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Introduction Without predicting how this will change his life, the narrator accepts an assignment to edit the final version of a report that records the genocide of indigenous people in […]

This article examines the role played by war, and public violence more generally, in the state-building experiences of Central America. Bellicist theory expects that wars provide a stimulus to extractive efforts, thus enhancing the autonomy and capacity of the state over time, though recent qualitative studies of South America find the opposite. I expand the reach of bellicist theory to Central America through the broader concept of public violence, which captures the long-term impact of external and internal rivals on the state. The quantitative tests demonstrate that Central American interstate and civil wars reduce the extractive ability of states, consistent with the South American evidence. Interstate rivals stimulate extractive efforts among governments, whereas intrastate rivals detract from those efforts. Incorporating the concept of public violence into bellicist theory thus helps to increase our understanding of Central American state building. Keywords: Central America; state building; rivalry; civil war

Recent writings concerning measurement of political democracy offer sophisticated discussions of problems of conceptualization, operationalization, and aggregation. Yet they have less to say about the error that derives from the use of inaccurate, partial, or misleading data sources. Drawing on evidence from five Central American countries, the authors show this data-induced measurement error compromises the validity of the principal, long-term cross-national scales of democracy. They call for an approach to index construction that relies on case expertise and use of a wide range of data sources, and they employ this approach in developing an index of political democracy for the Central American countries during the 20th century. The authors' index draws on a comprehensive set of secondary and primary sources as it rigorously pursues standards of conceptualization, operationalization, and aggregation. The index's value is illustrated by showing how it suggests new lines of research in the field of Central American politics. Keywords: democracy; regime indices; measurement; Central America; data sources

The persistent conflict between the United States and Cuba seems to be an exception to historian Eric Hobsbawm's concept of the twentieth century as a "short century" that ended prematurely [...]

This article discusses Central American regionalism since the 1990s, its state of disarray, and the possibility of a new regionalism framework to improve an understanding of its disappointment after intial enthusiasm. The author suggests that Central American integration is stimulated by external actors, not by spontaneous societal integration, and its goal is integration into the global economy rather than the imporvement of human welfare and security; globalization is viewed as a threat to which regional actors should respond.

Putnam argues that civil society - citizen activity in organizations - contributes to successful governance, but he does not specify in detail how this occurs. This article spells out how citizens' participation in groups might impinge on the state through both political participation and democratic norms. The authors consider not only Putnam's social capital but add new 'political capital' variables. The relationships among civil society and social and political capital are then explored, employing survey data from urban Central America. It is discovered that political context, specifically regime repression, powerfully affects civil society and social and political capital. Furthermore, civil society more clearly affects political capital variables than social capital variables., Robert Putnam draws on Tocqueville to argue eloquently that civil society - citizen participation in formal organizations - contributes to the success of democracy. In his study of Italy, Putnam [...]

Robert Putnam argues that civil society - citizen organizational activity - contributes to successful governance and democracy, outcomes potentially helpful in reconstructing Central America. Putnam does not, however, specify how civil society shapes government performance. We demonstrate how group participation might impinge upon the state through the 'political capital' of political participation and democratic norms. We first explore the relationships among two civil society measures (formal group activism and community self-help activism) and social and political capital, employing survey data from Central America. We then investigate the effects of civil society and social and political capital upon levels of democracy. We find that while higher levels of formal group membership and several political capital measures associate with higher levels of democracy, social capital lacks the relationship Putnam predicts. We conclude that political rather than social capital links formal group activism to democracy in Central America.

This article builds on our previous work, which showed that presidential popularity in Costa Rica is responsive to economic conditions. Here the analysis covers, in addition to Costa Rica, four sister republics which only recently have undergone democratization. We find that, as in the United States, presidential popularity in Central America rises and falls with the state of the economy. Also as in the United States, presidential popularity in Central America is cyclical, higher early and late in the presidential term. As new and tenuous as democracy is in most of the region, when it comes to rating presidents, Central Americans appear to use the same criteria as voters in the United States.

Like Hamlet in the climactic moment of his tragedy, the left, especially in Central America, has begun to question its own existence. Perhaps it needs to be even harder on [...]

Now that post-cold war crises outside of the Americas occupy the front pages of North American newspapers and the top of the evening news, it is easy to forget that [...]

