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Recent years have seen the rapid passage and modification of family leave policies in Latin America, a surprising trend, given the region's historically conservative gender norms. This article argues that the rise of new paternity leave policies—as well as the modifications to longer-standing maternity leave policies—reflects contending visions of gender and the family, mediated by the institutions and actors that populate the region's political landscape. Using an original dataset of family policy measures, this article finds that the factors facilitating the adoption of new, vanguard policies, such as paternity leave, function in ways different from those that shape the expansion of longer-standing policies, including maternity leave. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Labor market dualism-the segmentation of workers between formal, legally protected employment and informal, unprotected status-has long drawn attention from scholars and policymakers in Latin America. This article argues that lasting patterns of economic and political segmentation of workers arose earlier in the region's history than has previously been understood, well before the classic 'incorporation' period. Late-nineteenth-century practices for the recruitment and retention of workers shaped Latin America's first sets of labor laws, most notably those governing union organization and individual worker job stability. Subsequently, these first laws served as important templates for development, constraining and conditioning the labor codes adopted under mass-based politics. Using historical data drawn from Chile, Peru, and Argentina, this article shows how differing recruitment practices and variation in the extension of effective suffrage rights and electoral participation shaped early legal labor market segmentation and inequality in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]