The volume takes a broad view of recent social, political, and economic developments in Latin America. It contains six essays, focused on salient and cross-cutting themes, that try to construct a thread or narrative about the highly diverse region, highlighting its main idiosyncrasies and analyzing where it might be headed in coming years. While the essays recognize considerable advances, they also point out setbacks and missed opportunities that have stood in the way of sustained progress. Strengthening state capacity emerges as a significant challenge.
El presente volumen aborda el análisis de los procesos electorales de ámbito presidencial y legislativo celebrados en América Latina en el bienio 2014-2105. Se trata de elecciones celebradas en once países cuyo estudio se desarrolla en igual número de capítulos. Se cubren comicios simultáneos a ambas instancias en Argentina, Bolivia, Brasil, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Panamá y Uruguay. En El Salvador y en Colombia, aunque se celebraron en tiempos distintos, ambos tipos de comicios se consideran en el mismo capítulo; allí, las presidenciales precedieron a las legislativas con un año de diferencia en el primer país y las legislativas antecedieron por tres meses a las presidenciales en el segundo. Se recogen también en capítulos independientes las elecciones únicamente legislativas de México y Venezuela. Si bien el criterio temporal siempre puede calificarse de caprichoso en este caso sigue la preocupación iniciada hace ocho años de dar cumplida cuenta del acontecer electoral en la región, en el ámbito de los dos poderes representativos del Estado por excelencia. En efecto, este volumen da continuidad a anteriores trabajos. El bienio aquí analizado da cabida a un nivel promedio de elecciones presidenciales, si se tiene en cuenta el acumulado en la región desde hace 30 años, por lo cual es representativo del quehacer político latinoamericano. Así, la Tabla 1 recoge las 117 elecciones presidenciales que se han llevado a cabo en la región entre 19861 y 2015 cuyo resultado no fue cuestionado; su media es de cuatro procesos electorales por año y aquí el número de elecciones que se recogen son nueve.
In this book, renowned author José Maurício Domingues places Latin America within the third phase of global modern civilization and offers a general theoretical approach to contemporary Latin America. He sees modernity as configured by episodic modernizing moves which, when counting on strong identity and organization as well as clear-cut projects, may assume the aspect of modernizing offensives. Highlighting subjects as law, rights and justice as well as globalization and development, Dominguez places Latin America in the uneven, combined and contradictory development of modern civilization and offers a final assessment of its possibilities and limits. The book will be of interest to researchers and students of modernity, globalization, Latin America, sociological theory and its key concepts.
Christianity in Latin America provides a complete overview of over 500 years of the history of Christianity in the ‘New World’. The inclusion of German research in this book is an important asset to the Anglo-American research area, in disclosing information that was hitherto not available in English. This work will present the reader with a very good survey into the history of Christianity on the South American continent, based on a tremendous breadth of literature.
This volume discusses the challenges of Latin America in global environmental geopolitics. Written by leading experts, this book brings together Latin American research on global environmental change. They cover a range of topics such as climate change, water, forest and biodiversity conservation connected with science policies, public opinion, priorities of international funds, and international politics of Latin American countries. The book describes the discrepancy between the international priorities and the regional needs or country interests. It includes several case studies and analyses the cooperation in multilateral negotiations on climate change. It also offers a synthesis of debates around global environmental changes and Latin American politics, which the authors have previously promoted in different academic events in South America, including in Santiago de Chile in Chile, and Buenos Aires and Ushuaia in Argentina. This book assesses the environmental problems from different perspectives, highlights the scientific development in the environmental changes affecting Latin America and offers a new view on geopolitics to help face those issues. Specialist readers in international relations, political sciences, environmental sciences, geography and geopolitics will appreciate this up-to-date examination of Latin America and the global environmental change.
The first overview of current themes in Latin American archaeology written solely by archaeologists native to the region, making their collected expertise available to an English-speaking audience for the first time.
Current perspectives on Latin America’s role in the world tend to focus on one question: Why is Latin America always falling behind? Analysts and scholars offer answers grounded in history, economic underdevelopment, or democratic consolidation. Bagley and Horwitz, however, shift the central question to ask why and to what extent does Latin America matter in world politics, both now and in the future. This text takes a holistic approach to analyze Latin America’s role in the international system. It invokes a combination of global, regional, and sub-regional levels to assess Latin America’s insertion into a globalized world, in historical, contemporary, and forward-looking perspectives. Conventional international relations theory and paradigms, introduced at the beginning, offer a useful lens through which to view four key themes: political economy, security, transnational issues and threats, and democratic consolidation. The full picture presented by this book breaks down the evolving power relationships in the hemisphere and the ways in which conflict and cooperation play out through international organizations and relations.
This book presents in-depth analyses of the data gathered for 26 years by the Political Elites of Latin America project (PELA), the most comprehensive database about the topic in the world. Since 1994, PELA has conducted around 9,000 personal interviews with representative samples of the Legislative Powers of 18 Latin American countries, generating a unique resource for the study of political elites in a comparative perspective. Now, this contributed volume brings together studies that dig into the data gathered by PELA to discuss important topics related to the challenges faced by representative democracy in Latin America. After an introductory chapter that presents the potential of the PELA database, the book is structured in two parts. The first addresses in eight chapters important aspects of representative democracy such as political ambition, political trust, satisfaction with democracy, clientelism and the quality of democracy. It then discusses three relevant issues in Latin American political dynamics such as executive-legislative relations, women's participation as representatives, and the meaning of China and the United States in national politics. The second part addresses in five chapters studies of seven national cases that are representative of regional heterogeneity. These chapters aim to examine parliamentarian elites’ attitudes in different political systems with regard to a variety of relevant issues such as institutional trust, satisfaction with democracy, Executive-Legislative relations, clientelism, and gender questions. Furthermore, these chapters intend to evince the evolution of such attitudes in the course of the last two decades. Politics and Political Elites in Latin America: Challenges and Trends will be of interest to scholars and students of comparative politics in general and, more particularly, to those interested in the challenges faced by representative democracy not only in Latin America, but in many parts of the world.
Reclaiming Latin America is a one-stop guide to the revival of social democratic and socialist politics across the region. At the end of the Cold War, and through decades of neoliberal domination and the 'Washington Consensus' it seemed that the left could do nothing but beat a ragged retreat in Latin America. Yet this book looks at the new opportunities that sprang up through electoral politics and mass action during that period. The chapters here warn against over-simplification of the so-called 'pink wave'. Instead, through detailed historical analysis of Latin America as a whole and country-specific case studies, the book demonstrates the variety of approaches to establishing a lasting social justice. From the anti-imperialism of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas in Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba, to the more gradualist routes being taken in Chile, Argentina and Brazil, Reclaiming Latin America gives a real sense of the plurality of political responses to popular discontent.
Provides a detailed treatment of an important topic that has received no scholarly attention: the surprising transformation of indigenous peoples' movements into viable political parties in the 1990s in four Latin American countries (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela) and their failure to succeed in two others (Argentina, Peru). The parties studied are crucial components of major trends in the region. By providing to voters clear programs for governing, and reaching out in particular to under-represented social groups, they have enhanced the quality of democracy and representative government. Based on extensive original research and detailed historical case studies, the book links historical institutional analysis and social movement theory to a study of the political systems in which the new ethnic cleavages emerged. The book concludes with a discussion of the implications for democracy of the emergence of this phenomenon in the context of declining public support for parties.
