Search

Begin New Search Topic Politics Political Geography Latin America

31. How Presidents Legislate: Agenda Control and Policy Success in Costa Rica

Author:
Leslie A. Schwindt-Bayer
Publication Date:
07-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Abstract:
Presidents around the world have access to a wide range of legislative powers—veto power, decree power, and exclusive bill introduction powers, for example—that they can use to promote and defend their policy program. An important but often overlooked power is the ability to control the legislative agenda during extraordinary sessions where the president decides which bills the legislature will consider. Does agenda-control power make it easier for presidents to get their policies passed? In this paper, I examine whether the president's ability to set the legislative agenda increases the probability that his or her bills become law using the case of Costa Rica, where agenda control is one of the few legislative powers available to the president. I control for other factors that affect bill passage, including the partisan powers of the president, whether the president is a lame duck, the amount of time in the congressional session after sponsorship, the popularity of the president, and the type of bill. I examine this with data from three legislative sessions—1994–1998, 1998–2002, and 2002–2006—and find that agenda control, which increases the likelihood that they will successfully implement their policy agenda, is an important power for presidents.
Topic:
Politics and Governance
Political Geography:
Latin America and Costa Rica

32. Cautious Optimism for Peace in Colombia

Author:
Virginia M. Bouvier
Publication Date:
09-2010
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
United States Institute of Peace
Abstract:
The new Colombian administration that took office in early August faces a unique set of peacemaking challenges and opportunities related to the country's internal armed conflict. Following a spate of tensions with neighboring countries regarding the presence of illegal armed groups along Colombia's border areas, newly-inaugurated President Juan Manuel Santos moved quickly to create new mechanisms with his neighbors to ensure that contentious regional issues are addressed before they reach the boiling point. In a surprising video released just before the president-elect was inaugurated, the top leader of the Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces-People's Army (FARC-EP), called on Santos to enter a dialogue without preconditions, thereby opening a new window of opportunities to pursue peace. President Santos responded that “the door to dialogue is not locked,” insisting however that the guerrillas must lay down their weapons and meet a series of other pre-conditions before talks could occur. Former mediators differ over whether such preconditions will pose an obstacle to talks. In the final days of August, Brazil and Ecuador rejected a FARC-EP request for meeting with the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) to discuss a political solution to Colombia's conflict. UNASUR leaders said they would not engage in mediating the conflict in the absence of an express invitation from the Colombian government. The Colombian government has rejected UNASUR mediation and underscored its preference to negotiate directly with the FARC-EP once the latter meets the government's preconditions. Concrete good faith efforts—both public and private—will be required from the government and the guerrillas to build confidence, address the legacy of distrust created by decades of violence and set the stage for future talks.
Topic:
Democratization, Government, Peace Studies, and Politics
Political Geography:
Brazil, Colombia, and Latin America

33. The Media Activism of Latin America's Leftist Governments: Does Ideology Matter

Author:
Philip Kitzberger
Publication Date:
11-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
German Institute of Global and Area Studies
Abstract:
Has Latin America's left turn mattered in media politics? Does ideology impact governments' practices and policies regarding media and journalistic institutions? Through an empirical assessment of discourses on the media, of direct-communication practices, and of media regulation policies on the part of the recent leftist governments of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Uruguay, and Venezuela, this paper stresses the existence of a specific media activism on the part of leftist governments in Latin America. While showing that the current binary distinctions that stress the existence of two lefts—“populist” and “nonpopulist”—obscure important commonalities and continuities, the author also demonstrates that it is the existence of certain institutional and structural constraints that best accounts 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.
Topic:
Politics and Mass Media
Political Geography:
Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Latin America, Venezuela, Chile, and Ecuador

34. Neopatrimonialism in Latin America: Prospects and Promises of a Neglected Concept

Author:
Karsten Bechle
Publication Date:
11-2010
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
German Institute of Global and Area Studies
Abstract:
Neopatrimonialism relates to the co-existence of two different logics of political domination: legal-rational rule, which is associated with modern statehood, and patrimonial rule, which corresponds to the traditional type of domination. In recent years, the concept has been applied to characterize political authority in a number of states in different world regions. But despite the fact that elements of neopatrimonial rule can also be found in many Latin American countries, the concept has not taken hold in the scholarship carried out on that region. This paper first explains how neopatrimonialism relates to the dominant approaches in the scholarly debates on Latin American politics, and then it discusses the potential benefits of the concept of neopatrimonialism. It argues that neopatrimonialism provides a more complex characterization of political rule on both the political and the administrative levels than more frequently applied concepts such as neopopulism.
Topic:
Government, Politics, and Governance
Political Geography:
Latin America

35. Editorial

Author:
Jorge Gordin
Publication Date:
01-2009
Content Type:
Journal Article
Institution:
German Institute of Global and Area Studies
Abstract:
Welcome to JPLA Journal of Politics in Latin America. The launching of this journal reflects some changes in the field of comparative politics on Latin America. With the waning of military dictatorships in the region, there has been a proliferation of academic work on formal institutions, which now amounts to the dominant paradigm in the discipline. This scholarship on institutions has rebounded in the last two decades because of an increased interest on the part of political scientists and policy analysts in the quality of democracy and the performance of Latin American polities. Numerous comparative country studies as well as cross-national quantitative studies have focused on formal rules such as those governing the working of presidential and parliamentary regimes, elections, and the organization of political parties. Notwithstanding such studies, there is a conspicuous gap between these research foci and the increasing worldwide interest in informal institutions addressing issues such as public security and crime, corruption, globalization, and energy management, among others.
Topic:
Politics
Political Geography:
Latin America

