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This paper explores dynamics of change and continuity in subnational (provincial) authoritarianism in nationally democratic regimes. Borrowing from theories of territorial politics, it provides a framework for analyzing the strategic context in which incumbent authoritarian elites and local and national opponents pursue strategies of territorial control and opposition. Subnational authoritarianism must be understood not as a local issue but as an outcome of broader dynamics of national territorial governance in democratic regimes. Conflicts between incumbents and opposition are played out across multiple territorial arenas in the national political system. In nationally democratic regimes, incumbent authoritarian elites will pursue three types of strategies across territorial arenas: the parochialization of power, the nationalization of influence, and the monopolization of national-subnational institutional linkages. Subnational democratization, when it occurs, will result from intervention by actors in national political arenas. To this end, a distinction is made between two ?modes? of subnational political change: ?party-led? transitions and ?center-led? transitions. The paper concludes with case studies of two recent conflicts over subnational democratization: the state of Oaxaca in Mexico, and the province of Santiago del Estero in Argentina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores labor responses to international production outsourcing in Latin America. The author analyzes the tendency of some labor groups to develop broad national and transnational social alliances to pursue their claims, while other groups fragmented and developed close relations with management on a plant level. The author argues that industrial structure, national labor relations regimes, and labor ideologies shape four forms of labor responses: transnational activist networks, transnational labor networks, microcorporatism, and clientelism. Field research for this paper was conducted in El Salvador, Honduras, Brazil, and Argentina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers the first systematic analysis of mass public opinion regarding debt default. The research, which draws on a unique survey of Argentine public opinion, supports two conclusions. First, the preferences of individual Argentines followed a clear pattern that depended on their objective position in the economy and their views about financial flows that a default would disrupt. Other factors equal, those employed in the public sector, those who were unemployed or at risk of losing their jobs, and those who doubted the value of future capital inflows tended to favor default. Second, the effect of economic circumstances was strongest for the most sophisticated portion of the electorate. The paper develops this point by employing several measures of economic sophistication, and recommends that similar measures be incorporated into future research on economic policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though democratization has set into motion decentralizing changes in much of Latin America, this paper argues that the roots of the contemporary wave of decentralization lie in the pre-democratic period. Toward the goal of encouraging dialogue between the older literature on authoritarianism and the emerging literature on decentralization, this paper focuses on Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, the three countries in Latin America that have received the most scholarly attention by students of military government. According to the dynamic I explore in this paper, the replacement of democratically-elected subnational officials with appointed individuals from the center enabled military governments to contemplate a subsequent expansion in the roles played by subnational governments. Having asserted tight political control over subnational officials, de facto authorities at the national level no longer had cause to worry that subnational spheres of government could be used in ways that would challenge or undermine their objectives. In each case, the generals designed reforms in subnational institutions in the service of ambitious attempts to remake their countries’ economies and polities. The paper closes with the argument that military-era reforms at the subnational level profoundly shaped subsequent events in the democracies that re-emerged in the 1980s and 90s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the theory-building portion of a larger project inquiring into the effects of war on the tendency of international rivalries to persist or terminate. The research design of the larger project, a comparative cases design focusing on the rivalry profiles of three different states (Germany, the United States, and Argentina) is discussed. Selected preliminary findings from the Argentine case are utilized in an effort to refine extant hypotheses regarding war and rivalry termination in an effort to build more nuanced theory in this area. The paper concludes with a discussion of one possible direction: a new categorization of rivalries, where different hypotheses regarding war and termination are expected to apply to different rivalry types. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most contemporary democracies governments play a dominant role in the law-making process, as they introduce a significant proportion of bills to the legislature. However, the probability of success of these bills varies considerably. For example, in Argentina, the number of government bills approved as a percentage of all government-sponsored bills introduced in the Chamber of Deputies from 1983 to 1996 amounts to an average 64 percent(including and a minimum of 49% in 1986 and a maximum of 80% in the previous year). This paper studies how cross-voting affect governments' legislative success. I argue that uncertainty about legislators' support for government bills and limited governmental resources to engage in "vote buying" explain why defeats occur. The paper shows that Argentine presidents' overall legislative success has not been very different from other presidential regimes. However, by looking at the content of those bills that never made it through congress, I identify a peculiar policymaking pattern that may account for Argentine governments’ poor performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper combines institutional and bargaining analysis to assess the consequences of decentralization policy reforms on the evolution of balance of power among presidents, governors, and mayors. I reject the limitations of static theories of decentralization in favor of a dynamic account of institutional evolution