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Legal reforms making judges independent from political pressures and empowering them with judicial review do not necessarily imply an effective judiciary. Something has to fill the gap between institutional design and effectiveness. When the executive and legislative are strong and ready to react to an objectionable judicial decision, the judiciary would tend to be weak and deferent towards those in power. But the reverse is also true. Hence, in this paper we argue that fragmentation of political power is a source for an effective judiciary: one able to rule against the interests of power holders without being systematically challenged or ignored. We test this argument analyzing the decisions of the Mexican Supreme Court against the PRI on constitutional controversies and actions of unconstitutionality from 1994 to 2002. Using a probit model, we show that the probability for the Supreme Court of voting against the PRI increased from .07 to .44 to .52 as the PRI lost the majority in the Chamber of Deputies in 1997, and the Presidency in 2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Zedillo administration in Mexico, the federal government established a formula for distribution to states and municipalities of resources for social infrastructure. The question this paper seeks to answer is wheather the political bias previously observed in PRONASOL is eliminated with the new scheme. This paper uses municipal level data on a Mexican decentralized social program to test for political manipulation in its municipal distribution by the state governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although over the past years scholars have emphasized the need for legislative professionalism in developing democracies’ political science literature on this issue has not substantially increased. This paper is an attempt to enhance our knowledge of the factors that produce legislative professionalism in developing democracies by examining the case of Mexico. This paper analyzes the impact of minority governments on legislative professionalism in the assemblies of the Mexican states. The hypothesis of the paper is that under minority government the divergence of preferences between the legislature and the executive promotes a heterogeneous environment that makes it necessary for both branches to engage in negotiations over policy. Therefore, when legislators face a powerful executive with divergent preferences, they will have more incentives to increase the level of professionalism in the chamber. Thus, we should expect an increase in the level of a legislature’s capacity to perform its role in the policy-making process when minority government becomes more prevalent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral institutions in democratic states produce incentives for politicians to manipulate economic policy for electoral gain. A growing literature on political institutions in non-democratic states has begun to focus on the effects of these institutions on political and economic systems. Recently, Gandhi and Przeworski (2001) have argued that democratic institutions function by giving support to the autocratic regimes in which they are embedded. If non-democratic institutions are functional, the natural question is whether or not they are consequential. Do democratic institutions have political and economic consequences in non-democratic states that are analogous to those of democratic institutions in democratic states? I argue that the answer to this question is yes, and build on the literature on political business cycles (PBCs) to explain how. Elections in non-democratic regimes bestow legitimacy on the ruling government by purportedly demonstrating its widespread popular support. Ruling parties in non-democratic regimes are interested in maximizing their perceived legitimacy among the population, as such legitimacy gives them free reign to pursue their policy objectives with a minimal amount of domestic opposition. Whereas some authoritarian regimes with a tight control over the press and the exchange of information can create the illusion of a wide popular mandate, other non-democratic regimes must resort to more subtle political means to garner high levels of popular support. I focus on the latter group, which Levitsky and Way (2002:53) refer to as “competitive authoritarian regimes,” where conditions are ideal for the manipulation of economic policy for electoral gain. With the significant informational asymmetry regarding macroeconomic policy in the government’s favor, I predict that non-democratic regimes manipulate fiscal policy to create popular support for the incumbent regime. I demonstrate the applicability of this reasoning with a study of fiscal decision-making accompanying the 1982 presidential elections in Mexico. Turning to a longitudinal study, I develop a more rigorous test of the hypothesis through a time-series analyses of the political and economic correlates of national account balances in Malaysia. Employing an autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity model and adjusting for seasonal effects, I find a robust association between elections and lower quarterly budgetary surpluses from the years 1967 to 1997. At least in Malaysia, non-democratic regimes are characterized not simply by an unresponsive government, but rather by a dynamic political process. This paper contributes to comparative politics in two ways. By focusing on some of the more observable implications of economic policy manipulation in a well-defined population of states, this model lends itself to empirical verification, often difficult in the study of non-democratic states. My study also demonstrates ways in which researchers might conceive of the relationship between authoritarian regimes and the populations that they govern, illuminating directions in which the study of non-democratic governance might proceed in the future. References Gandhi, Jennifer, and Adam Przeworski. 2001. “Dictatorial Institutions and the Survival of Dictators.” Paper presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco. Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan A. Way. 2002. “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism.” Journal of Democracy 13(2). pp. 51-65. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to answer the question of whether the introduction of market mechanisms in the media changes the nature of state-society relations in single party authoritarian countries. For example, why has commercialization of the media in China resulted in a partial liberalization of political control, whereas privatization of the media in Malaysia coincided with a tightening of political control? This cross-national study compares the variation in media structures in China, Malaysia, and Mexico in order to assess the types of institutional reforms that result in greater liberalization of the media. In particular, it analyzes the market pressures media firms face in the financing of its operations. This second independent variable focuses on the methods of political control, which are carried out through both formal regulations and informal norms. By looking at both the market logic of media firms and the nature of state regulation, this study thus seeks to illuminate the key causal factors that control the plurality of perspectives in the media in these countries. The paper concludes with a discussion of the findings broader implications for civil society and democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As development practicioners have joined the academic community in affirming the constructive role of civil society, multilateral banks have embraced the norm of incorporating civil society representatives in consultations on loan requests and development projects. These processes increase the range of issues around which civil society organizations mobilize and the points at which civil society organizations can attempt to influence national governments and international actors. But this expanded terrain for civil society activism also raises questions about the representativeness of organizations invited to participate, the forms and quality of their engagement, and actual program consequences related to civil society consultations. This paper explores the civil society consultation process developed by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), focusing on consultations surrounding Plan Puebla-Panamá, an IDB-financed regional development initiative covering southern Mexico and Central America. In 2002, the IDB organized a series of workshops on this plan in each of the Central American countries; these were followed in 2003 with follow-up consultations at the sectoral and departmental level. Drawing on IDB reports and survey data collected at these meetings, supplemented with information from the author’s interviews with consultation participants in Nicaragua, this paper analyzes the process from the standpoint of representativeness, engagement, and impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a lot of interest in how party primaries affect the characteristics of candidates, most work has focused on U.S. presidential candidates, limiting scholars’ ability to compare the effects of primaries across large numbers of candidates. The gap is understandable, as it is rare for parties to use different selection methods simultaneously across districts. In new democracies, more experimentation takes place. One such case is Mexico, where the two largest parties used a variety of selection procedures to choose their 2006 candidates for plurality district seats, from open primaries to designation by the national leadership. Since re-election is prohibited, there were no unopposed incumbents. This paper looks at how selection methods affect the candidates chosen, drawing on two surveys, of congressional candidates prior to the 2006 election and of congressional deputies in March 2008. Since the decision to hold a primary is separate from who wins the primary election, I use a Heckman two-stage model to control for selection sample bias. The paper analyzes whether candidates selected in primaries are systematically more moderate or more extreme than the median candidate for each party. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will examine the economic relations between Mexico and Asia as a mean towards economic diversification. It looks at the countless possibilities that the region offers for Mexico to achieve its long awaited economic diversity. This paper examines issues of its relations with the two major economies of the region, China and Japan, looking at the challenges and opportunities that both countries pose. This paper tries to identify the reasons why Mexico needs and will continue to pursue relations with Asian countries as well as identify some of the transformations necessary to deal with an area as complex as Asia. It argues that if Mexico is willing to work with these economies and is willing to solve some serious domestic issues, it will in the end achieve its goal of reducing its dependence on the United States economy and will eventually achieve major economic gains from the Asian economies. This paper finds that Mexico is facing many challenges, domestic and foreign, that are impeding progress in its quest for economic diversification. Such findings need to be addressed in order to reduce its dependence on the United States economy and achieve greater cooperation with the Asian markets. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to understand how political ambition plays out in Mexico's federal system where incumbency does not exist because of the constitutional prohibition against consecutive reelection. Using a unique dataset of the prior career paths and ex- post political positions of almost 1,000 federal deputies, this paper finds that Mexico's federal system is much more like that of Argentina and Brazil, and much less like that of the United States in that political ambition (constrained by the nation's formal rules and informal relations) leads the professional politician to begin her political career in the local and state political arenas, and then return to her state when the single three-year term in the Chamber of Deputies concludes. Our empirical analysis estimates the effect of deputies' personal features, prior positions, district types, party labels, and electoral calendar on two types of career choices: the type of position (elected, bureaucratic, or party post) and the position level (municipal, state or national) with multinomial regression models. Results indicate that younger deputies from plurality seats systematically seek elected offices at local levels of government. Experience in local or national positions correspondingly leads to bureaucratic positions in the same political arenas. Partisan affinity with state governors affects the likelihood of getting a non-elected position but not its level, whereas local election calendars affect the future position levels but not its