scholarly journals Manuel Alcántara, Mercedes García Montero, and Cristina Rivas Pérez (editors). Politics and Political Elites in Latin America: Challenges and Trends. Cham: Springer, 2020. 353 pages. ISBN 978-3-030-51583-6.

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 181-184
Author(s):  
Emily Carty
1980 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 173-203 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin A. Most

The discussion focuses on the effects that changing forms of authoritarian rule and the growth of a bureaucratic state had on A gentine public policies during the 1930-1970 interval. Hitherto quite separate literatures are brought together in the examination of two different arguments. The first, drawn from the emerging literature on authoritarianism and corporatism in Latin America, suggests that the trends in Argentine public policies should have been interrupted whenever different types of authoritarian coalitions sequentially replaced each other in power. The second thesis, drawn primarily from research on Latin American bureaucracies and North American policy analyses, suggests that there is a need to disaggregate the coalition/policy linkage. It hypothesizes that four factors which developed at about the midpoint of the 1930-1970 period in Argentina—the growth of a large and well-entrenched public sector, limitations on the ability of political elites to press their policy demands, limitations on previously uncommitted resources, and the existence of a crisis of hegemony—should have increasingly constrained the policy-making importance of the coalitions and the leaders who represented them in the highest levels of government. Coalitions and elites should have been increasingly unable to direct and indirect policies in the ways which they preferred. Interrupted time-series analyses of seven policy series provided support for the constraints thesis. Coalitions and those who governed at the top were once important in Argentina as the authoritarian literature suggests. Coalition changes did not occur in a vacuum, however. Once the four state-related constraints developed, such shifts came to have only marginal impacts on the examined policy indicators.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1866802X2097503
Author(s):  
Nordin Lazreg ◽  
Alejandro Angel ◽  
Denis Saint-Martin

Conventional wisdom indicates that politicians in Latin America are all wealthy. However, the literature on both political elites and social origins of political parties indicates that we should expect differences in the capital accumulation of politicians depending on their ideological position. This study seeks to explore that question using financial disclosure forms made available in six Latin American countries: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Peru, and the Dominican Republic. We calculate the median wealth of the main political parties in each country and compared them according to their ideological position on the left–right continuum. We consistently find that the most right-leaning party in each country had a higher median wealth than the most left-leaning one. This relation is non-linear since centrist parties often represent anomalies in the distribution of wealth. When there are no ideological differences, we do not observe significant wealth differences either.


1996 ◽  
Vol 26 (105) ◽  
pp. 595-609
Author(s):  
Eric Hershberg

The author argues that the Spanish transition from authoritarianism to liberal democracy as well as the so called social democratic approach to modemization have been stylized into ideal types in the Weberian sense of the term. The Spanish model has gamered widespread attention. lts influence transcends the academic sphere, as Spain has provided political elites across the world with a model of regime change, especially in Latin America and Eastem Europe, where observers are intrigued both by the facility with which transition took place and by Spain's reencounter with the prosperous zones of Western Europe. These idealizations are confronted with the real costs of Spains transition and the democratic deficits of the Spanish Socialists management of crisis.


Author(s):  
Vincent Mauro

A redistributive wave across Latin America provided credence to existing explanations that emphasize the importance of democracy and the political left for democratic redistribution. Yet, neither of these theories tells the entire story behind the contemporary politics of inequality in Latin America. This article stresses the importance of party systems for democratic redistribution, especially their role in increasing the scope of social policy as well as igniting competitive electoral environments that incentivize political elites to redistribute, leading to the amelioration of inequality over time. Utilizing a time-series cross-sectional dataset on fifteen Latin American countries covering the period of 1990–2015, and extending the analysis to sixty-five global democracies, this article finds that countries with institutionalized party systems exhibit greater income redistribution and lower levels of inequality than those with inchoate counterparts.


2012 ◽  
Vol 209 ◽  
pp. 134-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia C. Strauss

AbstractChina's increasing, and increasingly visible, engagement in Latin America has led to a variety of analyses, many based on either international relations notions of realism or international political economy precepts of trade. Rather than seeing China's rhetoric on its relations with Latin America as fluff that conceals a harder reality, this article takes rhetoric seriously as a device of “framing and claiming”: a way in which political elites in China interpret the fast-changing developing world and China's place in it. The article explores how political elites have understood the sources of China's own domestic development and then projected those notions on to other parts of the developing world, through earlier “fractal” logics of development whereby each state repeats one model of development in its own way and a currently dominant “division of labour” logic that posits one integrated model of development whereby complementarity and comparative advantage hold sway. The article concludes with a comparison of China's relations with Peru and Brazil, suggesting that China's bilateral relations with Brazil indicate a newer, emerging rhetoric of global partnership based on equality.


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