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During the 1980s and 1990s, Mexico, was able to institute a stabilization and adjustment program in the form of a series of tripartite agreement known as the Pactos. The pacts managed to set the context for the reform of the Mexican economy. The central objectives of this paper are to understand, first, how tripartite agreements between 1987 and 1997 came about and helped reform the economy, and second, put forward some of the factors that are impeding mechanisms of social partnership in the context of democratic politics in 2000. This paper argues that the Pactos were the result of a free trade governing coalition interests for economic reform, and a set of institutional factors (State capacities (ideas, knowledge and expertise), corporatism, and the Pacto institutions) that helped create a policy mechanism that minimized uncertainty and free-riding through an system of rules that monitored, coordinated, and sanctioned political actors. This study suggests that social partnership mechanisms can help reduce uncertainty and foster cooperation in the context of economic reform and increasing competition, yet, that the institutional arrangements of Mexican presidential regime can be an obstacle for the development of tripartite accords in todays Mexican democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Mexican fiscal federalism from the point of view of legislative coalition building. In federal regimes legislators are constrained by their state affiliations. In order to evaluate the coalition formation strategies available to states, the paper analyzes minimal winning coalitions (MWC) of state delegations in the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. Banzhaf indexes of political power are calculated for each state. Players in this cooperative game are connected through their partisanship at the state level and the structural differences characterizing the states they belong to. Hence, the paper calculates connected minimal winning coalitions (CMWC) of state-party groups ranked according to their substantive disagreements on the reform of intergovernmental relations. The analysis of CMWC suggests that although coalition formation will be difficult, given the high degree of party discipline in the legislature, a reform of fiscal federalism in Mexico is possible. However, such reform can lead either to a highly redistributive system, which would further reinforce the vertical imbalances of the current arrangement; or a greater devolution of tax authority benefiting rich states, which would further enhance regional inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper comes out of a broader project entitled ?Two-Level Games and International Narcotics Control: Cooperation Between the United States and Mexico and Colombia, 1989-2000.? In the broader project, I examine how the United States handles narcotics control in its bilateral relationships with Mexico and Colombia during the presidential administration of George H.W. Bush and both William Clinton administrations. Working out of the ?two-level games? tradition associated with Robert Putnam, I seek to explain differences in cooperation across countries and across time by examining the interaction of domestic and international political processes. In so doing, I hope to contribute to the growing literature on this interaction as well as add theoretical and empirical rigor to the narcotics policy literature. In this paper I focus on the second Clinton administration and assess the degree of cooperation between the countries. I test three hypotheses consistent with the two-level games approach: strength of the president, timing of elections, and executive-legislative relations. I also address two alternative hypotheses: the ?interdependent? U.S.-Mexican relationship and the reputation of the Colombian president and probe their impact on narcotics control cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many mixed electoral systems voters cast two ballots, one for a party list and a second for a candidate in a single member district. In the Mexican mixed electoral system, since 1988 when the ballot structure was changed, voters cast a single vote to select both types of representatives. The single votes for district candidates are then aggregated for distribution of the party list seats in large M (40 seats) districts. In this paper, we examine the extent to which the Mexican one-vote ballot type affects strategic voting. We complement the Mexican data with district level data from Italy and Senegal. Through the SF Ratio and effective number of electoral parties comparisons, our findings indicate that strategic voting decreased from one comparable election to the next, although in modified form in concurrent (presidential and legislative together) elections. This, we argue, is at least partially an effect of the ballot structure. Check author’s web site for an updated version of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the "moral economy" of electoral clientelism - the exchange of votes for goods - on the basis of qualitative interviews conducted in late 2000 in rural Mexico. Contrary to common assumptions about physical needs forcing the "poor and powerless" to trade their political rights for material favors, it finds that respondents reject clientelist practices, defend their individual autonomy, and demand universalistic policies. In democratic Mexico, the paper concludes tentatively, attempted vote trading may be a widespread practice; yet an illegitimate one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1990s the average PAN voter had a centrist position on most relevant dimensions of political conflict in Mexico, and the PAN electorate as a whole has resembled a catch-all party that draws support from left to center-right. In this paper I demonstrate that the electoral coalition that supported the PAN and its presidential candidate in 2000 had grown even wider and more ideologically heterogeneous by the time the historical election took place. This phenomenon is explained by the shifts in the ideological distribution of the Mexican electorate, and, even more importantly, by the shifts in the average party placements on the relevant axes of political conflict. Vicente Fox benefited from a liberal electorate that had voted for the left in the past and even in the 2000 congressional races. Similarly, Fox received significant support from the right, still an electoral niche for PRI. Support for Fox was more likely among a younger, more educated, and urban electorate across the country, but especially in the most industrialized northern region. Vicente Fox not only benefited from the PAN’s pivotal position in the ideological distribution of the Mexican electorate, but also from the greater likelihood of voluntary participation inherent among PAN supporters. Typical explanatory variables of voting behavior, such as party identification and candidate image, account significantly for the vote choice, and the magnitude and significance of ideological orientations as well as the explicit desire for change account for both the election