Measuring Judicial Performance in Latin America

2005 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 77-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph L. Staats ◽  
Shaun Bowler ◽  
Jonathan T. Hiskey
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Ultimate Outcome ◽  
National Measure ◽  
Cross National ◽  
Judicial Performance ◽  
Judicial Systems

AbstractAn increasing number of development scholars and policymakers are recognizing the importance of Latin American judicial reforms in shaping the ultimate outcome of the region's “dual transition.” We can hardly begin to assess the conditions in which judicial systems are likely to improve, however, unless we have a means to measure judicial performance systematically across countries. This article offers just such a comprehensive cross-national measure of judicial performance for Latin America. Drawing from a survey of Latin American legal scholars and practitioners from 17 countries in the region, it seeks to establish a more valid, and therefore more useful, assessment of the performance of Latin American judiciaries than existing measures, in order to advance efforts to understand the causes and consequences of effective judicial reforms in the region.

Economic Vulnerability and Partisanship in Latin America

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (03) ◽  
pp. 80-103
Author(s):  
Melina Altamirano
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Informal Economy ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Significant Proportion ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Economic Vulnerability ◽  
Social Security Benefits ◽  
Cross National

ABSTRACTA significant proportion of the population in Latin America depends on the informal economy and lacks adequate protection against a variety of economic risks. This article suggests that economic vulnerability affects the way individuals relate to political parties. Given the truncated structure of welfare states in the region, citizens in the informal sector receive lower levels of social security benefits and face higher economic uncertainty. This vulnerability makes it difficult for voters to establish strong programmatic linkages with political parties because partisan platforms and policies do not necessarily represent their interests and needs. Using cross-national microlevel data, this study shows that individuals living in informality are skeptical about state social policy efforts and exhibit weaker partisan attachments. The findings suggest that effective political representation of disadvantaged groups remains a challenge in Latin American democracies.

Women’s Political Inclusion in Latin America: The Challenges of Gauging Visibility

2020 ◽  
pp. 55-70
Author(s):  
Magda Hinojosa ◽  
Miki Caul Kittilson
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
National Survey ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Political Support ◽  
Descriptive Representation ◽  
Political Office ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Latin American Countries ◽  
Cross National

Chapter 3 focuses on a select set of Latin American countries (Honduras, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Panama) where women’s legislative representation doubled from one election to the next and rose above 20 percent. Detecting the effects of quotas and descriptive representation is complicated. Available survey evidence is inadequate to discern clear patterns on how sizable jumps in the numbers of women in political office influence political engagement and support. Cross-national survey timing makes it even more difficult to gauge the impact of these changes. Further, these gains may not have always been publicly visible, and a variety of salient campaign issues and events contend for the public’s attention and may overshadow the influence of women’s election to office. Assessing changes to political engagement and political support requires precise methods. In this way, this chapter sets up the analysis using our unique survey from Uruguay.

Political Parties, Party Systems, and Democracy in East Asia

2001 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
HANS STOCKTON
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
South Korea ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Necessary Conditions ◽  
Party Systems ◽  
Curvilinear Relationship ◽  
National Comparison ◽  
Cross National

Institutionalized parties and party systems have traditionally been viewed as necessary conditions for democracies to function effectively. Although this area of research is germane to all democracies, most analyses have been divided by regional investigation. Seeking to bridge the gap, this article applies concepts and measures of institutionalization from the study of Latin America to Pacific Asia's two most prominent cases of democratic transition, South Korea and Taiwan. An effort is made to apply the approaches of Dix and Mainwaring and Scully on party and system institutionalization in Latin America to South Korea and Taiwan. Cross-national comparison reveals a curvilinear relationship between institutionalization and consolidation. Taiwan's path to consolidation has been predicated on a pattern very similar to those taken by Latin American cases, whereas South Korea, theoretically, should not be as close to consolidation as it is.

“I Will Bless Those Who Bless You”: Evangelicalism and Support for Israel in Latin America

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Tom Ziv
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
General Assembly ◽  
Un General Assembly ◽  
Evangelical Movement ◽  
Latin American Countries ◽  
Cross National

Abstract The relations of the Evangelical movement and Israel have drawn the attention of many scholars of religion, public opinion, and political science in the last two decades. This study examines the influence of Evangelicals on their country's policy toward Israel. I conduct the first quantitative, cross-national research, investigating the links between the size of the Evangelical population of a country and its support for Israel. Analyzing 198 UN General Assembly votes of 18 Latin American countries from 2009 to 2019, my results show that as the Evangelical population in a country grows, so does its support for Israel. Unpredictably, I also find that a state of armed conflict between Israel and the Palestinians does not decrease the support for Israel.

