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How does vote intention in presidential elections vary according to the economic conditions of a country, especially indicators of the financial market? Does the state of the economy, both its fundamentals as well as capital market, affect variation in candidates' percentage of vote intention in national polls? This paper tests how economic indicators influence vote intention in presidential elections in two emerging markets: Brazil and Mexico. The presidential elections of 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2006 in Brazil and 2000 and 2006 in Mexico are analyzed using all poll returns for each electoral period and corresponding economic data. The paper finds that no theory is capable of explaining results throughout the dataset but partisan explanations and Stokes' (2001) categories of alternatives to retrospective voting help elucidate vote intention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a research paper which focuses on the consistency and changes in the labor laws and related politics in Mexico and Brazil. It discusses on the labor law reforms and the evolution of labor practices in both the countries, and the efforts of Brazilian labor actors to circumvent legal challenges. It also focuses on the labor relations model of intense state involvement and a prevalence of labor unions in Mexico.

This paper outlines the contours of an ongoing research project on the politics of banking-sector opening in Mexico, Brazil, and Indonesia. The project tries to understand why these three countries opened their domestic banking sectors to foreign participation in the 1990s and early 2000s after decades of financial protectionism, and why their governments countries exercised different degrees of control over the opening process. I find that international pressure by itself did not generate significant opening; only when external pressure converged with banking shocks, and sometimes also with domestically-driven ideational change, did significant opening follow. I also find that although the shocks forced major de jure opening in all three countries, in practice, policymakers gradually reasserted control over the opening process and were able to harness foreign capital to advance domestic political priorities. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that a multilevel field of contentious collective action has emerged around trade agreement negotiations in the Americas. Building on empirical evidence from field research in Brazil, Chile, Mexico and the United States, it focuses on the challenges of coordinating such a field. More especifically, it presents the cases of cross-sectoral coalitions created in Mexico and in Chile to act as brokers in trade-related mobilizations. Coordination problems are put in the context of power relations among civil society organizations, of broader dilemmas of connecting the local and the global, and in the context of the negotiation of a new generation of trade agreements. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latin America is often characterized as a low-tax region, but the level of taxation actually varies drastically from country to country. This article explores the especially striking contrast between Brazil and Mexico, two countries that share some key characteristics but nevertheless have dramatically different tax burdens. Brazilian tax revenues have averaged roughly 34% of gross domestic product in recent years, compared to less than 12% in Mexico. Existing theories of taxation, which emphasize contemporary economic and institutional structures, cannot adequately account for this difference. Only the "rentier state" literature sheds some light on it, and the explanation it provides is quite incomplete. I argue that the stark contrast in tax burdens between these two countries can be traced to contingent historical events that shaped in enduring ways elite views of the proper role of the state, as well as the political capacity of popular sectors to pressure for greater expenditure, thus necessitating higher tax revenues. In the Brazilian case I emphasize the country's uniquely smooth transition to independent nationhood, while in the case of Mexico I point to the impact of the revolution of 1910-1920 and the subsequent social, economic and political reforms, especially under President Lázaro Cárdenas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Levels of democracy at the subnational level vary significantly in many federations, especially in developing democracies such as Argentina, Brazil, India, Mexico, Russia and South Africa. Instances of subnational authoritarianism are not uncommon in such nations. The literature on democracy and democratization, however, has mainly focused on regimes at the national level. Using quantitative evidence from the 24 Argentine provinces, I test theories of democracy that have been proposed by the national-level literature, and argue, drawing on rentier and fiscal theories of the state, that a key factor explaining variance in subnational democracy is the extent to which the incumbent in each unit benefits from rents. A burgeoning recent literature has studied the regime effects of natural resource rents (such as those produced by oil), and has suggested that, in very poor countries, foreign aid functions as a form of rent that hinders democracy. I argue that, in middle-income federations such as Argentina, the main source of subnational rents is the redistribution of tax revenues collected by the federal government. Rules and practices that disproportionally allocate these fiscal resources to poorer or smaller units provide their incumbents with generous rents that allow them to restrict democratic competition. Thus, fiscally progressive redistribution often results in politically regressive outcomes. A recursive OLS regression model shows that, in Argentina, the larger the federal fiscal (and oil) rents a province receives, the lower its level of democratic competition, even after controlling for modernization and other alternative theoretical accounts of democracy. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the engagement in electoral activism by gay and lesbian liberation movements in Brazil and Mexico in 1982. Electoral reforms which were responsible for the legal registration of political parties on the left and their entry into electoral politics in Mexico; Establishment of the Rosario Ibarra Lesbian and Homosexual Support Committee; Electoral strategies that came to prevail both countries within social movement fields.