outcome and the coalition phenomenon before and, perhaps, after 2000. This paper relies on a collection of national surveys conducted between 1996 and 2000 among the general population and actual voters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The restrictive legal framework of abortion in Latin America has started to change during the past decade, as legislative reforms and high court decisions have liberalized, to different extents, the abortion laws in Colombia, Mexico City, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay. Feminist mobilization has been the crucial factor of change in this area of rights, and conservative religious actors have been the main opponents of reform. On its part, political and legal factors contribute to understand the timing and outcomes of legal changes, as well as the capacity of movement and counter-movement to influence reform processes. Based on field work carried out in Mexico, this paper analyzes the main components of the legal and political opportunities that have been relevant in abortion legal reform in that country, which offer important points of reference for other Latin American cases. Drawing on social movement theory and legal studies literature, this paper highlights the importance of relatively stable components of political opportunities such as the type of institutional organization of federalism, which determines the location of abortion policy- and the possibilities of social movements to influence it-, as well as of institutional arrangements and cultural understandings regarding the relationship between State and Church. Regarding more contingent political factors, the analysis of this case confirms that divisions among elites, and in particular post-electoral conflict, may create conditions for rights advocacy actors, whereas politicians' search for legitimacy and short-term electoral incentives may favor counter-reformers, especially at the local level -where there may be greater Church's influence and less accountability mechanisms. With regards to the legal opportunity, the paper highlights the role of the rules of access to courts and legal standing in constitutional review proceedings, as determinants of the types of actors and claims that reach the courts. The analysis of the Mexican case shows how constitutional courts, in their quest for institutional legitimacy, may expand the legal opportunity for the participation of social actors at judicial proceedings, when facing decisions that involve highly controversial issues and social conflicts. Finally, the paper shows how rules of opinion formation at courts may affect final judicial outcomes and the influence of social actors in them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper prepared for presentation at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), Washington, D.C., on August 28-31, 2014 is presented. It examines law with Inter-American human rights law in Mexico. It also discusses conventionality control in the Americas and Mexico, and compliance with international judicial rulings, and human rights.

A conference paper prepared for presentation at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), Washington, D.C., on August 28-31, 2014 is presented. It examines the impact of customary law on trust and reciprocity in southern Mexico. It also discusses several aspects of formal institutionalization of usos y costumbres.

The impact of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) on the poor and marginalized has been a matter of debate since the beginnings of the information revolution. Whether or not ICT penetration is causing increased inequality and poverty remains an unresolved puzzle (ICTs, defined broadly in this paper, include TV, radio, Internet and mobile phones). The puzzle stems from small-n studies tending to find that the impact of new ICTs has been positive for the poor, while large-n studies purport the opposite (Forestier, Grace and Kenny 2001). Recent empirical studies suggest the impact of ICT is 'Janus faced'-in some cases emergent ICTs create new opportunities for the poor, while in others they seem to exacerbate the challenges the poor face (Kenny 2006; Huerta, Esperanza and Rodrigo Sandoval-Almazan 2007; Hanson 2008). I argue that the socioeconomic context, and governance, shapes the impact of these emerging technologies. I posit that there is an interaction effect between governance and ICT which is the 'missing link' that plays a central, yet often overlooked, role in determining the impact of ICT on the poor. There are three primary mechanisms influencing how ICT and governance interact: First, ICT affects governance by enhancing opportunities for information sharing through increasing speed of communication, increasing penetration rates, and deepening of technology (Web 2.0); Secondly, ICT affects governance by generating social capital and enhancing civil society; Third, ICT affects governance by improving efficiency. Finally, I make the theoretical leap, digressing from the established literature, that this produces an interaction effect between ICT and governance leading, in general, to better outcomes for the poor. To empirically test these claims, this paper takes a mixed methods approach. First, I conduct a large-n study comparing Mexico to other similar developing countries. Yet to investigate the puzzle in greater depth, I also employ a small-n analysis focusing on the poor in rural and urban Mexico. I compare case studies of ICT access and use by the poor in two urban areas, Guadalajara, Mexico's so-called 'Silicone Vally', and Puebla. Comparative analysis between two rural towns in Oaxaca, confirm the findings of the urban case studies: ICT access and use among the poor can be enhanced through an interaction with governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the exclusion of women from political offices in Mexico and Latin America's customary law communities, more broadly, is much more than a problem of the purported patriarchal cultures of indigenous and rural communities. We claim, based on a comprehensive survey of 466 mayors in the indigenous state of Oaxaca, that the underrepresentation of women is a function of institutions limiting female candidates. We test this "candidate pipeline" hypothesis, adapted from U.S.