type. PAN deputies are more likely to get bureaucratic and national level appointments than PRI deputies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Campbell, Converse et al., (1960) pointed out that belief systems have never surrendered easily to empirical study or quantification. However, this paper attempts to empirically locate the space occupied by each of the three major Mexican political parties in the different ideological cleavages and assess whether they have been able to successfully deliver a coherent ideological message to the electorate. After a brief explanation of the existence of a regime cleavage, which has coexisted with the traditional socio-economic cleavages, this paper locates the parties in each ideological cleavage according to both the electorate's and the elite's perception. If political parties have been successful in delivering the message of the type of society they aim to pursue no major difference between the mass and the elite placement of the parties would be expected. Generally, elites give meaning to political labels, such as 'left' and 'right', and this should be reflected in citizens' perception of the parties' ideological position. In order to test this hypothesis a mass based principal component factor analysis is used to observe the position given by the electorate to each party in the left-right continuum. This is compared with a principal component factor analysis, based on data from parliamentary elite surveys, reflecting the location of the political parties within the different ideological conflict lines. The empirical results presented in this paper show that while the PAN and the PRD are capable of delivering a coherent ideological message to the electorate, the PRI has difficulties in doing so and faces important challenges in this respect. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the centralization processes in Mexico and Russia. In this paper, the author traces and compares the development of the centralization processes that occurred in Russia from 2000-present and in Mexico from the revolution of 1910 to the eventual reversal of the country's tightly centralized system in the 1990s. The study demonstrates how the structure and strength of parties of power resulted in a shift in the balance of power between the center and regions and supports Riker's contention that federal institutions oftentimes take a back seat to other political factors in determining the actual distribution of power and resources within a federal polity.

This paper examines the impact of elite framing on the attitudes of Americans and Mexicans toward political and economic ramifications of NAFTA ten years after the agreement was signed, using data from 2004 national samples from both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a discussion of three questions central to the practice of indigenous autonomy in southern Mexico. Why did the federal government grant it? Is it consistent with liberal democratic principles? Does it benefit indigenous Mexicans? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper relaxes the informational assumptions of Weingast's (1997) model of democratic stability by applying the solution concept of quantal response equilibrium (QRE). Case studies of The American Colonies, Mexico, and China illustrate the findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization under the neoliberal paradigm has reduced the role of state intervention in global markets, and in the process reconfigured state/society interactions at the domestic level. These new forms of politics create the possibility of “globalization from below,” social movements that resist the logic and priorities of the global market by seeking to create autonomous political structures from the grassroots up. This paper will examine the case of the Zapatista autonomy movement in Chiapas, which began at the municipal level in 1994 and expanded into regional structures of autonomous government announced in 2003. The evolution of this movement will be analyzed in relation to changing responses by the Mexican state and global capital. In the comparative context of other new political movements confronting neoliberalism in Latin America–such as landless rural workers (MST) in Brazil, indigenous groups in Ecuador (CONAIE), and mobilizations against privatization and austerity in Bolivia and Argentina–the Zapatista movement can help understand the politics of organizing to confront global capital as the state recedes. The research draws on over a dozen stays in Zapatista communities as a human rights observer since 1994; and particularly in the Montes Azules region, which is the current center of conflict in Chiapas between local priorities and global marketing of commodities such as biodiversity and hydraulic resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The democratic transition and consolidation literatures recognize the key role that civil society plays in the consolidation and deepening of electoral democracy. As a corollary, societies with a weak civil society will have a difficult time consolidating an already vulnerable democracy. This then begs the question, how can civil society be encouraged to grow? Civil society can be encouraged to develop indirectly through a variety of mechanisms including funding for civil society organizations and tax deduction laws that create legal incentives. However, in some Mexican states controlled by the PAN, state governments have tried to create civil society directly by establishing neighborhood committees to mediate between government and society. The neighborhood committees are intended to build consensus about desired infrastructure projects, petition the government accordingly, and mobilize resources to pay for projects. This paper seeks to determine whether these committees are a successful government led creation of civil society or merely a different form of the same government control that has plagued organization life in Mexico’s past? This study proposes a survey of, and selected interviews with, the presidents of Tijuana’s neighborhood communities. Controlling for income and service levels, the study examines democratic practices within the committees, links to other civil society organizations, and their relationships with the PAN lead government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the changes in nomination rules used to choose state governor candidates in Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional, since 1995. I develop a formal model of