Surveys and the Study of Latin American Politics

To understand Latin American politics, one must view it through the eyes and minds of Latin Americans. Since the middle of the 20th century, pollsters in academia, government, and industry have fielded public opinion surveys in an attempt to do just that. Although they are not typically considered political institutions, polls and surveys influence a variety of political processes directly and indirectly thanks to the legitimacy they enjoy among academics, policymakers, and publics. Large strides have been made toward making surveys more methodologically rigorous and toward improving the quality of survey data in the region. Scholars have leveraged the data to advance the theoretical understanding of a range of topics, especially political support, partisanship, and voting behavior. Despite these gains, public opinion surveys face clear challenges that threaten their hard-won legitimacy. To the extent that these challenges are met in the coming decades, public opinion polling’s role in shaping Latin American politics will remain, if not strengthen.

The Oxford Encyclopedia of Latin American Politics

94 entries This encyclopedia reviews and interprets a broad array of research on Latin American politics, including topics related to political institutions, processes, and parties; social movements; political economy; racial and gender politics; and Latin America’s international relations. Under the editorial directorship of Harry E. Vanden and Gary Prevost and associate editors Jennifer Cyr, Kwame Dixon, Mary K. Meyer McAleese, Gabriel Ondetti, and Richard Stahler-Sholk, this publication brings together peer-reviewed contributions by leading researchers and offers the definitive resource for understanding contemporary politics in the region. As a result, the Oxford Encyclopedia of Latin American Politics is a necessary resource for students and as well as both new and established scholars.

Executive–Legislative Relations in Latin American Politics

Presidentialism has long been associated with democratic instability. Conflict between the executive and the legislature is at the heart of this relationship. Traditional arguments link minority presidents with policy deadlock and inter-branch conflict, especially in contexts where presidential institutions deincentivize the formation of governing coalitions that can provide presidents with stable legislative majorities. The extent to which these premises are true, however, varies significantly across the presidential countries of Latin America, as does the potential for conflict and cooperation between the executive and the legislature. The prevalence of minority presidents hinges on the fragmentation of congress as well as other characteristics of the party and electoral systems; the relative powers of the president and congress vary widely, and in many places they have been adjusted precisely to reduce inter-branch conflict. Finally, even where minority governments are the norm, the formation of governing coalitions has helped presidents obtain majority support in congress.

The dictator – A specific figure of modern Latin American novels

heroic pages of her own. Latin America is an area encompassing countries historically ruled by the Spanish and the Portuguese under their colonization time throughout the centuries.After hard struggles to gain independence, the region continued to face many new challenges and difficulties in which violence and military dictatorship were the most common situation dominating Latin American politics in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since then, the topic of dictatorship has been written in novels in that region. Márquez has stated in an interview that, the fact that brutality ran from one end of the continent to the other made the history shaped by brutality. Writing about this topic, modern Latin American writers have "entered" the deepest into the reality of their continent, wherever they are, no matter what narrative method they use. This helps modern Latin American literature express its own literary themes, not being mixed with other literatures. In Vietnam, over the past 50 years, a lot of Latin American novels have been translated and well received by Vietnamese academic and popular readers. Such authors as A. Asturias, L. Borges, Carpentier of the Latin American Vanguardia, Márquez, Llosa of the Latin American Boom have become familiar names to Vietnamese readers. Understanding the image of the dictator – an important image of the tradition and identity of Latin American literature will give a better understanding about this literature.

Social Communication and Voting Behavior

This chapter provides an overview of the nature of voting behavior and election outcomes in Latin America. Armed only with vertical understandings of political intermediation, research on Latin American voters “conceives the citizen as an independently self-contained decision-maker,” ignoring voters' embeddedness in peer networks. For this reason, even when referring to groups and so-called social factors, research on Latin American voting behavior is dominated by economistic and psychological approaches that see voters as social isolates. The chapter explains that the book illuminates the influence of horizontal social networks and political discussion on a central political act, voting behavior, in Latin America. Beneath all the elite-level strategizing, messaging, and maneuvering that plays out through vertical intermediaries lies a world of social communication and peer effects that scholars of Latin American politics have roundly ignored.