-based studies, against the hypothesis that culture--as measured by indigenous ethnicity--has an independent effect on women's representation. The paper disconfirms that patriarchal, traditionalist cultures of indigenous communities cause underrepresentation in the election of women and instead finds that a particular set of local institutions, which are more prevalent in indigenous municipalities, blocks the pipeline of potential women candidates. We conclude by considering the normative implications for customary law representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do political parties engage in religious mobilization in some environments but not in others? This paper develops a cross-national comparison of patterns of religious mobilization in Sunni- and Catholic-majority countries, with an emphasis on the cases of Turkey and Mexico. In many Sunni-majority contexts, political parties maintain strong and explicit ties to religious communities, relying on their mobilization to compete in what are often hostile political environments. In Catholic environments, political parties generally avoid making claims about religious doctrine or forming entangling alliances with sectarian movements, with candidates seeking to court religious voters doing so primarily through generic appeals to religious values and identities. What explains these differences in religious mobilization in the political arena? I argue that the crucial factors that explain this historically contingent divergence are pattern of secular regulations, electoral laws, and religious communities. The paper uses both quantitative and qualitative research methods to explore and evaluate this argument. First, relying on an original dataset covering 198 elections in 65 countries from 1990-2002, I examine the current distribution of different forms of religious mobilization across Sunni-majority and Catholic-majority countries. Then, I compare the evolution of religious parties in two critical, most-similar cases: Turkey and Mexico. Despite their analogous patterns of religious mobilization early in the 20th century and their comparable socio-economic and geopolitical situations, crucial differences in the evolution of their religious communities and secularist institutions expanded sectarian mobilization in Turkey while depressing it in Mexico. By exploring the patterns of religious mobilization across two world religions and critical country-cases, this paper highlights the contingent quality of religions impact on politics in general and electoral competition in particular [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Threats to the integrity of electoral democracy are manifold. The democratic quality of electoral contests can suffer damage from self-serving manipulation by central or subnational governments, foul play by contending parties and candidates, or the administrative incapacity or incompetence of election authorities. This paper focuses on a distinct form of threat that has received scant attention in the comparative literature: the societal subversion of democratic elections by criminal violence. Conceptually, the paper presents criminal violence as a form of horizontal threat against the integrity of liberal democratic elections. Empirically, it analyzes the ongoing civil war in Mexico (the so-called drug war) to illustrate the chilling effects criminal violence has on electoral d democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper starts from the assumption that OC is a specific type of system oriented towards an authoritative allocation of resources and that, as such, cannot survive without a territory where its power can be exerted through a mechanism of extortion and protection. The introduction states firstly that the cradle of OC is in the city, where it embodies the most unconventional and violent face of the capitalist accumulation of resources. Secondly, it asserts that it is necessary to take a closer look at the relationship between the city and the state in the nation-building process. The OC is, in fact, a direct consequence of the attempt, on the part of the central government, to reduce the cost of the process of the monopolization of force by co-opting local potentates instead of defeating them. The paper then compares Palermo and Ciudad Juárez, by looking at the two different paradigmatic models of OC that originated in these two cities: the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the maras. Besides, Italy and Mexico share many political and social variables in their historical evolution: the late formation of a unified state in the second half of the 1850s; the strategic even if peripheral role in the international politics, thanks to their peculiar relationships with the US; but also the Spanish legacy (in Italy, mainly in Southern regions), which probably helps us to explain other cultural similarities (e.g. family and religion). The first paragraph shortly reconstructs the history of Cosa nostra, emphasizing how its process of institutionalization and entrenchment in the Palermitan society results in one of the most striking example of political Mafia. The second paragraph analyzes the role of OC after the end of Cold War, when old hierarchies of scale, based on nation-states, became destabilized, and when the historic dependence on the center of so many peripheries in the international system was replaced by the center's growing subjugation to the peripheries. The third paragraph analyzes Ciudad Juárez both comparing it with other Latin American cities that gave birth to some of the most famous cartels of narco-trafficking, and stressing its peculiarities that concur to define the assembled crime paradigm. The conclusion, finally, challenges the widely accepted assumption that state violence - i.e. war on drugs - can be the right strategy to combat OC. On the contrary, social scientists should revisit and develop Tilly's idea of trust networks to find at least a theoretically plausible answer to OC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the origins of the organized criminal violence that once gripped Colombia and now grips Mexico and particularly the highly controversial counterinsurgency strategy used in Colombia that forms the basis for the strategy in Mexico. It argues that ideology is a reason why the military aspect of these problems was neglected for so long and the reason its detractors see it as a strategy that reduces national sovereignty and endangers democracy when statistics on control of territory, reduction of violence and democratic progress demonstrate the opposite to be true. The paper uses the term "colombianization" to emphasize Colombia's dramatic shift from almost ungovernable to one of the most successful countries in the region. Colombianization is defined not as a counterdrug strategy as are both the Colombian and Mexican U.S. assistance strategies but as an integrated, law-based, counterinsurgency strategy implemented from the bottom up that facilitates the establishment of elite consensus and puts the country on a path toward rule of law. Ironically, it was democratic and free market reforms that strengthened the forces of instability in both Colombia and Mexico and the militarization of security that appears to facilitate democratic stability. This study uses local level assessments of Plan Colombia and local interviews conducted in Chihuahua and Michoacán to evaluate the prospects of colombianization in urban and rural Mexico. Colombia's experience suggests that colombianization can stabilize the country and help reactivate the economy but it has little impact on the drug industry and the corruption associated with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A conference paper about gender equality and democratization in the Mexican states is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including democracy and women's participation in politics, the status of women across the states of Mexico, and the rates of female illiteracy.

