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The paper looks to establish the impact of runoff voting systems for electing presidents on the president's legitimacy, studying the second presidency of Alan Garcia in Peru. At first sight, this case seems to be at odds with the perspective that associates runoff voting with legitimacy. The analysis focuses on the evaluation made by citizens to whom the candidate Alan Garcia was not the first preference, but nevertheless voted for him in the second round. Our findings suggest that judgments made by this group of citizens are not different from those made by those who had Garcia as their first preference. If the two-round system didn't matter, this group would behave like those who preferred Ollanta Húmala to Alan Garcia. Results are robust to inclusion of preferences over policies and cleavages as controls. They are consistent with theoretical expectations that come from asserting a sense of identification by citizens towards the candidate they vote for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay describes the most relevant economic and political events that transpired during the years 2010 and 2011. During those years the economy showed some signs of recovery following the recession of 2009. However, violent activities continued to grow, in part as a result of the policies involved in the "war" against organized crime. The government tried unsuccessfully, to push for reforms of the political system. In the electoral terrain, the PRI had the best performance in local elections, while its presidential candidate is leading in public opinion polls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are some scholars who believe that Mexican political science has followed the standard of American political science and the former has accumulated the same flaws of the later, whereas other scholars consider that the practice of the discipline is still far from the American standard but that should be its goal. The current discussion is dominated by personal impressions rather than by empirical evaluations on the actual state of the discipline. This paper analyzes a sample of 231 published articles in three leading political science journals between 1990 and 2007. Contrary to beliefs about the Americanization of Mexican political science, results show that the later is dominantly descriptive, monographic and qualitative. The main conclusion is that beyond debating the preeminence of any method in particular, the discipline in Mexico will contribute more to the extent that it starts debating substantive aspects of the research methods and processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]