Theory: Few studies have examined political repression's effects upon individual behavior and attitudes. We theorize that regimes use repression to constrain political behavior and values so as to limit demands and opposition. We therefore expect intense repression to reduce participation and support for democracy. Hypotheses: Using six Central American countries for a most-similar systems test, we hypothesize that, other factors held constant, both 1) citizens perceiving more repression and 2) citizens of repressive regimes will report less political participation and lower support for democratic norms. Methods: Using early 1990s public opinion data from six urban Central American samples, we employ multiple regression to examine how perceived repression and systemic repression affect citizens, participation and support for democratic norms. Also analyzed are individual demographic, resource and attitudinal items, and systemic measures of regime stability, and econonlic development. Results: More intense regime repression markedly reduces both citizen activity and support for democracy in Central America. Perceived repression has no impact upon participation and very little impact upon democratic norms.

Is the success of democratization efforts in developing countries tied to the quality of public administration? Based on an evaluation of three Central American countries (Honduras, Panama, and Costa Rica), Donald Klingner claims that democratization and public personnel management are closely related. Although each country's development must be viewed in the light of its own conditions, public personnel management in these countries has evolved through a relatively uniform process, in three stages: (1) political patronage; (2) a transition to merit systems marked by passage of a civil service law, creation of an effective civil service agency, and elaboration of effective personnel policies and procedures; and (3) a dynamic equilibrium among the desirable but contradictory objectives that characterize public personnel management in developed countries. Because this process is essentially similar to the evolution of the field in the United States, it is possible that a general evolutionary model can be developed to predict or explain the relationship between democratization and enhanced public personnel management in developing countries., The development of stable democratic societies in Central America has been a popular news topic and a primary U.S. foreign policy objective for the past decade. Democratization has been a [...]

The definition of democracy in Central America depended on the actors in the revolutionary arena. For the insurgents, it was social reforms, economic changes and shift in power relations. For the elite, it was a process that the insurgents sought to destroy. For the bourgeoisie, it was as defined by the US government: an alternative to revolution and elite rule. Now, the post-revolutionary Central America faces the prospects of democratization, which includes lesser foreign intervention, demilitarization, and inclusive political participation. However, the economic cleavages that caused the insurgency are still in place.

State violence is an integral part of Central America's historiocity and it consists of three distinct processes. These are caudillismo or local strong-man rule, the patron-client relationship between the caudillo and subalterns as well as the caudillo and the state leaders, and the increased presence of and relationship with a foreign power, specifically the US. All these processes imply that it is the relationships among the social divides, not the institutions such as the military, that strongly informed and set the limits of state violence. This perspective opens up a new area for research on political violence.

There has been a major shift towards democracy as a form of government in the countries of Central America since the 1980s, but democracy is still tenuous in the region due to many factors. All five Central American countries are under civilian rule with the leaders coming to power through elections. The extremely poor condition of these countries and the continuing civil strife before the democratic transition make the changes even more significant. However, scholars are a little skeptical about the changes. The future of democracy in Central America is discussed.

On the evening of March 19, 1994, just hours before the beginning of El Salvador's national election day, a grand diplomatic party was held to honor all of the international [...]

Under the healing rays of the sun and the salty ocean air, some 500 Central American women gathered at the beach resort of Montelimar, Nicaragua in March of last year [...]

The concern with ethics in North American cultural anthropology discourages political economy research on unequal power relations and other 'dangerous' subjects. US anthropologists define ethics in narrow, largely methodological terms - informed consent, respect for traditional institutions, responsibility to future researchers, legal approval by host nations, and so on. The responsibility of the researcher to uphold 'human rights' or to document political repression and suffering is not merely dismissed by mainstream anthropology as a partisan issue outside the realm of scholarship, but is actually condemned as ethically problematic. The growing postmodernist deconstructivist approach within US anthropology allows ethnographers to obey their discipline's narrow ethical dictates through a reflexive investigation of the hermeneutics of signs and symbols devoid of political economic social context. Drawing on his fieldwork experiences in Central America, the author argues that anthropologists have a historical responsibility to address larger moral issues because their discipline's traditional research subjects - exotic others in remote Third World settings - are violently being incorporated into the world economy in a traumatic manner that often includes starvation, political repression, or even genocide. Meanwhile, in the name of ethics, North American anthropologists continue to ignore or avoid the human tragedies engulfing their 'research subjects'.

The limitations of the dominant neoliberal perspective on governance and institutional reform with a particular focus upon anti-corruption initiatives are explored. The growth of international interest in combating corruption is discussed following a brief general discussion of the dynamics of governance reforms in Central America.

The field of Central American studies, despite the death squads, Contras, and revolutionary movements that rocked the region in the 1980s, has developed rapidly in the last twenty years. In [...]