A conference paper about political participation in Mexico is presented which is prepared for presentation at the American Political Science Association Conference, in Toronto, Ontario, on September 2-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including the transformation of Mexico from a one-party authoritarian regime to a multiparty competitive democracy, and the influence of political opportunities and constraints on political participation.

A conference paper about food security and environmental change is presented which is prepared for presentation at the Annual Meetings of the American Political Science Association, in Toronto, Ontario, from September 3-6, 2009. The paper discusses topics including changing consumption behaviors, unrest in countries such as Egypt, Mexico and Haiti, and rising food prices.

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]

This paper shows that social network effects were significant in voting decisions during the 2006 Mexican presidential election. Political information was transmitted by means of local networks, mainly through personal intercommunication among voters and conformity effects. These conformity effects were geographically constrained to the perception of the local majority in the neighborhood where voters inhabit. The local network effects operated principally for the two leading candidates (Manuel Lopez Obrador, the leftist candidate and Felipe Calderon, the rightist candidate). We find that the local majority (i.e. the candidate who was perceived as the winner in the neighborhood) had a compensatory effect that served to overcome political disagreements among voters when they talked about candidates. In particular, the paper shows that the candidature of Lopez Obrador developed more dependence on the political information transmitted by local networks. This finding is reflected in the proposition that Lopez Obrador sympathizers tended to substitute "formal information" (mass media) by the "informal information" that their local network provided. This argument runs in accordance with the main strategic campaign of the PRD (the leftist party which postulated Obrador), which at the beginning of the campaign focused in a territorial strategy concentrated in those neighborhoods with greater support. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effects of the exchange of particularistic benefits for political support in Mexico during the presidential elections in 2000, more specifically, it looks at the competition of the three larger parties to gain votes through the distribution of gifts and services. Competition though gift-giving sheds light not only on the strategies parties follow to buy votes but also on the ways in which such an incentive interacts with other dispositions. Therefore, three major questions drive this inquiry: what strategies did parties follow in distributing particularistic benefits? What electoral effects do these have? What role do voter attitudes, like partisanship, play in voting choices in the face of particularistic benefits? Through the use of post-electoral survey data, I provide evidence that parties in Mexico engaged in vote-buying effectively during the 2000 presidential elections, they successfully bid and bought votes. While these results are not surprising, this paper also presents evidence that PAN, the eventual winner, managed to successfully demobilize PRI voters, while PRI did the same but to a lesser extent. In this election major parties in Mexico competed with one another to hold old wards, to win back lost ones, and to reduce the share of voters for their competition. Although the electoral effects are small due to the relatively small number of recipients of gifts, they are statistically robust. Furthermore, evidence suggests the development of long-term relationships between parties and recipients of benefits that affect their partisanship. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a theoretical argument that explains the patterns of change in bothsocial insurance and social assistance in Mexico over the last two decades and explains some ofthe apparent contradictions in the existing literature on globalization, democratic institutions, andwelfare in Latin America. By comparing multiple social insurance and social assistance policyoutcomes during the Salinas (1988-1994), Zedillo (1994-2000), and Fox (2000-2006)administrations, the paper demonstrates that though globalization may constrain welfare policyoptions, its impact is often indirect, through its effect on the relative political capacity ofdomestic actors. Furthermore, political liberalization changes the incentives for politicians tosupply welfare. In addition, existing welfare institutions create powerful policy legacies thatinfluence the interests of some domestic political actors. The overall pattern that emerges inMexico is one of partial retrenchment of social insurance and the expansion of targeted socialassistance, a pattern that can be explained in light of economic liberalization, democratization,and policy legacies. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the politics of banking reform in developing countries during the 1990s. Electoral competition helps to explain whether countries were likely to implement regulatory reforms after banking crises. The potential for wide swings in electoral support in highly competitive democracies should favor consumers, who benefit from reforms, and harm vested producer groups that prefer forbearance. Where electoral competition is muted, producer groups - such as a bankers' coalition - should benefit more than consumers given their economic and political power. To evaluate these arguments, this paper examines patterns of post-crisis regulatory reform implementation in Mexico, Venezuela, and South Korea during the 1990s. Within and cross-country evidence is consistent with the arguments. Surprisingly, it indicates that in countries with low levels of intra-party electoral competition, i.e. those with disciplined political parties, governments engaged in regulatory forbearance even with fierce inter-party competition. Crony financial capitalism seems less likely in multiparty settings with undisciplined parties. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Admiration and resentment of America are deeply rooted in the political traditions of the United States' nearest neighbors. As in other parts of the world, resentment has been on the rise in recent years. This paper distinguishes in its first part between critical opinion, skepticism, and prejudice on the one hand, and different types of anti-Americanism on the other. In the paper's next two parts, these general categories are confronted with data from Canada and Mexico and the dramatically different historical trajectories in the evolution of anti-Americanism in these two countries. In the fourth and final section, the paper seeks to identify commonalities, if any, in these radically different political settings. The expected finding is that even in close proximity to the United States, we find a plurality of different types of anti-Americanisms, a condition that characterizes world politics more generally. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how variation in subnational ethnic group presence and electoral rules vary, and whether they lead to differences in subnational ethnic political behavior that can affect local and even national elections, even in a case where national electoral laws prevent the formation of ethnic-based parties. To this end, the paper focuses on the political behavior of indigenous groups at municipal levels in Mexico. Certain institutional and demographic features of Mexico allow us to investigate how different local electoral laws interact with ethnicity to shape local and national party politics. It finds that, local electoral institutions appear to affect national voting behavior, as well as finds some preliminary evidence that ethnicity exaggerates the expected effects of said institutions. Simple statistical studies and data tables are used to support the investigation. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What determines how judicial institutions perform? Prominent theoretical approaches such as international political economy, institutional rational choice, social capital, and structural theories suggest that international economic actors, political competition, political participation, and poverty may all be important forces driving institutional behavior. This paper analyzes these various theoretical approaches and uses qualitative and statistical analysis to compare judicial performance in the Mexican states. The paper provides evidence to support the institutional rational choice hypothesis that political competition generates judicial independence. Poverty, political participation, and an export-oriented economy seem to influence judicial access and effectiveness. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a framework for explaining variation in property rights institutions as emerging from interactions among decision-makers at three levels; formal government actors, the community of right holders and individuals. Property rights are understood as a function of the value of the resource to which a right has been assigned, and the enforcement activity. It recognizes that representatives of formal government, including bureaucrats, regulators and various types of law enforcement and monitoring agents face different types of incentives in enforcing claims to property. Right holders make decisions about property right institutions based on expectations of external third-party enforcement, levels of peer-enforcement and their own ability to self-enforce property claims. This combination of these different types of enforcement activities determines the structure of property rights that ultimately results. The theoretical framework is applied to the empirical case of a mixed-right system among communities bordering a National Park in the Southern Mexican state of Campeche. Data collection incorporated semi-structured interviews across a selection of twelve communities. This is used to develop an analytic framework based on a simple game-theoretic model where the benefits and costs underlying the production of a property right determine the type of right structure. Empirical evidence supports the institutional economic perspective that resource value is fundamental to understanding property rights institutions, and that enforcement activity influences the form of rights. However it provides evidence that actions by different types of enforcement agents; bureaucratic, community and individual, also affect the specific structure of rights. While the project focuses on property right systems for producing environmental public goods, the framework applies to property rights systems across a wide variety of public policy areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on the effects of fiscal federalism suggest that the effect of decentralization on public good provision and fiscal restraint is largely determined by the social and political context in which the decentralizsation coccurs. This paper extends this work by showing that the outcome of decetralization is contingent upon the patterns of political competition that develop in the local political arena following decentralization. Specifically, the use of state resources to maintain clinetelist networks and low levels of budgetary discipline both predomidate in localities with either extremely high or low levels of electoral fragmentation. [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 can 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 politicians 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]

The paper addresses the increasing urban disparities within Mexico City in the last century and how the lack of accesible public space has neglected vast central and peripherial areas from a full citizenship. Even when the creation of new open spaces may have impacted in different ways the various income groups around it, we demonstrate that an inclusive strategy on public spaces can also serve as an instrument to extend the living standards for the rest of the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of the targets has been paid much less attention than the issue of the actors in the literature of popular protests and social movements. The main objective of this paper is to fill this gap. I elaborate the boomerang effect theory of contention by distinguishing two types of target: opponent and mediator. Popular groups do not always attack their ?opponent? directly. Instead, they sometimes go to another target, ?mediator?, and ask this mediator to enforce the opponent to take action they want. The boomerang effect theory originally accounts for transnational activists’ strategy of using international institutions or foreign governments as mediator in order to influence authoritarian domestic governments (opponents). I argue that the boomerang effect is a common strategy taken by popular actors in domestic contention. I demonstrate how the processes of political liberalization in Mexico have transformed popular groups? choice of opponents and mediators using my database of over three thousand episodes of popular protests between 1964 and 2000 created from newspaper sources. I find that popular groups followed the hierarchical nature of the Mexican political system consistently and "correctly." In general, popular groups chose the federal government as mediator to attack the state government (opponent) and counted upon the state