that incorporates the effects of policy feedbacks on preference formation in multi-staged processes. I define decentralization as a three-dimensional process that involves fiscal, administrative, and political reforms, and I distinguish between the partisan and territorial interests of bargaining actors. I propose a sequential theory of decentralization that considers actors? preferences, type of interests and coalitions, and the sequence of decentralization reforms. The argument of the paper is that the sequence and timing of fiscal, administrative, and political decentralization reforms and the type of political coalitions that initiate each round of reforms are two key determinants of the resulting evolution of intergovernmental balance of power. I test the argument by comparing the ways in which decentralization policies originated and unfolded in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia between 1978 and 1999. The paper shows, against commonly held beliefs, that different trajectories of decentralization (a democratic path in Colombia, a technocratic path in Mexico, and an authoritarian path in Argentina) led to the strengthening of governors and mayors in Colombia and Mexico, and to the decline of governors? preexisting resources and capacities in Argentina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the post transition period of the 1990s, political parties have lost some of their dominance, the state has shrunk and new forms of civic organizations have come into being. This paper uses the 1997 World Value survey to analyze how these changes have shaped the relationship between political party membership and civic organizational membership in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. While some politicians have feared the rise of civil society, this paper shows that there continues to be a strong link between civic organizational membership and party membership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper challenges an increasingly common claim about the relationship between domestic politics and foreign policy. Many political scientists argue that, in a democracy, domestic audiences constrain leaders to honor international commitments. I explain why this argument depends on three assumptions that are unlikely to hold in a wide range of cases. I then offer an alternative theory in which domestic audiences sometimes make compliance less rather than more likely, and I test it with a unique collection of public opinion polls about foreign debt in Argentina. The data reveal that domestic audiences prevented Argentina from suspending debt payments in 1999 but had the opposite effect two years later, when they contributed to the largest default in financial history. The results confirm the existence of a conditional, rather than direct, relationship between democratic accountability and compliance, and they suggest an important avenue for future research: investigating who favors default and when they are likely to become electorally decisive. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a preliminary assessment of the way in which the Argentine Supreme Court, reformed in 2003, has contributed to redefine its own institutional role through its procedures and decisions. Based on empirical research conducted in Argentina in 2005 and 2007, the paper shows that this Court has set out to recover its institutional standing and legitimacy through a new jurisprudence on rights as well as through innovative ways of judicial intervention, associated with what has been called "experimentalism" in public interest litigation, which include the participation of new kinds of actors and entail an emerging new relationship between the Court and civil society's organizations in Argentina. Contrastingly, it is shown, based on academic works in the field, that the Mexican Supreme Court, since its reform in 1994, has contributed through its decisions to define its own institutional role as a mediator in political conflicts. The paper offers a preliminary account of some factors that may have contributed to these differential results. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most of the literature on federalism has emphasized the relationship between national and subnational governments, but has overlooked the organization of power at the subnational level. Likewise, most of the debate on the separation of powers in presidential, parliamentary, and mixed systems has neglected the role of federalism in bolstering the separation of powers. In this paper, we argue federalism may be defined as a constitutional arrangement that creates executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government at the subnational level. This definition has important implications for the literatures on federalism and the separation of powers, two themes often treated in isolation. First, it directs the attention of students of federalism to the neglected subject of the separation of powers at the subnational level. Second, it directs the attention of students of the separation of powers to the issue of federalism. We show that the existence of institutional mechanisms that override the subnational separation of powers in federal systems is problematic for democracy and deserves further attention. We also point to the fact that by safeguarding the subnational separation of powers, federalism can strengthen democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we utilize theories originally developed to explain US congressional organization to analyze legislative organization in Argentina [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Argentina’s 1994 judicial reforms fit a pattern that characterized the Latin American experience with such reform in the 1990s. In Argentina, as in many Latin American countries, the ruling party could be induced to initiate judicial reforms (introduce constitutional revisions to strengthen the judiciary) but then proved unwilling to implement these constitutional changes (via the enactment of congressional legislation). As a result, institutional judicial advancements often remained purely paper changes. In the Argentine case, the ruling party delayed the implementation of judicial reform until it believed it was unlikely to maintain its position of political dominance. Judicial reform in such a situation may serve the ruling party as an "insurance policy" in which a stronger judicial branch reduces the risks the ruling party faces should it become the opposition. An empowered judiciary may check the capacity of incoming politicians to alter the outgoing party’s policies or to change the rules of the game in ways that would prevent the outgoing ruling party from returning to power in