intraparty politics to explore the effects of federalist policies, rising interparty competition, and economic liberalization on the choice of nomination method. Economic liberalization created opportunities for opposition parties to challenge the ruling party’s dominance in subnational elections. This, in turn, decreased PRI politician’s costs of exiting the ruling party and ignited redistributive conflicts between central and local actors in the party. The central leadership faced the question of retaining control over nominations or devolving power over candidate selection to local elites. The decision hung on striking a balance between the need for popular candidates and the intraparty distribution of rents of office. The model determines under which combinations of economic and electoral conditions the central leadership finds it optimal to surrender control over nominations. These hypotheses are tested with data from forty-four gubernatorial candidate selection processes, spanning eight years and two federal administrations. The results of the statistical models show that interparty competition is a less accurate predictor of institutional change than redistributive conflicts within the party hierarchy. These results have implications for how we think about the political economy of institutions, in the context of democratization in former one-party regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globalization under the neoliberal paradigm has reduced the role of state intervention in global markets, and in the process reconfigured state/society interactions at the domestic level. These new forms of politics create the possibility of “globalization from below,” social movements that resist the logic and priorities of the global market by seeking to create autonomous political structures from the grassroots up. This paper will examine the case of the Zapatista autonomy movement in Chiapas, which began at the municipal level in 1994 and expanded into regional structures of autonomous government announced in 2003. The evolution of this movement will be analyzed in relation to changing responses by the Mexican state and global capital. In the comparative context of other new political movements confronting neoliberalism in Latin America–such as landless rural workers (MST) in Brazil, indigenous groups in Ecuador (CONAIE), and mobilizations against privatization and austerity in Bolivia and Argentina–the Zapatista movement can help understand the politics of organizing to confront global capital as the state recedes. The research draws on over a dozen stays in Zapatista communities as a human rights observer since 1994; and particularly in the Montes Azules region, which is the current center of conflict in Chiapas between local priorities and global marketing of commodities such as biodiversity and hydraulic resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses evidence from Mexico to test two competing visions about how democracy produces responsive government. Electoral theories of democracy, such as accountability theory, posit that democracies are responsive to the public interest because citizens are able to use elections as a means of controlling politicians. Participatory theories explain levels of responsiveness as a function of a citizenry?s ability to articulate demands and influence government through a wider range of political action. I test hypotheses derived from these two theories, using an original dataset that combines electoral, socioeconomic, public-financial, and demographic indicators for virtually all of Mexico?s 2400 municipalities, from 1980 to 2000. Although most recent research on Mexico has emphasized the importance of elections as instruments of democracy, my data show that electoral competition has little effect on municipal government performance. Non-electoral forms of participation, on the other hand, are closely and strongly correlated with government performance. Most surprisingly, the data show no evidence of an interactive effect: a competitive electoral environment does not appear to be a necessary condition for participation to be influential. I argue that Mexico?s institutional context is responsible for the failure of elections to influence government responsiveness in Mexican municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Factors Determining the Process of Democratization in Mexico By Clemente Quinones University of Connecticut Basically all the Latin American politics experts coincide that Mexico is now consolidating its democracy after going through a relatively long and arduous process of democratization beginning with the most substantial electoral change of the late 1970s. In his now classic study of modernization and post-modernization, Inglehart (1997) concludes that basically the whole world is in the post materialist wave, including developing regions of the world, such as Western Europe (16 nations), North America, Latin America, and Asia. Within the Latin American region, inglehart included Mexico. In a few words, the post materialist values are basically also part of Latin American (including Mexico) and Asian cultural assets. On his part, Putnam (1993) found that social capital (civic-ness) had a stronger impact on the Italian political institutions (government performance, turnout) than the economic factors of the modernization theory. So strong was this impact that economic advanced Italian regions appeared to have more successful regional governments because they happened to be more civic (Putnam, 1993). In this paper, I try to see the extent to which the post-materialist and social capital values affect the democratization process in Mexico. My hypothesis is that although these variables had an important role, there were also some other non-less-important factors, including domestic political leaders’ will and international variables, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other financial institutions. Using the World Value Survey data, I will apply a regression analysis whose dependent variable will be the democratization process and the independent factors will include different specific post-materialist and social capital values and some indicators of external factors and individual leaders’ pressure to democratize the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reframes urban informality as a socially produced space. With this framework, I analyze and discuss informality and its policy implications in Mexican cities. I argue that through regularization policy, the main strategy to approach informality in Mexico, the informal space has been partitioned. Placing regularization at the center of governmental strategies addressing urban informality constrains informality to its legal definition. Conversely, understanding informality as a way of life, as a place of political and economical interaction, as a framework of social experience and symbolic representations and as a space containing all these dimensions, may help in drawing a clearer picture of the informal space and in turn better inform the policy to tackle it. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the indigenous people who lived in the rural towns surrounding the Viceroyalty capitals of New Spain and Peru, and how they dealt with the new local political institutions that the Constitutional Monarchy tried to establish across its territories. It was during this time that the wars of independence were taking place with different intensities in Spanish America. The explanation for the adoption and rejection of the new forms of vote and representation lies in the cognitive force of indigenous political traditions. The central argument is that in New Spain, many of the values, beliefs and representations made the transition easier, while in Peru it was not the case. This was due to cultural differences that arose from the density and frequency of local commercial interactions between Indians, low rank Spaniards and Mestizos. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the ongoing political party system realignment in Mexico and the implications this holds for electoral outcomes. In particular, the 2009 Congressional elections are likely to be a predictor of the direction of change for the 2012 General Election, in which the President and Senate are up for election. So, we examine the evolution of the post-reform party system through 2006, apply modeling based on individual party identification, electoral outcome, and state-level office holding to predict the result of the Congressional elections. This is used to project party consolidation and fragmentation for the 2012 General Election. For example, a resurgent Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) indicates the potential for a three-party system, yet the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is riven by two ideologically distinct factions and faces the possibility of collapse. The National Action Party (PAN) struggles to capitalize on its holding of the Presidency, and five other parties seek to carve out electoral space in the evolving political environment. What does the 2009 election portend, and what will this hold with regard to the shape of the electorate in 2012? ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper emerges from the recent proliferation of discussions concerning Arendt's views on sovereignty, humanity, and superfluousness. Tracing some of the different strands of her notion of human superfluousness, I look at how the exclusion and deprivation inherent in the idea of superfluousness is reflected in, and illuminated by, contemporary questions surrounding stateless persons some key experiences of terrorism and the femicides of Ciudad Juarez. I argue that the strong and radical connections this notion has with Arendt´s concept of violence deserve more emphasis than it has hitherto received. For the link between superfluousness and the biopolitical administration of bare lives undertaken increasingly by our political institutions and practices not only permits the justification of the use of violence. It can also be seen as a veiled but highly dangerous form of violence itself. And, if this is the case, it is not only stateless persons, illegal migrants and political detainees who are rendered superfluous by contemporary poietic politics, but ordinary citizens too. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do women know less about politics than men do? This study analyzes the existence and persistence of a gender gap in political knowledge in Mexico. While there is evidence of gender differences in political knowledge in the United States that in turn shape patterns of political participation (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Dow 2008; Kenski 2006; Kenski and Jamieson 2000; Mondak and Anderson 2004; Verba, Burns and Schlozman 1997), this topic has received very little attention in the context of new democracies. This paper seeks to address that gap by analyzing surveys conducted in Mexico from 1997-2006 as part of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project. I find that there is a gender gap in political knowledge in Mexico. I also find evidence that differences in education patterns between men and women have the largest impact on differences in political knowledge. However, a sizable difference across the two genders continues to exist even after controlling for other sociodemographic factors. I then discuss the implication of these findings for the conditions that might help reduce the gender differences in political sophistication. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A rising literature on voting behavior emphasizes a “two step” model (originally argued by Dominguez and McCann in Democratizing Mexico), where a voter first examines their attitudes toward the dominant party and then towards their personal economic or personal interests. However, there are divergent findings from tests of this model, and there are methodological differences that limit our ability to make consistent conclusions. In this paper, we reexamine the validity of the “two-step” argument using data from the 2000 Mexico and 2006 Paraguay elections and employ methods we argue are more appropriate for these tests: 1) a mixed logistic estimation and 2) statistical backwards induction. From the mixed logistic regression, we conclude that voters in nations with hegemonic parties confer greater importance to the image of the dominant party, confirming the “two step” model. From the statistical backwards induction analysis, we confirm that the existence of the two steps respond to strategic considerations of voters. These findings have relevant implications for transitions to a multi-party democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the literature on indigenous political mobilization in Latin America is now quite extensive, relatively little has been published on why ethnic mobilization has not occurred in some indigenous regions. In this paper, I examine a case where there is very little mobilization and organization around ethnic identity: Yucatán, Mexico. I begin with a political history of Yucatán, comparing and contrasting it with neighboring Chiapas state. I then argue that ethnic mobilization in Yucatán is significantly limited by a lack of robust organizational networks available to potential activists. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the relationship between perceptions of corruption and two dimensions of trust, interpersonal trust and trust in fundamental government institutions using Mexico as the case study. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The organization of fair elections requires impartial and independent electoral management bodies. This paper analyses the impact of electoral competition on the independence of state level electoral institutions in Mexico, an emerging democracy. We posit a simple model where increased political competition in local elections leads to more independent electoral management bodies through various mechanisms at different stages of a democratization processâ??noting that competition in local, state assembly or gubernatorial elections do not produce the same incentives for electoral reform among all political parties. We develop an original index of the independence of electoral institutions for the Mexican states during the 1990 to 2004 period, and analyze a number of measures of political competition to assess some of the hypotheses derived from our model. Results indicate that increased competitiveness in governor and legislative races leads to more independent electoral institutions, whereas competition in municipal races does not. Increased competition from some political parties elicits larger increases in independence than others. We also find that, as the number of effective political parties increase, the pressure for further electoral reform eventually settles down. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The isolated effect of religious affiliation does not always explain affinities of left-wingers. A solution for this lack is proposed in this paper, where I provide specific individual-level measures that were designed and collected for the first time in Mexico in order to explain preferences in the political spectrum, such as religious awareness, preferences for a horizontal Church, and the political effect of the Holy Masses. The dependent variable in the analysis is party identification with the three major parties and independent respondents, using several religious dimensions as explanatory variables, demographic measures and religious leader's opinions, where identification with the PRI is influenced by religiosity, a stronger preference in favor of religious politics, and conservative moral values; variables as horizontal Church and good opinions about the main Cardinal in the country play in favor of the PAN; and religious awareness, Catholic Church Structure, horizontal Church and political Masses have a positive impact in the identification with the PRD. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I use experimental methods to analyze the effect of both voters and electoral candidates' phenotypic appearance on the voters' evaluation of electoral candidates, in contexts where race isn't a clear line of political/social conflict. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the determinants of the composition of subnational public spending –pork, patronage, and public goods- where the provision of local public goods takes place under decentralized arrangements. Recent research on the composition of public spending looks at political institutions, e.g., system of government, electoral rules, structure and size of the legislature, but disregards partisan factors. This paper suggests that the choice among alternative combinations of policy is shaped by the partisan constraints and inducements faced by subnational politicians: party competition, partisan control of government and the level of party system centralization. The paper looks at two Latin American cases, Mexico and Argentina, and argues that under mechanisms of partisan political centralization, the proportion of spending on public goods increases in subnational units governed by opposition parties –vis-à-vis the national executive. On the other hand, in the absence of mechanisms of partisan political centralization, the proportion of spending on public goods depends on the level of party competition at the subnational level. The study tests the hypotheses in a cross-section time-series analysis of the composition of subnational government spending in Mexico and Argentina in the period 1980-2000. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we look at how campaign investments affect municipal and district-level vote shares for the three major parties in Mexico for the 2000 elections. Our explanatory variables include the number of candidate campaign appearances, coverage in the local media market, campaign expenditures, and the number of registered party activists in each locale. This massive and original data set allows us to estimate the effects of electoral investments that politicians make during the course of a campaign. From a practical point of view, the analysis allows us to predict the substitutability of, say, a given number of activists for each thousand dollars in ad buy time. It also allows us to simulate, for instance, how much more investment would have helped the incumbent PRI retain the presidency instead of losing to the challenger PAN after 71 years of single party dominance. From a theoretical perspective, the paper gives us an aggregate data perspective on campaign effects. We believe that campaign effects should be substantial in Mexico’s new democracy since voters have had very limited experience in aligning their personal preferences with the partisan options. However, to this point, individual-level analyses using both cross-sectional and panel survey designs have found more limited effects than one would expect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the impact of democratic governance on the pension reforms in Mexico. The country's regime transition to democracy seems to have little effect on pension reforms. The democratic transition did not significantly improve the capability of the National Union of Workers of the Social Security and its labor allies to resist important socioeconomic reforms set forth by the government. This could be attributed to several factors, which includes the lack of popular support for independent labor's discourse.