government?s power to challenge the municipal government. As political liberalization has led to the erosion of the supremacy of the executive power, popular groups have begun to use the empowered legislature as mediator to exercise influence over the previously untouchable executive branches of the state. Since the selection of mediator must involve popular actors’ sensitive judgment on the power relations among the state actors, the exploration of the mediator-opponent relations is a promising way to find the major effects of political changes upon popular contention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on an unprecedented survey of thousands of indigenous citizens in southern Mexico, this paper seeks to partially disconfirm primordialist theories about the ascriptive nature of ethnicity by demonstrating that while indigenous identities may be endogenous to linguistic groups, these identities may be readily activated and deactivated. That is, indigenous citizens, like their non-indigenous counterparts, usually view their participation in society through a statist/individualist frame, rather than from a collectivist-traditional/communalist perspective. Constructing a logit model based on variables derived from the survey, I conclude that ethnicity is less important in shaping peoples? attitudes than other causes. Independent variables like the form of state-society relations, agrarian structures, poverty and isolation are found to be more determinant in shaping attitudes about how indigenous Mexicans order relations with both traditional communities and the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the implementation of gender quota law on the 2003 midterm legislative elections in Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I use the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements to think through some of the democratic dilemmas and possibilities of participatory gatherings that emphasize collective visibility and shared performance over deliberation and debate. I argue that to view spectacle, mass gatherings, and passionate identification as simply anti-democratic is to misunderstand the nature of democratic life. During what came to be known as El Movimiento (the movement), Chicano and Puerto Rican activists experienced public performance as both confirmation and revelation. The marches, fiestas, conferences, poetry and teatro events that characterized movement politics gave Latinos a felt sense of themselves as a people capable of political agency. By putting movement politics in conversation with the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Hannah Arendt, I argue that civic practices emphasizing sentiment, imagination, and identification are powerfully implicated in how subjects make democratic commitments, participate collectively, and resist inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent wave of political transitions has often led to competitive elections, but not always to the minimal institutional guarantees of civil and political rights or the responsive policy outcomes that are generally associated with democratic regimes. Scholars have offered a range of explanations for the differences in the quality of these new democracies. Aspects of socioeconomic structure, institutional configurations, and the strategic choices of elite actors have each been proposed, but these hypotheses are rarely systematically tested against each other. In this paper, I draw on the experiences of Mexico’s thirty-one recently empowered state governments in the years since that country’s pivotal 1988 presidential election to provide just such a test. My statistical analyses indicate that legislative pluralism, the strength of radical opposition parties, and economic inequality each have an important effect on the quality of new democracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The globalization of finance and concomitant increase in financial crises increased the demand for a new ‘international financial architecture.’ Most of the scholarly and policy focus has centered on the role of the international financial institutions (IFIs) - the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. This paper argues that focusing on the IFIs overlooks the ability of the economic great powers to substitute governance structures as a means of advancing their common preferences. Because financial regulation produces a cleavage of interests between the developed and developing states, the developed great powers have relied on club organizations and forum-shopping among substitutable governance structures to create new modes of coordination. This argument is demonstrated by reviewing the development of new financial codes and standards in the wake of the Mexican and Asian financial crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The one-vote ballot structure in legislative elections in Mexico discourages strategic voting. However, several scholars have found strategic voting in some legislative elections. In this paper, I argue that such voting is not strategic voting (because of the ballot structure) in terms of the classic Duvergerian non-wasting the vote proposition. If voters keep voting for a party other than the most preferred one it must be for reasons different from the classic strategic voting motivations (a la Duverger). Consequently, I introduce a logistic regression model to explain this electoral behavior. The results show that 584 people vote sincerely, and 99 people vote non-sincerely in the 1997 election, for an accuracy of about 78 percent. A person having extreme pro-non-sincere voting values on the 3 statistically significant variables has a probability of 59.68 of voting non-sincerely in 1997, while a person having the extreme pro-sincere voting values on the three variables has a probability of 68.94 of voting sincerely. For the 2000 election, 1171 people voted (as stated) sincerely, and 95 people voting non-sincerely, to be correct 80.5 percent according to my model. The expected probability of a non-sincere voting by a person having the extreme pro non-sincere voting values on the independent variables (included in the model) is 52.63, while for a person having the extreme pro-sincere voting values on the 5 variables, his/her probability of voting sincerely is 15.97. By increasing the number of parties, sincere voting indirectly has an impact on democratization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the broader theoretical claim that civil society can be thickened (in democratic ways) with international support and collaboration. Case studies of domestic election monitoring organizations in Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru suggest that internationally supported civic organizations can play an important role in mobilizing political participation. There is less evidence to show that they can consistently fulfill other democratizing functions, such as modeling democratic practices and improving communication between government and citizens. [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]

