Suchergebnisse

[ES] El libro editado por Andrea Castagnola y Saúl López Noriega, Judicial Politics in Mexico: The Supreme Court and the Transition to Democracy, constituye un trabajo innovador cuya principal virtud es analizar, de una manera convincente y sugerente, el papel que la Suprema Corte de Justicia jugó en las vicisitudes del largo y complejo proceso de democratización en México. No parece un elogio inmerecido afirmar que, hasta la publicación de este volumen, no existía investigación escrita que hubiese abordado, de un modo tan sistemático en términos teóricos y tan informado empíricamente, el estudio de la máxima institución del poder judicial en aquel país y que, al mismo tiempo, analizase los vínculos del comportamiento de la Suprema Corte de Justicia con los progresos y las regresiones de la democracia mexicana.

This review essay identifies two images of Mexican public opinion. It is based upon a critical reading of four recent books & the related research in the field of Mexican electoral behavior & public opinion. The first contains dimensions of public opinion & political behavior that are coherent & predictable, which suggests that the Mexican electorate has rational political preferences. In contrast, a second collection of findings suggests that Mexican political opinion is incoherent. This image questions the rationality of Mexican political preferences. Adapted from the source document.

ABSTRACT
The ideational definition of populism proposes that a narrative is populist if it is characterized by a Manichean cosmology that divides the political community between a "people," conceived as a homogeneously virtuous entity, and an "elite," conceived as a homogeneously corrupt entity. Departing from that conceptualization, this work first investigates the specific stories that Andrés Manuel López Obrador uses to spread his populist worldview, which we call "storytelling." We define the idea of storytelling as the art of telling a story where emotions, characters and other details are applied in order to promote a particular point of view or set of values. Second, we explore whether some of those stories produce greater negative affective polarization, here defined as the extent to which rival sociopolitical camps view each other as a disliked out-group. Findings suggest that some specific stories—in particular, what we call "stories of conspiracy" and "stories of ostracism"—indeed tend to induce more polarized attitudes among citizens.

This paper aims to explore the types of rationality that underlie choice for political regime that intervene in the process of preference formation. The analysis is focused on Brazil, a society that recently completed a successful process of transition towards democracy. Our strategy is to test the rationality of support for democracy in both aggregate-level time series analysis, and individual level cross-section analysis. At aggregate level, our attention is centered on if, a long term, the performance of democratic governments predict the percentages of support for democracy. At individual level, our interest is focus on the balance between the impact of survey respondents' evaluation of different dimension of democratic performance (that we labeled here "utilitarian rationality"), and the effects of citizens' normative preferences (that we named here, "normative rationality"), as well as their joint impact on molding of individuals' preferences for a particular type of government in Brazil. The results show that, at aggregate level, objective measures of performance do not explain support for democracy. In a different way, results at individual level endorse the hypothesis that utilitarian rationality prevails along some signs of normative rationality. Finally, we suggest that such difference between two levels could be interpreted in favor of the idea of include other rationalities to explain political attitudes. If we only consider the utilitarian rationality in the preferences formation, we could only have a piece of the portrait. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract.  Major cross‐national surveys measure popular support for democracy through direct questions about democracy in the abstract. Since people may entertain competing democratic ideas and ideals, however, the academic community ignores the extent to which standard questions capture citizen support for liberal democracy. To solve the validity problems associated with direct measures of democratic support, this article proposes linking them to more concrete, indirect measures of support for democratic principles and institutions. It employs the statistical technique of cluster analysis to establish this linkage. Cluster analysis permits grouping respondents in a way that is open to complex and inconsistent attitudinal profiles. It permits the identification of 'democrats with adjectives' who support democracy in the abstract, while rejecting core principles of liberal democracy. The article demonstrates the fruitfulness of this approach by drawing a map of 'illiberal democrats' in Mexico on the basis of the country's 2003 National Survey on Political Culture.