Examines why some democratic innovations succeed while others fail, using Venezuela, Ecuador, and Chile as case studies. Citizens’ Power in Latin America takes the reader into the heart of communities where average citizens are attempting to build a new democratic model to improve their socioeconomic conditions and to have a voice in decisions that affect their lives. Based on groundbreaking fieldwork conducted in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Chile, Pascal Lupien contrasts two models of participatory design that have emerged in Latin America and identifies the factors that enhance or diminish the capacity of these mechanisms to produce positive outcomes. He draws on lived experiences of citizen participants to reveal the potential and the dangers of participatory democracy. Why do some democratic innovations appear to succeed while others fail? To what extent do these institutions really empower citizens, and in what ways can they be used by governments to control participation? What lessons can be learned from these experiments? Given the growing dissatisfaction with existing democratic systems across the world, this book will be of interest to people seeking innovative ways of deepening democracy.

Now in its sixth edition, Politics of Latin America: The Power Game explores both the evolution and the current state of the political scene in Latin America. This text demonstrates a nuanced sensitivity to the use and abuse of power and the importance of social conditions, gender, race, globalization, and political economy throughout the region. It is uniquely divided into two parts: one that treats big-picture, thematic questions, and one that focuses on particular countries through case studies of ten representative nations: Guatemala, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, Nicaragua, and Bolivi

Highlighting eleven different topics in separate chapters, the thematic approach of Latin American Politics offers students the conceptual tools they need to analyze the political systems of all twenty Latin American nations. Such a structure makes the book self-consciously comparative, allowing students to become stronger analysts of comparative politics and better political scientists in general.

Looking at the Latin American liberal project during the century of postindependence, this collection of original essays draws attention to an underappreciated dilemma confronting liberals: idealistic visions and fiscal restraints. Liberals, Politics, and Power focuses on the inventiveness of nineteenth-century Latin Americans who applied liberal ideology to the founding and maintenance of new states. The impact of liberalism in Latin America, the contributors show, is best understood against the larger backdrop of struggles that pitted regional demands against the pressures of foreign finance, a powerful church against a decentralized state, and aristocratic desire to retain privilege against rising demands for social mobility. Moving beyond the traditional historiographical division between Eurocentric and dependency theories, the essays attempt to account for a uniquely Latin American liberal ideology and politics by exploring the political dynamics of such countries as Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Peru. Contributors discuss liberal efforts to build a viable legal order through elections and to implement a means of public finance that could fund the states' operations. Essays that span the entire century address issues such as the emergence of caudillos, the role of artisans, and popular participation in elections in light of fiscal, and other, impediments to progress. In their introduction, Vincent C. Peloso and Barbara A. Tenenbaum provide a hemispheric overview of liberalism that illustrates its similarities across Latin America. By exploring the liberal constitutional and economic order lying beneath apparently dictatorial states, this pathbreaking volume underlines the importance of fiscal policy in the fashioning of state power. Liberals, Politics, and Power serves not only as a guide to the liberal principles and practices that governed state formation in nineteenth-century Latin America but also as a means to evaluate the complex relationship between ideas and practical politics.

Click here to see a video interview with Emelio Betances. Click here to access the tables referenced in the book. Since the 1960s, the Catholic Church has acted as a mediator during social and political change in many Latin American countries, especially the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. Although the Catholic clergy was called in during political crises in all five countries, the situation in the Dominican Republic was especially notable because the Church's role as mediator was eventually institutionalized. Because the Dominican state was persistently weak, the Church was able to secure the support of the Balaguer regime (1966-1978) and ensure social and political cohesion and stability. Emelio Betances analyzes the particular circumstances that allowed the Church in the Dominican Republic to accommodate the political and social establishment; the Church offered non-partisan political mediation, rebuilt its ties with the lower echelons of society, and responded to the challenges of the evangelical movement. The author's historical examination of church-state relations in the Dominican Republic leads to important regional comparisons that broaden our understanding of the Catholic Church in the whole of Latin America.

This book identifies sources of power that help business and economic elites influence policy decisions.

This book illustrates how political psychology has addressed critical social issues in Latin America and provides a selective summary of work conducted by some of the leading Latin American researchers in political psychology.