The aim of this paper is to explore whether government repression explains the transformation of peasant protest into rural insurgency and whether renewed repression explains the ethnic turn of a rural rebellion. The 1994 uprising of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in the southern state of Chiapas, Mexico, serves as an empirical case for hypotheses testing. We create an Index of Zapatista militancy to account for the variations accross time for Zapatista support and an Ethnicity Index to explain the ethnic turn of the movement. We develop three multivariate OLS model to test the geographical origins and evolution of Zapatismo between 1992 and 2000. Statistical results suggest that municipalities with larger indigenous populations and longer and more intense histories of religious competition between Catholic and Protestant Churches, where protest was most intense and repression less severe, were more likely to become Zapatistas in the early 1990s. Contrary to widespread views on the origins of Zapatismo, it was not the municipalities facing the most severe levels of repression the ones that took up arms, but their neighbors. We believe that the heightened environement of repression developed under the administration of Patrocionio González (1989-1994) pushed peasant Indians from municipalities with the state's highest levels of mobilization into a logic of prevention: they took up arms before they became victims of what was already happening to their neighbors. Statistical results, however, suggest that the heavy handed reaction of federal and state authorities in response to the 1994 uprising did have an effect on the future trends of Zapatismo. In fact, protest and repression become the best predictors of Zapatista support in the 1994-1995 and 1996-2000 periods. Ethnification in this latter period was most likely to emerge in those municipalities with strongest Zapatista presence and longer and more intense levels of peasant indigenous protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at responses by Mexican social movements to the introduction and use of genetic engineering (GE) in agriculture and food production. A number of prospective studies had highlighted the potential contribution of new agricultural biotechnologies to sustainable development. But following the traditional top down and technocratic approach to development, the alleged subjects of sustainable development had never been consulted on the desirability of such technology. Now that genetic engineering is being pushed onto the population of a number of countries around the world, some social movements are voicing their qualms about the sustainable development claims of genetic engineering in agriculture. This essay places these developments in the context of the broader struggles of the Mexican peasant and indigenous social movements, mainly in relation to their emergence from the authoritarian corporatist structure of the developmentalist years, and to their core political claims to autonomy and self management. What comes out of this analysis is the conclusion that these autonomist social movements are important actors that have to be taken into account when dealing with the introduction of a new technology such as genetic engineering, especially if the latter has to make any contribution to the process of sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the factors that serve to shape an individual’s attitudes towards his/her political system, its fundamental institutions, and the politicians that occupy those institutions? This question provides the point of departure for this analysis of the attitudes of the Mexican voter on the eve of the country’s 2000 presidential elections. This paper examines how the sub-national political fault lines that run through Mexico affected the way Mexicans perceived the 2000 elections and their political system more generally. I test, and provide at least preliminary evidence for, the proposition that the local political environment serves as a principal determinant of how citizens view their larger political system, even perhaps to the point of trumping national-level regime characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper investigates the institutional legacies of the one-party regime in Mexico and Russia respectively as they make the transition to democracy and market economies. Despite their differing histories, the countries are responding to similar globalization pressures, in roughly similar ways. However the Soviet legacy of strict limits on institutional pluralism and lack of a mechanism for ensuring leadership rotation left Russia ill-prepared for the democratic transition in comparison with Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a theoretical account of how competitive elections might produce accountability in the subnational Mexican context. I argue that only two logical mechanisms exist: party sanctioning, in which the electorate casts judgment on parties based on the past performance of their office-holders, and candidate selection, in which the vote is based on anticipated future performance of candidates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Not surprisingly, a vast amount of research has focused on the psychological and economic factors that influence attitudes toward immigration. These studies, primarily done in the United States and Western Europe, have found that strong national identities, more so than economic concerns, are associated with more negative attitudes toward immigrants and immigration. Our paper takes a novel approach by examining attitudes about migration in a country known for emigration rather than immigration. Using Mexico as our case, we examine the impact of Mexican identity and economic considerations on attitudes about immigration and emigration and on the likelihood of emigrating to the United States. Mexico provides a unique setting as a sizeable proportion of the population has friends or relatives who have migrated to another country yet it also experiences in-migration and transmigration. How do national identity and economic considerations, found to be key factors explaining immigration attitudes in "receiving" countries, affect attitudes on immigration in this "sending" country? We find that migration attitudes in Mexico are better explained by national identity than by economic considerations and that national identity is a strong predictor of both anti-immigration attitudes and the belief that emigration is a major problem in Mexico. We also find, however, that