Suchergebnisse

In the winter of 1996, Steve Forbes--publisher, heir, and presidential candidate--captured the American imagination with his proposal for a flat tax. But while Mr. Forbes claimed that such a tax would level the economic playing field by eliminating countless loopholes and miles of red tape, his actual proposal betrayed such claims to fairness by overtaxing workers and undertaxing financial capital. In the face of recent proposals for dramatic and far-reaching tax reform, Taxing America takes a critical look at the way the federal government collects its revenue and exposes the bias at the h

Legislative experience, one of the various indicators of both congressional institutionalization and political elites' renewal, has been mostly measured by either turnover or reelection. However, in regions such as Latin America, with more volatile and less institutionalized party systems, where most careers are not stable and ambitions are not mostly static, turnover and reelection may not be accurate measures of legislative experience. This paper aims to fill this gap by assessing parliamentary experience in Latin America by means of a more accurate indicator: legislative amateurism. Using a novel dataset comprising eighteen national single or lower-chamber legislatures over almost three decades, we find that legislative amateurism is a consequence of party system institutionalization, electoral volatility, and newly implemented gender quotas. Overall, our findings suggest that weak political parties and certain electoral rules may become fertile ground for amateur legislatorś landing in Congress.

Development agencies and governments have promoted fair trade to improve the lives of those at the tail-end of a supply change. But how does this model benefit small farmers and producers? Layla Zaglul Ruiz (LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre) sheds light on these questions in the report 'Adding value to coffee and chocolate in … Continued

Love and social class work together. Intimate bonds can both alleviate or reinforce inequality along class, gender and ethnic lines. In his research, Malik Fercovic-Cerda (LSE) reveals the bonds of romantic partners from different social backgrounds in Chile. Chile, like most of Latin America, has historically been recognised as a nation with low social mobility … Continued

The European Union remains the top investor in Latin America and the Caribbean. But the economic and diplomatic pressure from the US and China remains. The recent EU and CELAC summit showed promising new steps on climate action, digital alliance, and sustainable trade, Andrea Colombo (University of Salamanca) writes. Many things did not sound new … Continued

The University of Chicago Press has declared Made in America the free e-book for July, 2023. Here is the link: https://press.uchicago.edu/books/freeEbook.html — good, I guess, through July 31.

The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted education in Latin America, with school closures leading to significant setbacks in inequality and poverty. In an upcoming article for the journal Economía, Nora Lustig (Tulane University), Valentina Martínez Pabón (Yale University), Guido Neidhöfer (ZEW Mannheim), and Mariano Tommasi (Universidad de San Andrés) explore the challenges in social mobility and equality … Continued

Women in Latin America make up a record-high presence in regional parliaments today. But issues like effective implementation, political parties’ decisions, and prejudices keep these numbers low in countries like Guatemala, Colombia, Paraguay, Dominican Republic, Panama and Brazil. In their latest book, Flavia Freidenberg and Karolina Gilas (UNAM, Mexico) explain that defending and consolidating democracy … Continued

As the climate crisis disproportionately imperils the health of populations living in poverty and social exclusion in Latin America, realizing the most vulnerable population's right to health as a crucial component for achieving climate justice becomes increasingly urgent. While the region's new constitutionalism has made progress toward protecting this right, a transformative approach is just beginning to take hold in the field of climate change law, as evidenced by the growing number of rights-based climate litigation cases. This paper employs systematic content analysis (SCA) to qualitatively examine the corpus of domestic rights-based climate change lawsuits filed across Latin American jurisdictions through mid-2022 and places a sharper focus on the adjudicated cases. The goal is to scrutinize the relationship between the use of the right to health and climate justice within this body of litigation. Particularly, the study delves into the interplay of the social and ecological factors that compound climate vulnerability. It achieves this by identifying and classifying data based on the motives of the litigants, the objectives of the litigants and courts and their arguments, and the legal bases of their respective complaints and judgments as they relate to the existing and emerging health concerns of vulnerable populations. The findings reveal a constellation of ways in which litigants and courts use the right to health in relation to the socio-ecological spectrum of health vulnerability. This paper proposes a typology of cases (climate justice gradient) to conceptualize this phenomenon as a first step in expanding the strategic and interpretative horizons of the current climate litigation toward a more comprehensive approach to climate justice.

Has social assistance expansion contributed to political inclusion in Latin America? The current literature favours a "policy exchange" approach, hypothesising that social assistance is an electoral asset exploited by governing coalitions. The findings from this literature are mixed. The article proposes an alternative approach emphasising political inclusion. In unequal societies where economic cooperation is regulated by institutions generating inequality and disadvantage, social assistance contributes to the political inclusion of disadvantaged groups. Analysis of Latin American Public Opinion Project data for 2010 to 2019 data finds support for this hypothesis.

When the Covid pandemic erupted in America in early 2020 one might have predicted that the United States would weather it relatively well, better than most other western nations. We are a rich, well-educated people with a sophisticated medical system, advanced pharmaceutical research, and hospitals full of high-tech equipment, all regulated by watchful government agencies. […]

What activates individuals' support for autocratic governments? Some suggest that the answer is perceptions of increased corruption and/or poor economic performance. We do not dispute this explanation but instead contend that it depends on individual differences in personality. We hypothesise that introverted and closed-minded citizens are generally resistant to democracy. When democracies appear unable to address problems, introverted and closed-minded citizens defer to authoritarian leaders for efficient solutions. We test our hypotheses with cross-national survey data from Latin America. Our findings have important implications for how we understand the roots of autocratic attitudes.

What activates individuals' support for autocratic governments? Some suggest that the answer is perceptions of increased corruption and/or poor economic performance. We do not dispute this explanation but instead contend that it depends on individual differences in personality. We hypothesise that introverted and closed-minded citizens are generally resistant to democracy. When democracies appear unable to address problems, introverted and closed-minded citizens defer to authoritarian leaders for efficient solutions. We test our hypotheses with cross-national survey data from Latin America. Our findings have important implications for how we understand the roots of autocratic attitudes. (JPLA/GIGA)

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.(JPLA/GIGA)

As income inequality in the United States has reached an all-time high, commentators from across the political spectrum warn about the social implications of these economic changes. America, they fear, is "coming apart" as the gap between the rich and poor grows into a fault line. This paper provides a comprehensive review of empirical scholarship in sociology, education, demography, and economics in order to address the question: How have five decades of growing economic inequality shaped America's social landscape? We find that growing levels of income inequality have been accompanied by increasing socioeconomic segregation across (1) friendship networks and romantic partners, (2) residential neighborhoods, (3) K-12 and university education, and (4) workplaces and the labor market. The trends documented in this review give substance to commentators' concerns: compared to the 1970s, rich and poor Americans today are less likely to know one another and to share the same social spaces. The United States is a nation divided.