CIAO DATE: 12/2012
Volume: 4, Issue: 2
November 2012
The New Federalism of Mexico's Party System (PDF)
Francisco Cantú, Scott Desposato
Federalism is widely lauded for its ability to manage deep social divisions and promote efficient policy in democratic systems, but it has been criticized for its impact on party system nationalization. In this paper, we explore the role of formal and informal institutions on party system nationalization in the Mexican political system, focusing on legislative politics. In Mexico, an end of one-party rule transformed the nature of center–periphery relations, empowering subnational actors and giving them incentives to act on the national stage. Using an original dataset, we show that these changes resulted in national parties dividing along state lines on policy decisions, and that the magnitude of these divisions depends primarily on 1) the informal centralization of career resources, 2) the extent to which parties are ideological and programmatic, and 3) the personal vote incentives of electoral rules.
I Want It All, and I Want It Now: The Political Manipulation of Argentina's Provincial High Courts (PDF)
Andrea Castagnola
Provincial supreme courts are important players in local politics because justices can affect the interest of the ruling governors; however, no research has addressed the factors that affect judicial turnover in provincial high courts in new democracies. This research attempts to fill this gap by using original data on the 525 departures of all provincial high court justices in Argentina from 1983 to 2009. My guiding hypothesis is that the stability of a justice on the bench depends on the political proximity of the justice to the ruling governor rather than on the executive’s institutional capacity to impeach. This study reveals that being aligned with the faction of the ruling governor is a major factor in accounting for judicial turnover not only in single-party provinces, as expected, but also in multi-party provinces. Because provincial politics have proven to be a major source of power for national politicians, governors would prefer to have a friendly court during their administration.
Katsuo A. Nishikawa
I argue that innovative development programs that require citizen participation in the production of public goods can have unexpected bene-fits for individuals’ dispositions toward democracy. In particular, I explore the effect of taking part in state-sponsored neighborhood development programs – direct-democracy type programs that require individuals to organize within their community as a precondition for state help – on participant dispositions toward democracy and willingness to take part in politics. To test this hypothesis, I use original survey data collected in the Mexican state of Baja California. To measure the effect of participation in neighborhood development programs, I conduct a quasi experiment via propensity score matching. I find robust evidence suggesting that participating in such programs correlates with higher levels of political participation, a better sense of community, more positive retrospective evaluations of the economy (according to both pocketbook and sociotropic measures), and overall higher support for the government.
Bullets and Votes: Violence and Electoral Participation in Mexico (PDF)
Miguel Carreras, Alejandro Trelles
In this paper we analyze the effect of criminal violence on electoral participation in Mexico. Many scholars have studied the origins of criminal violence, as well as the success or failure of contemporary regimes in dealing with it. However, few have studied how it affects voter turnout. Following recent findings in the behavioral subfield, we hypothesize that as criminal violence increases, citizens abandon public channels of participation and take refuge in their private spheres. Using longitudinal and geostatistical tools to analyze Mexican municipalities in the last decade, we find that the level of electoral turnout is lower in the most violent regions of the country. In the final section, we use survey data to confirm that citizens exposed to high levels of criminal violence are less likely to vote.
Kevin Funk
The books under review all deal with the same fundamental phenomenon: mobilization against neoliberal policies by South American indigenous groups. These works fall into two groups: those that focus on the Mapuche struggle in Chile, and those that consider anti-neoliberal indigenous mobilization in the region more broadly. Just as literature in the former group fails to draw any linkages between the Mapuche and other South American indigenous struggles, the latter body of literature does not engage with Chile as a case worthy of consideration. This essay delineates the arguments made by scholars from both groups and argues that they must be brought into dialogue with one another in order to develop both a more holistic conceptualization of the Mapuche struggle in Chile and a more complete understanding of indigenous mobilization in the region. Further empirical work is needed on how Mapuche mobilization relates to other indigenous, anti-neoliberal mobilizations in South America.