Suchergebnisse

This book offers a novel political-institutional explanation for variation in political polarization, outsider populism, and the fate of democratic regimes across twenty-first-century South America. Drawing upon a wealth of primary evidence and employing process tracing tests to evaluate key causal claims, the book examines how the occurrence - or not - of state crises and the inherited strength of left wing political actors combined to push countries onto distinct party system trajectories characterized by different kinds of left parties and movements, highly variant levels of polarization, and ultimately divergent political regime dynamics. The book challenges extant interpretations of political variation during Latin America's turn to the left, which have centered on economic explanations. It also develops new theoretical propositions for understanding polarization, populism, and democratic erosion in young democracies across the world.

What explains high party polarization in younger developing democracies? This article examines and explains variation during South America's recent left turn period, making two key claims. Extremely polarized politics in countries such as Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela emerged through a mechanism termed polarizing populism, in which political outsiders leveraged popular anti-systemic appeals to underwrite otherwise risky and highly controversial policy programs. The occurrence (or not) of polarizing populism in South America, in turn, can be explained by the conjunction of state crises before the left turn period (which provided fuel for outsider politics) and the strength of the extant infrastructure of left-wing political mobilization each country possessed as the post–Cold War era began, which shaped incentives for outsiders to build ideologically narrow or broad elite coalitions. These propositions are tested through a broad analysis of eight South American countries and a more detailed case study of Venezuela.

NGOs have proliferated in the developing world, assuming key political roles as intermediary organizations representing public interests. Yet at least in the three Latin American countries examined here, the proportion of the NGO sector focused on postmaterial issues massively outpaces the proportion of the mass public that considers these issues highly salient. This article demonstrates this "postmaterial disjuncture" and theorizes that international donors help drive it by favoring NGOs that pursue postmaterial issues. This hypothesis is evaluated by analyzing a unique dataset containing information on over 700 NGOs. Organizations pursuing postmaterial issues are more than three times likely to receive international funding than are otherwise identical NGOs pursuing material issues. While international donors may be well intentioned, their postmaterial agendas shape the issue orientation of the NGO sector, resulting in potentially adverse consequences for its ability to effectively represent mass interests. (JPLA/GIGA)

Why and how do class cleavages become politicized in party systems? The recent tenure of left governments in South America has seen the party system realigned along the class cleavage in Venezuela but not in Brazil or Chile. This article argues that different approaches to expanding social protection-'mobilizational' in Venezuela and 'technocratic' in Brazil and Chile-explain divergent outcomes. Mobilizational policies incentivized social organization among beneficiaries and allowed for linkages between these organizations and left parties, facilitating credit claiming and recruitment by the left. Technocratic policies targeted atomized beneficiaries with no room for partisan involvement, making credit claiming and recruitment difficult. Case-based evidence illustrates these mechanisms whereas survey analysis using genetic matching confirms that mobilizational and technocratic programs exerted strikingly different effects on support for left parties. The broader contribution is to theorize a new form of class-based political mobilization in Latin America, also being implemented in other countries. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Inc., copyright holder.]