The Judicial Response to Police Killings in Latin America
The Judicial Response to Police Killings in Latin America

Author: Daniel M. Brinks

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2007-10-22

Total Pages: 11

ISBN-13: 113946650X

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This book documents the corrosive effect of social exclusion on democracy and the rule of law. It shows how marginalization prevents citizens from effectively engaging even the best legal systems, how politics creeps into prosecutorial and judicial decision making, and how institutional change is often nullified by enduring contextual factors. It also shows how some institutional arrangements can overcome these impediments. The argument is based on extensive field work and original data on the investigation and prosecution of more than 500 police homicides in five legal systems in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. It includes both qualitative analyses of individual violations and prosecutions and quantitative analyses of broad patterns within and across jurisdictions. The book offers a structured comparison of police, prosecutorial, and judicial institutions in each location, and shows that analyses of any one of these organizations in isolation misses many of the essential dynamics that underlie an effective system of justice.

The Economics of Crime
The Economics of Crime

Author: Rafael Di Tella

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 486

ISBN-13: 0226791858

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This title presents a survey of the crime problem in Latin America, which takes a very broad and appropriately reductionist approach to analyse the determinants of the high crime levels, focusing on the negative social conditions in the region, including inequality and poverty, and poor policy design, such as relatively low police presence. The chapters illustrate three channels through which crime might generate poverty, that is, by reducing investment, by introducing assets losses, and by reducing the value of assets remaining in the control of households.

Representation and Effectiveness in Latin American Democracies
Representation and Effectiveness in Latin American Democracies

Author: Moira B. MacKinnon

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-03-14

Total Pages: 330

ISBN-13: 1135935815

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Legislatures, the judiciary and civil society are important actors in representative democracies. In what ways and how well do they represent? And how effectively do they carry out their institutional and social roles? Both questions refer to the key dimensions of democracy analyzed in this book: representativeness and effectiveness, respectively. While they have been developed separately in scholarly work on institutions and regimes, there is little work considering them simultaneously, and on their interaction. Using quantitative and/or qualitative methods, contributions from top scholars in the field of legislatures, the judiciary and civil society examine these two concepts and their relationships in four Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico. Designed to guide the reader through the complexities of this debate, each expert engages in a larger set of theoretical debates about different approaches to representation in each sphere. In doing so, they debate how effectively these spheres carry out their roles in each country: whether a congress is institutionalized, its accountability, and its performance as a lawmaker; whether a judicial system is independent, carries out oversight, and protects citizen rights; and the role of civil society in a representative democracy. Representation and Effectiveness in Latin American Democracies is a timely and welcomed contribution to the to the growing debate about the quality of democracy in Latin America, and the developing world more generally.

Tax Evasion and the Rule of Law in Latin America
Tax Evasion and the Rule of Law in Latin America

Author: Marcelo Bergman

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-08-26

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 0271073640

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Few tasks are as crucial for the future of democracy in Latin America—and, indeed, in other underdeveloped areas of the world—as strengthening the rule of law and reforming the system of taxation. In this book, Marcelo Bergman shows how success in getting citizens to pay their taxes is related intimately to the social norms that undergird the rule of law. The threat of legal sanctions is itself insufficient to motivate compliance, he argues. That kind of deterrence works best when citizens already have other reasons to want to comply, based on their beliefs about what is fair and about how their fellow citizens are behaving. The problem of "free riding," which arises when cheaters can count on enough suckers to pay their taxes so they can avoid doing so and still benefit from the government’s supply of public goods, cannot be reversed just by stringent law, because the success of governmental enforcement ultimately depends on the social equilibrium that predominates in each country. Culture and state effectiveness are inherently linked. Using a wealth of new data drawn from his own multidimensional research involving game theory, statistical models, surveys, and simulations, Bergman compares Argentina and Chile to show how, in two societies that otherwise share much in common, the differing traditions of rule of law explain why so many citizens evade paying taxes in Argentina—and why, in Chile, most citizens comply with the law. In the concluding chapter, he draws implications for public policy from the empirical findings and generalizes his argument to other societies in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe.

More Money, More Crime
More Money, More Crime

Author: Marcelo Bergman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-05-07

Total Pages: 409

ISBN-13: 019060879X

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While worldwide crime is declining overall, criminality in Latin America has reached unprecedented levels that have ushered in social unrest and political turmoil. Despite major political and economic gains, crime has increased in every Latin American country over the past 25 years, currently making this region the most crime-ridden and violent in the world. Over the past two decades, Latin America has enjoyed economic growth, poverty and inequality reduction, rising consumer demand, and spreading democracy, but it also endured a dramatic outbreak of violence and property crimes. In More Money, More Crime, Marcelo Bergman argues that prosperity enhanced demand for stolen and illicit goods supplied by illegal rackets. Crime surged as weak states and outdated criminal justice systems could not meet the challenge posed by new profitably criminal enterprises. Based on large-scale data sets, including surveys from inmates and victims, Bergman analyzes the development of crime as a business in the region, and the inability-and at times complicity-of state agencies and officers to successfully contain it. While organized crime has grown, Latin American governments have lacked the social vision to promote sustainable upward mobility, and have failed to improve the technical capacities of law enforcement agencies to deter criminality. The weak state responses have only further entrenched the influence of criminal groups making them all the more difficult to dismantle. More Money, More Crime is a sobering study that foresees a continued rise in violence while prosperity increases unless governments develop appropriate responses to crime and promote genuine social inclusion.

Negotiating Universalism in India and Latin America
Negotiating Universalism in India and Latin America

Author: Andres Mejia-Acosta

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2021-06-15

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 1000395189

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This book explores how vertical inter-governmental political and fiscal bargains and horizontal variation in political, social and economic conditions across regions contribute to or undermine the provision of inclusive and sustainable social policies at the subnational level in Latin America and India. The question of how to advance universal social rights while reducing territorial inequalities has been a central dilemma for Latin America and India. After several decades of ambitious decentralization reforms in both regions, the balance between local accountability versus centralized planning remains a theoretical and empirical problem in need of systematic exploration. The chapters in this volume incorporate both federal and decentralized unitary states, pointing to common political tensions across unitary and federal settings despite the typically greater institutionalization of regional autonomy in federal countries. The contributors examine the territorial dimension of universalism and explore, in greater and empirical detail, the causal links between fiscal transfers, social policies and outcomes, and highlight the political dynamics that shape fiscal decentralization reforms and the welfare state. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Regional & Federal Studies.