Suchergebnisse

Ecuador TV, la televisión pública de ámbito estatal de Ecuador, fue concebida como un componente fundamental durante la era correísta. Esta investigación se propone decodificar, desde una perspectiva profesional, el valor histórico y presente que se le atribuye como medio público. Para lograr este objetivo, se llevaron a cabo 31 entrevistas con especialistas y profesionales ecuatorianos de la comunicación. Los resultados revelan que Ecuador TV ha representado una oportunidad fallida, principalmente debido a su politización gubernamental y a la intensa polarización sociopolítica del país.

This research investigates the reasons for the overwhelming frequency of constitutional amendments in Mexico despite the widely held academic views of its constitution's rigidity. The article introduces a novel model highlighting the core of the Mexican Constitution. This model serves as a foundational lens to understand the interplay between political institutions, preferences of political actors, and amendment provisions. The application of this model attributes the frequency of amendments to three different reasons: first, the length and inconsistency of the Mexican Constitution; second, the institutional requirements for amendments; third, the political consensus prevailing in the Mexican political scene (crucial instances, such as the onset of multipartyism with concertacesión and pivotal reforms to Articles 27 and 73, offer deeper context) makes amendments feasible. A comprehensive analysis of the 68 constitutional amendments from 2000 to 2013 corroborates these expectations concerning institutional thresholds, coalition dynamics, and amendment significance.

Everywhere, it seems, we are urged to "address the root causes" of our problems. The phrase "root causes" is novel; until the 1970s, writers of American books, newspapers, and academic journals almost never mentioned "root causes." And then they did–at an accelerating pace, right up to the present.[1] So we now read that we need […]

Latin American democracies have been characterised as the product of personalistic leaders relying on their unique qualities to achieve and maintain political power. However, this characterisation has lacked conceptual and empirical development since the term "personalism" has been used to account simultaneously for a particular type of electoral appeal seeking to mobilise and persuade voters and for the concentration of power in a single political leader. This article advances in conceptualising electoral personalism as a strategy followed by political elites appealing to voters based on the personal characteristics of leaders and candidates, distinguishing it from personalisation as the concentration of power in a single leader. Based on statistical analysis, we propose two novel indicators of electoral personalism and assess its prevalence among Latin American countries. The article also advances in exploring its political, economic, and social determinants at the aggregate and individual levels.

It's deja vu all over again. Large, left-wing, American[1] protests fueled by student outrage follow a familiar—and typically self-defeating—pattern. It happened with the anti-Vietnam War protests, Iraq War resistance, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, now Gaza. (I simplify some, but not much.) An outrage brings students and young adults out onto the streets to […]

While the success of the president's legislative agenda is measured by examining the rate of passage of presidential bills (the batting average), the dominance of the president over the legislative process can be better understood by considering the share of presidential bills among bills introduced and laws enacted. Studies on the success of the president's agenda outnumber those on the dominance of the president, but the latter more directly address the debate on the proactive legislative powers of the executive. Reviewing the 13,358 bills introduced and the 2603 laws enacted in the eight legislative terms in Chile between 1990 and 2022, we associate the constitutional changes in 2005 and the electoral reform of 2015 with a decline in the legislative dominance of the president. There was a progressive decline in presidential dominance in legislative inputs and outputs long before the 2019 social upheaval weakened the Piñera government.

El ckunza, una lengua de los lickan antai chilenos, se considera extinta. Su comunidad ha trabajado en recuperarla desde 2010. Este estudio descriptivo-cuantitativo examina el conocimiento y uso de la lengua entre los miembros de la comunidad atacameña. Los resultados revelan un incipiente retroceso en el proceso de desplazamiento del ckunza. Este artículo contribuye a los esfuerzos de revitalización lingüística aportando a la planificación lingüística y la investigación en este campo.

