for public protests in Latin America allows for testing whether their occurrence is connected with changes in spoiled and blank ballots. Using an appropriate dynamic regression model covering variations in the 148 intervals between Latin American legislative elections in the 1979–2021 period, this study finds a strong connection between the emergence of antigovernment protests and surges in invalid voting (and vice versa). This relationship still holds at parity of economic conditions and it is reinforced by a lack of alternation in the party of power. Conversely, the appearance of workers’ strikes appears to work as a substitute for this behavior, which is also chosen by voters when democracy deteriorates, while corruption has no independent impact on invalid voting. Overall this work’s findings promise to send the research agenda on invalid voting in a new direction, previously unexplored because of an absence of fitting data.

This article examines bureaucracies using a novel dataset of Chilean central government employees from 2006 to 2020. Unlike perception-based sources, this dataset provides objective, disaggregated, and longitudinal insights into bureaucrats’ characteristics and careers. The authors validate it against official employment statistics and conduct an exploratory and descriptive analysis, presenting six descriptive findings about the Chilean bureaucracy that cannot be discovered using available aggregate data. The analysis reveals significant degrees of personnel stability and professionalization in the civil service, but with considerable rigidity in careers and substantial interagency heterogeneity in turnover, wages, and exposure to political cycles. These findings suggest that the Chilean national bureaucracy is mostly well developed along Weberian lines, though not uniformly so. These measurements also serve as a benchmark for comparing other Latin American bureaucracies in the future.