Suchergebnisse

For only the fifth time since 1978, the Dominican Republic held concurrent elections in 1994 for candidates at every level of government — presidential, congressional and municipal. The most important of these contests, for the presidency, saw the incumbent, Joaquίn Balaguer, returned to the post he has held for so long, defeating his principal challenger, José Francisco Peña Gόmez, by a margin of 22,281 votes. The most recent election, on 16 May 1994, proved to be just as traumatic and incident-prone as those that preceded it, dating back to the first democratic election in 1978. Unlike the last election (in 1990), however, in which Balaguer also won a narrow victory, this time the charges of electoral fraud were well-documented and the accuracy of the tally widely
disbelieved, not just domestically but internationally as well.

Causes of electoral fraud in presidential elections, focusing on 1994 elections in which Joaquín Balaguer was reelected by a narrow margin. Factors include mix of authoritarianism and democracy in the regime, power of the presidency, and weak electoral and judicial institutions.

Unlike many developing countries, Colombia has managed since 1958 to avoid both military rule and chronic political instability while being governed by a civilian political regime, a consociational regime. The purpose of this article is to help explain the Colombian political regime's relative longevity by focusing on the behavior of producer groups in Colombia and the associations that represent them. The article asks how important the support of these groups has been to the political regime established in 1958. It also seeks to identify the major patterns of interaction between the groups and different governments and to determine what implications these patterns have had for continued regime support. The article will find significant support for the regime by producer groups, support that is linked to considerable, but not unlimited, capacity for influence. Such regime support has been conditional, rather than consolidated, and derives from favorable access to the state, the regime's overall policy orientation, and its ability to maintain order.

In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars interested in studying Latin American politics inevitably were drawn to the study of military coups d'etat and their causes. In the 1980s, a number of the countries in Latin America whose civilian political regimes were overthrown by military regimes may undergo or attempt to consolidate processes of democratization or redemocratization. Thus scholarly interest has tended to shift away from seeking to understand the causes for military overthrows of civilian regimes toward the study of prospects and processes of democratization or redemocratization in Latin America. In this context, the reexamination of earlier examples of durable transitions from authoritarian military regimes to civilian regimes may shed light on the relative importance of different factors in determining particular outcomes. This article carries out such a re-examination for the case of Colombia, analyzing the transition from rule by General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla (1953-1957) through the crucial period of the interim military junta (1957-1958) to the consociational National Front political regime.

Two elements have played a central role in the emergence of repressive bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes in Latin America: the pattern of industrialization, & the sociopolitical legacies of initial incorporation of the popular sector. Exploring the case of Colombia, which has not had a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime, in the context of these two elements leads to development of a more comprehensive theoretical framework that enhances understanding of the nature & extent of constraints imposed by economic factors, & of the range of political options for Latin American countries. It is shown that the processes of industrialization & initial popular sector incorporation in Colombia have played an important role in determining the country's political regime type, but the manner in which these evolved in Colombia has differed from those posited in the bureaucratic-authoritarian model in ways that have promoted the viability of a more liberal political regime, primarily due to three factors not sufficiently stressed in the model: (1) the country's initial export structure; (2) the differential economic & political impact of the international system; & (3) the forms of channeling social & political demands, particularly the political party structure. The importance of those factors is examined with reference to the coffee sector. 6 Tables, 71 References. Modified AA.