36. The Culture of Fear and Control in Costa Rica (II): The Talk of Crime and Social Changes

Author:
Sebastian Huhn
Publication Date:
09-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
German Institute of Global and Area Studies
Abstract:
The Costa Rican talk of crime is fundamentally based on the assumption that a formerly explicitly nonviolent nation has been transformed into a battleground for social violence—that is, on the belief that an alarming “crime wave” is occurring today while there was no crime at all in the past. On the basis of this assumption, the fear of crime and the call for zero tolerance and drastic law enforcement actions have been increasing. In this paper I discuss the Costa Rican talk of crime from a historical perspective to demonstrate that crime has always been a topic that has generated pervasive feelings of insecurity and social pessimism. I argue that social changes in Costa Rican society and the paradigmatic shift in economic and social‐welfare politics since the 1980s have been essential in the transformation of the talk of crime. As part of this transformation, the politicization of crime since the 1990s has been one of the most powerful changes in the dominant discourse.
Topic:
Crime, Economics, Politics, and Sociology
Political Geography:
Latin America

37. El papel del liderazgo partidista en el sistema de partidos en México

Author:
Juan Pablo Navarrete Vela
Publication Date:
03-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
CONfines de Relaciones Internacionales y Ciencia Política
Abstract:
El presente trabajo aborda el tipo de liderazgo de los tres partidos fuertes en el sistema de partidos en México: Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) y el Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD). El periodo de estudio se ubica después de las elecciones presidenciales del año 2006, en el cual el PAN logró mantenerse en el Poder Ejecutivo.
Topic:
Democratization, Politics, and Governance
Political Geography:
Latin America and Mexico

38. Regularidades de la Política Exterior de Néstor Kirchner

Author:
Alejandro Simonoff
Publication Date:
08-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
CONfines de Relaciones Internacionales y Ciencia Política
Abstract:
La política exterior del gobierno de Néstor Kirchner ha sido presentada por muchos analistas como un fenómeno fragmentado y contradictorio. Por ello, para analizarla creemos que hacerlo en clave autonómica es un buen ejercicio; seguir no sólo los términos teóricos de Juan Carlos Puig, sino también los ajustes e innovaciones de algunos de sus discípulos; Guillermo Figari, por ejemplo.
Topic:
Foreign Policy and Politics
Political Geography:
Latin America

39. Elections and the Origins of an Argentine Democratic Tradition, 1810–1880

Author:
Eduardo Zimmermann
Publication Date:
12-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Abstract:
The present paper addresses several issues raised by the evolution of the electoral institutions and practices developed in nineteenth-century Argentina, and the role they played in the country's further political development. On the basis of the pioneering works of a new political history, two features of that historical process are considered in particular: first, an early consolidation of democratic principles born out of a widely shared perception of egalitarian social conditions prevalent in the River Plate provinces; second, the development of political and electoral practices that over time were to militate against the establishment of “classical” institutions of political representation. Many of the features of nineteenth-century Argentine electoral life, which would shape a particular democratic culture in the twentieth century, are thus seen as the result of a particular historical combination of early egalitarian politics with weak institutions rather than as a reflection of a strategy of exclusion and control by ruling elites or some vague “antidemocratic” cultural legacy.
Topic:
Democratization, Development, Politics, and Social Stratification
Political Geography:
Argentina and Latin America

40. Argentina's Double Political Spectrum: Party System, Political Identities, and Strategies, 1944–2007

Author:
Pierre Ostiguy
Publication Date:
10-2009
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Kellogg Institute for International Studies
Abstract:
The paper demonstrates that the Argentine political arena or “party system” is, has been, and continues to be structured as a two-dimensional space, and more precisely, at least from 1945 to 2002, as a double political spectrum. This structure for party or leaders' competition has resisted and outlasted many regime changes, economic calamities, and institutionally short-lived political actors. In fact, positions in the two-dimensional Argentine political space are far more stable than the partisan institutions themselves; a position abandoned within it leads to the creation of a new partisan actor to fill it. The dimension orthogonal to the left-right axis, itself very present in Argentina, is clearly rooted in the social, political, political-cultural, and sociocultural cleavage between Peronism and the forces opposed to it, or “anti-Peronism.” Both Peronism and anti-Peronism, moreover, fully range from left to right, thus creating a double political spectrum in Argentina. This main cleavage, in addition, has been notoriously difficult to characterize ideologically and politically, also complicating the comparative analysis of party systems. A key goal of this paper is to show that it is best understood—in a more general way—as being a conflict and contrast between the “high” and the “low” (Ostiguy 2009) in politics.
Topic:
Democratization, Politics, and Governance
Political Geography:
Argentina and Latin America