the future. My research suggests that the likelihood of effective judicial reform increases as the ruling party’s probability of reelection declines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When will judges act independently of elected officials? Although scholars agree that judicial autonomy is an essential condition of the rule of law, there is no consensus about the circumstances under which it occurs. In this paper, we use positive political theory (PPT) to develop a theory that specifies the institutional conditions for an independent judiciary. In brief, we argue that when the executive and legislative branches are united against the courts, the courts have few resources with which to defend an independent course. In contrast, when significant and sustained disagreements arise among elected officials -- such as under a divided government -- judges have the ability to challenge the state and sustain an independent course, with little fear of a political reaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how legislative rules structure amending behavior in the lower chambers of Argentina, Chile and Mexico. The article emphasizes the theoretical relevance of voting agendas, order of voting, status quo position and sequence of amending moves by committees and floor challengers. It shows that although individual deputies can get improvements by introducing floor amendments, committees are usually able to mitigate the effects of unwanted changes. It also shows that in Chile (unlike Argentina or Mexico), the executive has procedural rights that allow him to respond to committee reports with amendments of his own, and that he uses these prerogatives often to successfully protect presidential bills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the influence of human rights advocacy networks in post authoritarian countries, focusing on Argentina and Chile. I specifically study the role of advocacy networks that seek to protect individuals’ physical integrity from police abuse. This includes studying groups’ influence on legal reforms to guarantee a fair treatment at the moment of a citizen’s arrest and groups’ influence in reducing practices of police violence. The case studies reveals two findings: first, because most analyses have studied the influence of human rights groups on authoritarian regimes, the conclusions have tended to overemphasize their importance. When facing fragile established democratic regimes, advocacy networks confront new strategic challenges that have not been explored properly. The case studies prove that even if alliances between domestic and international advocacy networks work, the domestic configuration of power and the way the topic of citizens’ rights is framed strongly determine whether incumbents are willing to address the issue of police reforms and police brutality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effectiveness of the legal system in protecting citizens from arbitrary killing from the state. It presents data on the number of state killings in Uruguay, Argentina and Brazil, and on the judicial response to these killings. The analysis includes a discussion of inequality before the law, and calculates the effect of belonging to a certain disfavored social group on the effectiveness of the rights of members of that group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages in an empirical exploration of the link between political parties and democratic consolidation in Latin America using public opinion data collected in seven Latin American countries. Specifically, in each country I use structural equations analysis to explore factors that affect individual confidence in political parties and then examine the relationship between this level of confidence and support for democratic politics. Subsequently, I compare the findings cross-nationally, which allows for broader insights into the hypothesized connection between representative institutions and the strength of democracy. This analytical approach permits examination of these relationships within each of the countries studied and enables comparison throughout the region. We can draw two major conclusions from this analysis. First, in all seven countries a strong and significant link between confidence in political parties and confidence in Congress is found. Second, the analysis finds some support for the hypothesis that public confidence in political parties produces greater support for democracy, and by extension, that effective political parties can be important in democratic consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the recent shift from plurality to more inclusive rules of presidential elections in Latin America is the outcome of constitution-making processes in which no single party, particularly those with a large electoral base, is able to impose its preferred electoral rules. Being themselves the result of a competitive and pluralistic party system, it also proposes that the new rules of presidential elections are likely to produce less arbitrary and more socially acceptable outcomes than simple plurality rule would under the same circumstances. To illustrate the logic behind these propositions this work analyzes the origins and consequences of a recently created qualified plurality system of presidential elections in Argentina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the collapse of the Argentine presidency in 2001. It emphasizes the role of corruption and the breakdown of trust in state-societal relations, precipitated by the rampant corruption of the previous government and its party apparatus, Peronism. Other factors include the economic crisis and persistence of personalistic, populist politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a conceptualization and operationalization of the degree of democracy (as opposed to the quality of democracy) for the Argentine provinces. I use a mainstream and "thick" definition of regime type, and posit that, the least democratic subnational units in Argentina and other third-wave federations are better understood as hybrid regimes rather than "subnational authoritarianisms." I discuss the measurement implications of this conceptualization, develop a full operationalization of the concept, and present the methodological design of a survey of experts that serves as the measurement instrument. Preliminary results are presented as an illustration of the type of information that will be available once the survey is complete. Some dimensions of democracy -such as inclusion and fair counting of the votes- show little inter-provincial variance, while others ¬-such as freedom of expression and institutional constraints on the executive- vary considerably from province to province. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the domestic politics of sovereign debt repudiation. I contend that countries that are governed by a coalition of parties are less likely to reschedule their debts than those under single-party governments. I test this argument using cross-national data from 1971 to 1997 in 48 developing countries. My results show that ceteris paribus, the probability of debt repudiation is lower when there is a multi-party coalition rather than a single-party government in power. The effect of multi-party coalitions on sovereign defaults is quantitatively large and roughly of the same order of magnitude as liquidity factors such as debt burden and debt service. These results are robust to numerous specifications and samples. I complement my statistical findings with an examination of the Argentine default in 2001. I find that both the timing and the political circumstances under which the repudiation of the country's sovereign debt occurred correspond to the conditions identified in this paper. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the process of judicial independence building in democratizing nations from a political science perspective. It addresses the theoretical and empirical paradox: why does a ruling party agree to cede the control over a branch that could limit its future power? Using the cases of Argentina (2003-2006) and Mexico (1994-2004) we argue against two recent theoretical approaches developed to explain the structure of incentives leading governing elites to promote such institutional changes. Both explanations conceive reforms as rational strategies of actors to limit the power of opponents, the future government -according to the electoral incentives approach, and the party in power -according to the divided government approach. We challenge the notions of both approaches for the analysis or our cases and argue that both processes show a strong explanatory power of legitimacy and power building needs as incentives for self-limitation. We also argue that implementation of reforms occurred in these two cases in contexts both framed by a political institutional crisis in conjunction with a crisis of credibility of the courts. The results of this study suggest the existence of perhaps too many domestic contextual factors shaping incentives and strategies of reforming elites regarding judicial independence as to construct a single explanation behind judicial reform in democratizing nations. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on Argentina's economic decline (the 'Argentine Riddle') has focused on identifying the events leading up to a critical juncture sometime during the early to mid-twentieth century that predicated a change. Instead, by constructing a historical narrative of Argentina's economic institutions before identifying a juncture, I have found that the greatest theoretical traction is gained by an approach that uses Charles Lindblom's (1950; 1977) concept of incrementalism. This paper examines the relationship between primary historical sources and the actions taken by economic and political actors that defined economic institutions. Specifically, it studies the data collected on immigration and related aspects of the economy post 1876 until World War I. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In light of extensive decentralization in much of the world, analyses of citizen satisfaction with democracy that treat citizens as subjects of their national governments alone are incomplete. In this paper, I use regression analysis of unique survey data from Argentina to explore the relationship between local government performance and citizen satisfaction with democracy and use the results to suggest some implications for democratic stability in Latin America.I demonstrate that there is indeed an important link between local government performance and citizen system support, but also that citizens distinguish between qualitatively different types of government performance. Certain measures of local government performance, like corruption, have ramifications for citizens' evaluations of the functioning of their democracy, and even for citizens' faith in democracy per se. At the same time, other types of local government performance, such as local bureaucratic inefficiency, do not reverberate beyond the local sphere. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is part of a larger project looking at the factors that cause some voters to place greater weight on economic concerns when evaluating the incumbent or voting. Here we argue that informal employment, working without a written contract with your employer, makes voters vulnerable to shifts in the job market by inducing wage volatility and increasing the ease of being dismissed while denying workers access to potential coping mechanisms during economic downturns such as severance pay, unemployment insurance, or pensions. The result, we predict, is that informally employed voters will place greater weight on national economic outcomes and capabilities to generate jobs when voting. We test this hypothesis with original survey data on approval of Argentine President Nestor Kirchner and Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo as well as of voting intentions in the 2006 Peruvian presidential elections. The implications of the growth of the informal sector on electorasl outcomes is then discussed. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we analyze the distribution of pay and changing trends of inequality in Argentina and Brazil, illuminating the specific winners and losers, by region and by economic activity (sector). In both countries we find that inequality rose in the neoliberal period, but that it declined following the severe crises of neoliberal policy, in 1993 in Brazil and in late 2001 in Argentina. This period of post-neoliberalism is characterized in both countries by a decline in the economic weight of the financial sector and a recovery of the position of the civil service. In both countries, the rise in inequality leading to the crisis produced an increase in the relative position of the major metropolitan centers; this positional advantage also declined modestly in the post-crisis recovery period. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about the legislative oversight in Argentina is presented. It discusses how informal mechanisms may affect policy and other outcomes in Latin America. It explains why oversight mechanisms are widely used in Argentina although the country's legislatures have lower capacities than executives. It shows that legislative controls in Argentina are effective only when they impose threats on the executive.