Politics and Privatization: Exogenous pressures, domestic incentives and state divestiture in Latin America

2010 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 291-320 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID DOYLE
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Statistical Tests ◽  
International Diffusion ◽  
Initial Decision ◽  
American States ◽  
Stage Process ◽  
Political Conditions ◽  
Domestic Level ◽  
Cross National

AbstractDespite a pervasive trend towards state retrenchment in Latin America since the 1980s, there remains significant variation in the levels of privatization across the region. However, very few cross-national studies of the determinants of privatization have been conducted and we still do not truly know why states privatize. This paper examines the determinants of privatization for 14 Latin American states over the period 1975 to 2003. I contend that privatization is best conceptualized as a two-stage process involving an initial decision to privatize, followed by a subsequent decision concerning the extent and intensity of privatization. In addition, privatization cannot be simply explained by either international or domestic level-variables. Rather, endogenous and exogenous variables will have different impacts at different stages of this process. The results of the statistical tests yield two important insights. Firstly, the initial decision to privatize is primarily shaped by international factors, in particular, international diffusion, while variation in the level of state divestiture across the region can primarily be explained by domestic economic and political conditions.

Migration vs. development? The case of poverty and inequality in Mexico

2012 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-74 ◽  
Author(s):  
Agustín Escobar Latapi
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
International Migration ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Opportunity Cost ◽  
Inequality Index ◽  
Poverty And Inequality ◽  
And Migration

Although the migration – development nexus is widely recognized as a complex one, it is generally thought that there is a relationship between poverty and emigration, and that remittances lessen inequality. On the basis of Latin American and Mexican data, this chapter intends to show that for Mexico, the exchange of migrants for remittances is among the lowest in Latin America, that extreme poor Mexicans don't migrate although the moderately poor do, that remittances have a small, non-significant impact on the most widely used inequality index of all households and a very large one on the inequality index of remittance-receiving households, and finally that, to Mexican households, the opportunity cost of international migration is higher than remittance income. In summary, there is a relationship between poverty and migration (and vice versa), but this relationship is far from linear, and in some respects may be a perverse one for Mexico and for Mexican households.

Palestinian Diaspora Communities in Latin America and Palestinian Statehood

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-120
Author(s):  
Yousef M. Aljamal ◽  
Philipp O. Amour
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
South America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
The Political ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Latin Americans ◽  
Political Views ◽  
The Right

There are some 700,000 Latin Americans of Palestinian origin, living in fourteen countries of South America. In particular, Palestinian diaspora communities have a considerable presence in Chile, Honduras, and El Salvador. Many members of these communities belong to the professional middle classes, a situation which enables them to play a prominent role in the political and economic life of their countries. The article explores the evolving attitudes of Latin American Palestinians towards the issue of Palestinian statehood. It shows the growing involvement of these communities in Palestinian affairs and their contribution in recent years towards the wide recognition of Palestinian rights — including the right to self-determination and statehood — in Latin America. But the political views of members of these communities also differ considerably about the form and substance of a Palestinian statehood and on the issue of a two-states versus one-state solution.

Sorting Out the Mixed Economy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amy C. Offner
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
New Deal ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Associations ◽  
Welfare Programs ◽  
The Road ◽  
Social Welfare Programs ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The New Deal

In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. This book brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, the book also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.

Nesting Expectations: What Can the Mexican and Argentinean Cash Transfers Tell Us about the Development of Development?

1969 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-169
Author(s):  
Andrés Dapuez
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
Latin American ◽  
A Priori ◽  
Cash Transfers ◽  
Conditional Cash Transfers ◽  
Cash Transfer ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Transfer Programs

Latin American cash transfer programs have been implemented aiming at particular anticipatory scenarios. Given that the fulfillment of cash transfer objectives can be calculated neither empirically nor rationally a priori, I analyse these programs in this article using the concept of an “imaginary future.” I posit that cash transfer implementers in Latin America have entertained three main fictional expectations: social pacification in the short term, market inclusion in the long term, and the construction of a more distributive society in the very long term. I classify and date these developing expectations into three waves of conditional cash transfers implementation.

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