Este artículo examina las interacciones entre la estructura social, las políticas públicas y su incidencia en la desigualdad de las fuentes de ingreso de los hogares, en los casos de Argentina y Colombia, desde una perspectiva comparada. El periodo de estudio abarca desde antes de la pandemia del COVID-19 hasta la crisis generada por el virus y la fase de recuperación posterior. Los resultados demuestran que durante la crisis los gobiernos de Argentina y Colombia implementaron políticas de ingresos similares en términos generales. Sin embargo, se argumenta que la estructura de los mercados laborales y la institucionalidad de protección previa, en conjunto con el diseño de las políticas públicas específicas en cada país, son determinantes de la diferencia en la dinámica distributiva. Se pone en evidencia el impacto regresivo de los ingresos laborales y, a su vez, el rol compensador de las transferencias monetarias en los ingresos no laborales, aunque con matices entre ambos países.

In this paper, we address the issue of partisan bias in compulsory voting systems. Given the current global trends – declining trust in mainstream political parties, rising support for left- and right-wing radicals, growing populism and anti-elite sentiment – we seek to determine how they manifest themselves in an environment where citizens are required to vote by law. To answer this question, a quasi-experimental design is proposed. The data show that forced activity does not affect either extreme forces support rates (from a cross-country perspective) or the rationality of their voters (from an individual-level perspective). As far as we know, this is the first attempt to generalize the role of compulsory voting in extreme politics, as well as the first one to refute this role with ample evidence.

This post is just a brief reminder of what American "exceptionalism" has come to: The U.S. is exceptional in short lives. This graph[1] shows the historical trajectory in expected lifespans for the U.S. and several large, affluent, western, democratic, "peer" countries. (You can choose other peer countries from Our World in Data; it won't change […]

Our study examines whether citizens punish political misbehavior by estimating the impact of disciplinary sanctions on the re-election of political parties in Colombian mayoral elections. Results reveal that disciplinary sanctions have no effect on the re-election of paramilitary-linked parties. However, they can have a significant negative impact on the re-election of traditional and minority parties. The lack of punishment suggests that organizations manipulate voters through persuasion mechanisms, aligned with the Schumpeterian view of political competition.

A video podcast interview conducted by student Juan Alonso Martinez on his Youtube channel, "Atlas." https://youtu.be/BxNOZSM81hQ?si=P9ygOcbZeZOp8OPx

In a recent and updated post, I reviewed the evidence clearly showing that there was and is not a so-called "loneliness epidemic." (Surprise! Despite my post, the epidemic of epidemic alarms continues.) Many media stories about loneliness (e.g., here, here, here) also assert that American adults have fewer friends or weaker friendships than they did […]

Regardless of its utility as a measure of actual corruption, perceived corruption is related to many political attitudes and other variables which makes it an important phenomenon to understand. This paper explores demographic variables, ideological orientations, socioeconomic status, interpersonal trust, political attitudes and feelings of resentment as explanations for corruption perception with response styles controlled within a structural equation modelling framework using survey data collected in Guyana where corruption is salient and thought to be pervasive. It finds that the categories of variables jointly explain 31.5% of the variance in corruption perception and that there is explanatory utility for each category of variables evaluated except socioeconomic status with demographics and ideological orientations accounting for the largest changes in explained variance. It also finds that political cynicism attenuates an initial effect of interpersonal trust and concludes that ethnicity appears to function as partisan orientation in its relationship with corruption perception.

This article examines four potential strategies of the Brazilian welfare system in the face of increasing liberalization and globalization since the 1970s. We test whether liberalization and economic globalization hurt the expansion of social expenditure (the efficiency hypothesis or race to the bottom hypothesis) or whether the welfare system expands as a response to the volatility caused by liberalization and globalization (compensation hypothesis). We employ time-series regression analysis to panel data from 1970 to 2015. We controlled for economic (wealth and GDP growth) and political factors (strength of the left and effective competition of parties in the lower house). We identify different strategies followed by the welfare system through the period analyzed. However, two strategies are dominant in the long run: A neoliberal strategy when the impact of globalization is considered (efficiency hypothesis) and an embedded neoliberal strategy when the effect of liberalization is pondered (compensation hypothesis).