Argentina and Turkey are two countries with different historical, cultural and institutional attributes. They are however both examples of new democratic regimes that emerged in the mid-1980s amid economic crisis . They are also two newly emerging markets with middle-income status, which switched to free market economics in the 1980s with accelerating privatization programs in the 1990s. Both of the governments applying these privatization plans have been populist in nature but technocratic and neoliberal in credentials. The initiators of economic reform programs, Ozal and Menem, both used effective coalition-making strategies with strongly clientelistic tones giving rise to rampant corruption. Privatizations, in both cases, were used as effective tools to bring about these outcomes while simultaneously shaping them as they emerged. The cases of Argentina and Turkey pose an interesting puzzle in terms of convergent effects of privatizations on democratization and its corollaries. This study argues that comparable patterns can be observed in the concentration of power, in the executive regardless of the parliamentary versus presidentialist regime divide, in the reaction patterns of labor unions and their development inthe neoliberal era, ispread of patronage links and corruption, and finally, in the fluctation of economic development in the two countries. These and other similar developments are then related to the privatization policies and their implementation. Further research should look at more detail in the direct relationship between privatizations, their implementation and consequences on workers and labor unions, party structures and civil society to determine if similar patterns exist as well in these features of democratization and examine why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What accounts for the successful responses of some emerging market countries to the challenges posed by integration into the global economy? And why do other countries fail to adjust to exogenous shocks, such as sudden shifts in their terms of trade or the willingness of foreigners to invest? Taking three recent currency crises in Argentina (in late 2001) and Brazil (early 1999, mid 2002) as illustrations, this essay proposes a diagnostic toolkit for thinking about the politics of adjustment to external economic shocks. We compare analytical frameworks that highlight 1) the strategic importance of the emerging market country to members of the G-7, 2) the difficult political sociology of certain economic policy shifts, and 3) the decision-making characteristics of the set of national political institutions. Differences in national decision-making patterns accounts most convincingly for Argentina?s more costly and prolonged adjustment to its recent forced devaluation and currency float, as compared to Brazil?s less painful policy shifts. However, one of the other frameworks proposed might be more useful for analyzing a different country?s response to some other exogenous shock. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chile and Argentina have had very different experiences of democracy and dictatorship. Together they illustrate how the overall relationship between regime type and economic performance may be indeterminate. At the same time, they illustrate the hypothesis that it is policies more than regimes that influence economic performance. Assuming that the impact of regimes on economic performance is mediated by policy, the direct answer to the question of title of this panel, ?How does regime type affect inequality?? is ?not directly.? But the argument that policies have a more direct effect on economic performance than regimes raises the question of the relationship between the policies that I argue contribute to good economic performance and inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the institutional arrangements of judicial independence in Uruguay, Brazil and Argentina. Definition and theory of judicial independence; Difference between independence and autonomy; Requirement for independence; Concepts of judicial independence.

