CIAO DATE: 02/2013
Volume: 4, Issue: 3
January 2013
Destroying the Opposition's Livelihood: Pathways to Violence in Bolivia since 2000 (PDF)
William T. Barndt
During the first decade of the 2000s, Bolivia occasionally turned violent. Yet the causes of these episodes of sustained violence have not yet been identified. To this end, this article tests which mechanisms theorized by existing scholarship produced two prolonged episodes of violence. It concludes that both episodes emerged from the same causal pathway: the national government provoked violence by seeking to raze the economic foundations of well-organized sectors – sectors that represented the mass bases of ascendant political oppositions. This finding not only sheds light on political order in Bolivia, but also opens up new directions in research on violent confrontation in Latin America.
Too Undisciplined to Legislate? Party Unity and Policy-making in Brazil (PDF)
Sylvia Gaylord
Discipline and cohesiveness of political parties are essential for legislatures to engage in policy-making. Parties in Brazil have historically been considered ideologically weak and uninvolved in policy issues of national importance. Analyses of roll-call votes, however, have shown that parties can be disciplined government supporters. This paper tests the claim that Brazilian parties have also become programmatic actors in their own right. The paper uses statutory delegation content to test whether voting discipline translates into greater influence on the substance of legislation. The data analysis shows that party unity among parties of the government coalition does not affect statutory content. Opposition parties, by contrast, are more likely to reduce the executive’s discretion when they are more unified. Overall, the support for the hypothesis of programmatic parties is weak, given that executive authorship is the strongest determinant of statutory content.
Corruption in Latin America: Understanding the Perception–Exposure Gap (PDF)
Simone R. Bohn
What beliefs do citizens who perceive levels of corruption in their countries to be of significance hold? Do those beliefs arise from their exposure to corruption? Furthermore, do perceptual and experiential corruption decrease the reservoir of legitimacy of a democratic regime? We attempt to answer these questions using the 2012 Americas Barometer survey of 24 Latin American countries. We find that whereas “rational-choice corrup-tors,” males and, to a lesser extent, individuals with resources are particularly exposed to corruption, perceived corruption originates from a sense of impunity derived from a negative evaluation of the state’s ability to curb corruption. In addition, we show that perceived corruption significantly decreases citizen satisfaction with democracy, but exposure to corruption does not. All in all, the policy implications of our study are straightforward: having an efficient and trusted judiciary is central to curbing both experiential and perceived corruption, even if it increases the latter in the short run.
Michelle Bachelet's Government: The Paradoxes of a Chilean President (PDF)
Gregory Weeks, Silvia Borzutzky
The purpose of this article is to explain the contradictions in Michelle Bachelet’s presidency by focusing on the paradoxical nature of presidential power, the limits on the executive in the Chilean constitution, and how those limits affected President Bachelet’s government. At the outset of her presidency, she faced the problem of wanting to promote inclusive policies while simultaneously experiencing political pressure to maintain elite consensus. Due to institutional and political constraints, Bachelet’s rhetoric of inclusion could not be realized, and she eventually decided to opt for the more traditional elite consensus approach. In our view, the emphasis on achieving elite consensus produced contradictory results. It sustained Bachelet’s personal image as a national leader, but limited her ability to get effective legislation passed. Indeed, the Concertación itself was blamed for inaction rather than the president as an individual.
The Media Politics of Latin America's Leftist Governments (PDF)
Philip Kitzberger
Does Latin America’s left turn matter in media politics? Has ideology any impact on governments’ practices and policies regarding media and journalistic institutions? This essay focuses on the existence of a specific kind of media activism on the part of leftist governments in Latin America. It does so by assessing discourses on the media, direct-communication practices, and media regulation policies. While showing that the current binary distinctions stressing the existence of two lefts – “populist” and “nonpopulist” – obscure important commonalities and continuities, the author demonstrates that institutional and structural constraints account for the differences among the various leftist governments in Latin America. In sum, the paper challenges the prevailing neglect of ideology as a relevant factor in explaining developments in government–media relationships in the region.