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AbstractReliable data on Protestant and Catholic membership in 18 Latin American nations show that Protestants have recruited a larger percentage of the population in many nations than previously estimated. Analysis of these data shows that, as predicted by the theory of religious economies, the Catholic Church has been invigorated by the Protestant challenge: Catholic mass attendance has risen to unprecedented levels, and is highest in nations where Protestants have made the greatest gains.

ABSTRACTElectoral contests in Latin America are often characterized by attempts by political parties to sway the outcome of elections using vote buying—a practice that seems to persist during elections throughout the region. This article examines how clientelist parties' use of vote buying is jointly shaped by two voter traits: poverty and partisanship. We hypothesize that clientelist parties pursue a mixed strategy, broadly targeting their core voters but also poor swing voters. While most of the existing evidence comes from single-country studies, this study adds cross-national evidence from multilevel regressions of survey data from 22 Latin American countries. Empirically, we find that poverty matters mainly for swing voters. For partisans, the effect of poverty on vote buying is weaker. These results suggest that poverty plays an important role in vote-buying strategies—but also that partisanship moderates clientelistic parties' vote-buying strategies during electoral campaigns.

The premise of this book is, simply, that politicians matter—that an understanding of the role played by politicians in the way that politics is carried out in their countries is, far from constituting a resurrection of outdated elitist theories, of vital importance in present-day Latin America. The authors consider politicians as both cause and effect. Drawing on pioneering field research on the opinions of Latin American legislators in 17 countries, they focus on two broad topics: political systems, as reflected in politicians' perspectives on the democracies and party organizations of which they are a part; and the role played by ideology, not only in shaping positions on issues, but also as a factor that gives coherence to parties. Their seminal work is central to the current political dynamics in the region, as well as to broader debates in political science

A review essay on books by (1) Miriam Ching Yoon Louie, Sweatshop Warriors: Immigrant Women Workers Take On the Global Factory (Cambridge: South End, 2001); (2) Vicki L. Ruiz (Ed), Las Obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family (Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center, 2000); (3) Sonia Saldivar-Hull, Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender Politics and Literature (Berkeley, CA: U California Press, 2000); & (4) Pablo Vila, Crossing Borders, Reinforcing Borders: Social Categories, Metaphors, and Narrative Identities on the U.S.-Mexico Frontier (Austin, TX: U Texas Press, 2000). 22 References.

AbstractThis article promotes the idea that multinational corporations have independent agency in the process of economic reform in Latin American host countries. Through a number of pooled cross-sectional time series analyses, it shows that accumulated foreign direct investment can affect policy reform in ways unanticipated by earlier theories predicated on the obsolescence of firms' influence after initial investment. The influence of firms varies across different reform areas, and competitive pressures lead firms to press alternately for liberal and illiberal reform measures. The study also considers sectoral issues, and argues that a preponderance of natural resource–oriented FDI can alter the impact of multinational investment on policy reform. Indexes of economic reform are measured against stocks of FDI and a number of political and economic control variables. Evidence shows that the dramatic increase in FDI in the region in recent years has bolstered firms' bargaining power and concomitant policy leverage.