I examine central bank reform efforts in Brazil, Thailand, and Mexico, arguing that more veto players inhibit reform and that competition over the benefits of policy innovation can prevent reform, even if most players agree it would be beneficial. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the geographical distribution of PROGRESA, a social transfer program in Mexico. Although Mexico has a history of clientelism and patronage, PROGRESA was designed to be nonpartisan. Very clear eligibility criteria were developed to prevent politicized distribution of benefits. However, despite these safeguards, the author finds evidence for a core supporter model of distribution. Even after controlling for whether a locality was eligible for PROGRESA, she findd that for every ten percentage point increase in the 1997 PRI vote share in the municipality.

This presentation analyzes the complicated judicial process before and after the 2001 Yucatan Gubernatorial elections and shows that even after the historical 2000 Presidential Elections Mexican electoral system has flaws at local level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I discuss how the PRI in Mexico has reformed the way that it selects candidates for public office. I argue that loopholes in the new rules often allow party elites to avoid using open procedures in favor of closed ones, thus avoiding reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that the value of party labels as heuristic devices depends on individual perceptions of party reputation, including cognition and affect. We test our theory using data collected from university students in the U.S., Mexico and Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study seeks to explain variation in civil society ? government relations and the creation of political opportunities for civil society organizations to address problems of water and sanitation along Mexico?s northern border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to popular opinion non-Mexican-origin wage earners do not suffer from competition with Mexican immigrants. The "border-wage" in Southern California and Texas is a "Mexican" wage that actually privileges Non-Hispanic Whites [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to some authors, party identification (PID) may not only increase with time, but can also decrease as a consequence of evaluation of parties’ performance. Theories related to ‘active’ learning state that people could learn from both positive and negative inputs. Campbell and his colleagues acknowledged that PID could consist of positive and negative feelings, although most research has focused on the positive side. It is not only that positive performance will lead individuals to prefer one party to another, but it is also the case that poor performance will lead them to choose a second best party, or in some cases no party at all. In these cases, the ‘hostility’ toward parties may be the main guide in defining PID. It has been argued that there are more chances of disliking one or more parties without liking any other in multiparty systems relative to two-party systems. Evaluations of party performance over time may give rise not just to positive feelings that enhance PID, but also may produce negative sentiments that decrease PID, or in some cases, increase hate toward a party, what has been defined as ‘negative’ PID. Two-party systems, as Britain or the United States, offer a partial setting for studying parties’ negative evaluations, mainly because competition is polarized, and even perhaps this is the reason why very few studies have been found on the subject. Conversely, a multiparty system facilitates the analysis of negative evaluations, expecting to find both people who have developed an attachment to a party and people that may hate other political parties. An ideal context to study such as the impact of negative evaluations is either the one-party systems, as post-Communist countries where it is expected to find certain degree of aversion to the former ruling party, or countries where long-ruling parties had governed but recently lost, like Taiwan or Mexico. Previous studies have distinguished positive from negative PID, by demonstrating the existence of two different kinds of attachment. Those respondents who mention that they would never vote for some party are said to have developed a negative PID. In contrast, I hypothesize that there is one sort of party attachment (that is PID) that may be guided by both positive and negative party evaluations. I hypothesize that positive and negative feelings are determinants of PID. For both Panistas and Perredistas the PRI should be the party they would never vote for. For the case of independents, I also hypothesize that even though these individuals do not hold a clear partisan attachment, they should hold a strong anti-PRI feeling, even stronger than towards any other party. In sum, looking at countries that ended up a one-party period or an authoritarian period gives an interesting but overlooked tweak that may advance research on PID by developing the concept of negative party identification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines water and sanitation problems in the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua. Issues concerning the policy process from the 1960s to the 1980s; Comparison between integrated and non-integrated networks; Sub-networks of the water and sanitation policy network.