national identity does not predict the intention to emigrate. We conclude by arguing that more work needs to be done on migration attitudes in "sending" countries to get a more complete understanding of the factors that influence migration attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a response to international pressure along with massive indigenous mobilization across Latin American countries over the last two decades, most of the governments in the region have undertaken the implementation of innovative laws to address indigenous demands regarding cultural and territorial rights. Thus, multicultural laws such as Usos y Costumbres, Rondas Campesinas and more recently the Consulta previa law, stand as the mainstream legal instruments created to redress centuries of exclusion. Framed within international standards established by ILO 169, these laws attempt to fill the gap between representative democracies and indigenous collective claims for autonomy and self-determination. However, their implementation by national governments has been uneven and conflicts between the states and indigenous communities persist across the region. By comparing two cases from Peru and Mexico, this paper aims to explore under which conditions multicultural laws can foster the realization of indigenous people's territorial rights while at the same time contravening the capacity of the states to affirm their authority over the entirety of their national territories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explains the high levels of violence on the Mexican side of the Texas-Tamaulipas border. In general, this part of the U.S.-Mexico border has been overlooked by scholars, political analysts, and the media until recently when violence in the Mexican border state of Tamaulipas reached unprecedented levels. The study finds that the recent increase in violence in the so-called "forgotten" border has to do mainly with the following factors: deteriorated socioeconomic conditions, endemic corruption, the introduction of federal forces into the fight against drug trafficking groups, the new shape of the Mexican political system, the division between the Gulf Cartel and the Zetas, and the paramilitarization of those organizations. This last phenomenon is crucial to explain the situation of extreme violence in Tamaulipas, where the State seems to have lost the "monopoly" of the legitimate use of violence. In other words, the violence levels that are currently afflicting the territory of Tamaulipas are indicative of the degree of control and coercion that organized crime groups exert over this region of Mexico, at times even substituting the State as the legitimate purveyor of control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reforms oriented towards enhancing the rule of law in emerging democracies in Latin America were first aimed at courts. More recently, increasing reform efforts have also been directed at public prosecution services, with specific attention to reducing the political use of criminal prosecution. The Public Prosecutor's Office (PPO) is a crucial institution within the justice system; without its effective participation, justice cannot be served because the institution is the one in charge of advancing criminal actions. Drawing on archival analysis of the legislative debates at the time PPO reforms were approved, this paper compares national-level reforms to the PPO in Brazil, Chile and Mexico along two main dimensions: (1) criminal procedure; and (2) political autonomy. In doing so, I explain why formal reform outcomes varied in the three countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Efforts to operationalize democracy at the national level have occupied a central place in the discipline since the 1960s, and have resulted in a cumulative body of literature and in a variety of datasets of increasing rigor and geographic and temporal coverage. Attempts to measure democracy at the subnational level are much more recent and inchoate, cover only a few countries and periods, and, critically, are not comparable across nations. After reviewing the state of the subject at the national level and the existing (objective) national subnational indices, this paper proposes six versions of an objective Subnational Democracy Index that can be calculated on the basis of (typically available) electoral and institutional data. Because of their modest data demands, the proposed indices can easily be applied to very different national and temporal contexts, thus permitting comparisons of subnational regimes across countries. The measures are pilot-tested on the first-level subnational units of five federations (Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Mexico, and the United States) and of one unitary country (Uruguay). The ultimate goal of this line of research is to produce cross-sectional--time-series datasets of subnational democracy with broad geographic and temporal coverage similar to those existing for national regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While governmental and organized crime elements have traditionally held sway over media coverage in Mexico, the current shift in relations between actors involved in the country's so-called 'drug war' as well as the evolution in the organizational structure of Mexico's drug trafficking organizations have effectively silenced traditional news outlets -such as newspapers, printed dailies, radios and TV shows at all coverage levels, and public statements by municipal and state representatives. This situation has created an informational 'black hole' regarding the state of affairs in some of the more active drug zones of the country -particularly located in Mexico's northern region. Despite the press control exerted over news media by both governmental and non-governmental elements, current technological advances have allowed for the use of the Internet as a safe haven to broadcast news related to drug trafficking activities from various regions of the country in an uncensored, unrestricted manner through the use of social networks -such as Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, as well as many blogs, forums, and podcasts. The present paper addresses the issue of limited press freedom in northern Mexico during 'drug war' times. It focuses on the rise of informal media as the freedom of press's lifeline in an environment where the monopoly of violence by the state has been lost in some regions of the country, and taken over by criminal non-governmental agents. The present study analyzes in depth the case of Tamaulipas, Mexico. This case had been overlooked by scholars, political analysts, and the media in general until nowadays, when violence in this state has reached unprecedented levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]