Some political parties in Latin America and elsewhere in the developing world penetrate social networks so thoroughly that they are able to gather information about individual voters and extend or deny rewards to these individuals, conditional on their actions. These parties are able to hold voters "perversely accountable." When parties have these capabilities, can they buy people’s votes? And what kinds of voters will they target? Simple game theory models show that parties can influence individual voters’ votes. They will do so most successfully by targeting not loyal, nor opposition, nor (frequently) marginal voters, but instead voters who are weakly predisposed in their favor. These theoretical insights find support in evidence from original sample surveys conducted in a new democracy where vote buying is perceived as rampant: Argentina. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why hasn?t abortion been liberalized in Latin America? The first part of this article analyzes the experiences of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile in an attempt to answer this question, focusing on the rise of the reproductive rights movement, activism of the Vatican and anti-abortion movements, and the peculiar sociology of abortion in the region. The next part explores how differences in the position of the president on abortion and the availability of congressional allies for the reproductive rights movement affected the political climate surrounding abortion in the three countries in the 1990s and early 2000s. In Brazil, the most liberal country, a ?legal abortion? movement has emerged to encourage public health services to perform abortions on women who have been raped. In Argentina, there is almost no discussion about liberalizing abortion, but conservative attempts to ban abortion under all circumstances have failed. Chile, where abortion is illegal under all circumstances, is completely closed to discussions about liberalizing abortion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is a ?perfect dictatorship?? Such a regime provokes little societal resistance at installation. Its leaders act jointly to consolidate the regime and to broaden the support coalition by agreeing upon succession rules to rotate the presidency within the authoritarian regime. They delegate policy-making authority to civilians in areas of their competence. They emphasize consultation, not open contestation, prefer cooptation to repression, eschew ideological appeals, compel social actors into regime-licensed organizations, and deactivate civil society. South Korea under Park Chung Hee is compared on these dimensions to Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, all at a time when authoritarian regimes governed them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines constraints that limit possibilities for raising revenue from Latin America's under-taxed elites, which is critical for redistribution and for strengthening tax systems. Constraints can be either political or structural, and they very both across countries and across tax policy areas. I emphasize constraints that restrict the agenda space—that is, the set of reforms that policymakers consider as feasible options. I examine three politically salient areas of reform that are critical for improving tax equity in Chile and Argentina: increasing the corporate tax, taxing interest earned on financial assets (which is exempt in Argentina) and expanding tax agency access to bank information. In Chile, constraints are political rather than structural. Organizational and institutional factors enhance the influence of the right and business over the Concertación's corporate tax agenda beyond what would be expected from a simple reading of the configuration of powers in Congress and the structural power of capital. The same factors blocked access to information on checking accounts. In contrast, in the absence of such political constraints, the Argentine business sector achieved little influence over cross-sectoral corporate taxes from 1993 to 2005. However, both structural and political constraints hindered taxation of interest earnings and access to information on time deposits in Argentina. The powerful financial sector lobby, in combination with a widespread perception that taxing interest would cause depositors to withdraw their funds from the banks, kept these issues off of the reform agenda. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses a unique research design to statistically analyze the impact of inter-firm networks and publicly supported institutions on firm upgrading capabilities in emerging market societies. Our examination of the transformation of the Argentine wine industry in two provinces reveals the importance of a firm's "public-private" network. Links to other firms and institutions appear especially helpful to the extent they help the firm gain access to different communities of producers. Governments can aid upgrading and competitiveness, especially in backward societies, by building public-private institutions that not only offer supply-side resources to firms but also act as bridges across regions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion that governments bound by the rule of law are less likely to expropriate privatewealth has been a prominent idea since the publication of North and Weingast's seminalarticle on public borrowing in seventeenth-century England. However, this view has beenchallenged recently. For example, Stasavage (2003) argues that constitutional checks andbalances are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition to create a credible commitmentto secure property rights; rather, what matters is whether the owners of productive assets arein control of public institutions or not. One of the main shortcomings of the literature, however,is that it has tried to settle the debate by looking at evidence on sovereign borrowingfrom the same pair of countries (England and France). This article seeks to overcome suchlimitation by focusing on the link between representative government and public borrowingin Argentina. I present an "analytic narrative" of the country's rags-to-riches story in thenineteenth century. First, I use historical evidence to document the institutional factorsunderlying the absence of long-term borrowing and the use of money creation to financepublic deficits in post-independence Argentina (1820-1862). Next, I examine the 1863-1913period to test the claim that party government leads to credible commitment. I complementthe historical narrative with an econometric analysis using time-series data on the partisancontrol of government, monetary policies, and public borrowing. My findings support theview that credibility derives not only from having representative institutions but most importantlyfrom the fact that propertied groups have control over public institutions. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1970s, economies all over the world face pressures from globalization and post-fordist restructuring. Within a Varieties of Capitalism framework, I suggest that adaptation to these pressure has run along three paths, which I call liberalization, segmentation, and informalization. Liberalization is the path of Liberal Market Economies (LMEs). It consists of deep cuts in social legislation, job security, and an erosion of labor union power. Segmentation has been followed by most CME countries. It leaves the institutions of the labor market intact for a core labor force., but creates a variety of options for non-standard employment at the (quite significant) margins of the labor market. The third path, taken by Latin American economies, is informalization. As traditional sources of employment, both in manufacturing and in the public sector, decreased as a source of globalization, new and flexible jobs were created in the informal economy, especially - but not exclusively - in the service sector. I provide cursory evidence for this theory with quantitative data and further support the argument with case study evidence from Germany and Argentina. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [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]

The article examines issues concerning CSJN and constitutional politics in post-Menem Argentina. Several court cases were cited which illustrate a trend in jurisprudence of CSJN during the post-Menem era. One of the cases focused on a lawsuit filed by the Province of San Luis at the Argentine Supreme Court on March 5, 2003. The cases decided by the court during the post-Menem area are divided in issue areas like public sector salaries and measures imposed to address the economic crisis that rocked Argentina from mid-2001 to early 2003.

Distribution of public jobs through political patron-client networks has been taking new forms as a result of the political and socio-economic changes in developing countries like Argentina and Turkey. In this new context, two levels of electoral competition, the general elections and the process of achieving candidacy within the party, have to be analyzed in order to understand the factors that affect the particularistic exchanges between politicians and their supporters. In the internal competition of parties patronage jobs serve as a signal about the ambitions of politicians for leadership in the party. With a game theoretic model, I analyze how the interaction between a follower who sends a signal about his ambitions through patronage jobs and his leader in the party affects the level of patronage jobs that are distributed by the follower. I demonstrate the existence of an equilibrium wherein the follower limits his efforts to build personal political loyalties through distributing jobs in order to signal to his party leader that he is not a threat to her leadership. Two conditions under which this equilibrium exists are of substantive interest: Only when the party's or party leader's support is important for followers' reelection and when the leader's support for other party members carries risks for leadership take-over, that is when the leader is moderately strong in the party, followers have incentives to constrain the level of clientelism in public sector employment. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines findings from a study of two prominent global private environment regulatory programs in Argentina and Brazil from 1992 to 2004. It explores whether some types of programs, supported by different sets of actors, are more likely than others to be effective across different national contexts. Findings suggest that program advocacy on the part of transnational corporations is less consistent than it is often claimed to be and that governments have little influence on these initiatives.

The article examines the implications of the promotion of the standards of freedom of association and collective bargaining in international organizations that regulate the international economy. It highlights the evolving consultations between the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the International Labor Organization. It focuses on the interpretation of freedom of association, illustrating the resulting policy recommendations in Indonesia and Argentina.

The article attempts to provide an explanation for why, between 1983 and 2001, Argentina chose to attempt to press its territorial claim for the disputed islands of Malvinas and Falkland through peaceful negotiations. It argues that negotiation attempts were used by Argentine leaders in order to divert attention from domestic instability. It examines the validity of several competing alternative explanations for the country's strategy of attempted negotiations with Great Britain.

The article explores the connection between collective memory and democracy in Germany, Argentina, and Chile. Democracy allows memory to flourish through open and public discussions of the past. Memory, in turn, helps improves the stability and quality of democracy by fostering transparency, invigorating the civil society and vigilance, re-building societal trust, weakening authoritarian enclaves, and increasing the legitimacy of the government. However, balance must be achieved so as not to alienate former regime supporters and officials.