Political scientists have examined in great depth the transformation of formal and informal political institutions in systems undergoing democratization processes. Nevertheless, the effects of democratization on the operation of federations have been largely overlooked (Gibson 2003). This research investigates whether the process to solve disputes between state and municipal governments in Mexico has been transformed by the democratization process. Binary panel data models were estimated to investigate the effects of municipal electoral competition and vertically divided government on the probability that a municipality (the third level of government in Mexico) introduces a constitutional controversy versus its state government at the Supreme Court. We provide evidence to support the hypothesis that under the new democratic conditions, municipal presidents from political parties other than the party of the governor tended to be more active and demanding in their interactions with the state governments; and therefore contributed to decentralize the federal system. The statistical analysis reveals that, in the 1995-2000 period, municipalities in vertical divided government relationships with their state government were more likely to introduce constitutional controversies than those in unified relationships, other factors remaining equal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do U.S. citizens at the border between Mexico and the U.S. show a distinctive set of foreign policy orientations and sensitivity due to their proximity to the most ?foreign? of the U.S.?s borders? A representative survey of El Paso, Texas residents tests the following counterintuitive hypotheses: (1) Those who share a strong borderlands identity are the most likely to hold essentially isolationist attitudes; (2) Affinity for Mexicans and Mexico is inversely related to cooperative internationalist attitudes; and (3) Those most integrated into the local socio-political system will be the most economically protectionist. These seemingly contradictory attitudes are not "borderline/top-of-the-head thinking" but are rooted in the socioeconomic realities of a border which is isolated from the world at large. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of panel data from Brazil, Mexico, and Russia suggests that presidential campaigns have ambiguous effects on inequalities in mass-level political knowledge. In all three campaigns, the gap in political knowledge between individuals with fewer socioeconomic resources and those with more resources stayed the same or widened. At the same time, less affluent, less educated citizens who paid a great deal of attention to the campaign learned more than equally attentive high-status citizens. These findings suggest that electoral campaigns have the potential to mitigate the knowledge gap, even if they fail to do so in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

use individual level polling data to show that Latin Americans have long economic memories. I argue that, thanks to repeated hardship associated with economic crisis and reform, voters should wish to punish all parties deemed responsible for their economic woes. Even so, not all established parties have lost support. Political institutional arrangements determine whether voters will reject multiple parties, or whether they will concentrate on punishing just incumbents. Statistical analysis of public opinion data from Argentina shows that when institutions permit the entry and survival of multiple parties in the system, voters are more likely to punish multiple parties at election time. Data from Mexico, in contrast, shows that voters only began punishing the hegemonic PRI for economic problems after the introduction of political liberalization, that is, electoral reform. The study thus shows that retrospective voting models as applied to developing countries should not be limited to analyses of incumbent party support. Rather, they should be (1) cast in light of political institutional context and (2) extended to other parties in the system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political acculturation remains a topic of substantial interest to both scholars and policy-makers. In this article, we draw on data from the Democracy through U.S. and Mexican Lenses Project and the Latino National Political Survey to analyze the relative ?stickiness? of political attitudes among Mexican-origin people in the United States. We find that some differences in political attitudes and behavior are small or evanescent, but other differences persist even when demographic factors are taken into account. In general, political acculturation seems to be more thorough on elements of democratic process whose results are more tangible and whose operation is more easily understood. By contrast, large differences between the Mexican-origin population and non-Mexican Americans persist for more subtle or intensive elements of the political process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to document the construction of Mexican immigrants as a national security threat in the U.S. media during the 2006 Congressional debates over immigration reform. This is done with both a qualitative newspaper content analysis and a qualitative critical discourse analysis. A random sample of 107 newspaper articles printed between 1/1/06 and 6/30/06 are analysed from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle and USA Today. Using an analysis of two framing metaphorsâ€" Immigrant as Threat and Immigrant as Dangerous Watersâ€"this study documents how Mexican immigrants, by being framed as a national security threat, have been used to forward a call to secure and defend the borders from a perceived threat to U.S. Anglo culture. This paper shows how these calls are partially rooted in white nationalist discourses and a fear of Mexican immigrants who are seen as foreign invaders. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debate over legal and illegal immigration in our local communities and nationwide has produced a number of reactions. Some cities have passed laws favoring immigration, others have voted on resolutions and ordinances restricting the ability of certain groups to rent or work within their boundaries, still others have remained neutral. .x000d..x000d.Sandler acknowledges that many states have also created laws dealing with illegal immigrants and their employment in the U.S. workforcen (Sandler 2006). .x000d..x000d.The first section of this paper will discuss the historical and prevailing trends in cross-border immigration and the socio-economic variables that exist inside Mexico and the United States that creates an atmosphere to propel individuals to migrate north. At this point, the paper will describe the different actions that have taken place by local governments with respect to immigration. I describe these as sanctuary cities, enforcement cities, and neutral cities. Next, the paper will attempt to show a flaw in local government’s ability to legislate immigration policy by showing similarities to the Jim Crow laws of the last century. Finally, the paper shows the dilemma local governments find themselves in because of the lack of action. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]