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Governments have deployed different strategies for controlling corruption and to reinforce the ethical frameworks of public employees. Traditionally, a normative or "obedience" approach has been adopted, which highlights the importance of regulations to avoid unethical behaviors. The Chilean government, after an important corruption crisis, decided to implement a different approach, where the objective is to address this problem by an integrity approach centered on the values of public service. The purpose of this paper is to study how this strategy has unfolded, through a quantitative and qualitative analysis, which allows us to present different models of implementation of integrity systems. The article finalizes with ideas and thoughts that could be useful, both for Chile and Latin America, for a better implementation of strategies for curving corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Performance Audits are among the competences of many Supreme Audit Institutions (sais), both in developed and developing countries. However, the level of real implementation of this technique in Latin America is underexplored. This paper aims to contribute to the analysis of the implementation of performance audits in Latin-American countries. This paper analyzed the situation of performance auditing in Latin America through a comparative study based on the evidence obtained from the websites of the sais and on a questionnaire sent to them. Results show a common rhetoric with respect to the importance of this technique but variations in practice. These variations can be explained by three reasons: rhetorical implementation, lack of fit between this technique and the problems facing Latin American countries and different levels of political and economic development. Access to information is quite difficult, fears to answer the questionnaire and lack of accessibility to the reports makes having a full picture a daunting task. Latin American sais should reevaluate the type of performance audit that suits their aims and adapt rather than adopt the tools developed in countries with different problems in public management. This paper offers a broad view of performance audit in Latin America. It reflects the effort of international organization and the limitations that performance audits confront in certain settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past democratic presidents were removed by military coups. Since the return of democracy in Latin America there were numerous presidential interruptions, but these took place via constitutional mechanisms. Governments fell, but the democratic regime remained. Over the last three decades, the experiences of presidential dropouts have led to the development of a theory about presidential interruptions, which attempts to explain the phenomenon of new presidential instability in Latin America. This paper touches on seven distinct issues, in order to add insights to the theoretical debate on presidential interruptions. These issues are: 1) presidential interruption's connection with the theory of constitutional succession; 2) the alleged breach of the fixed term and independence of powers; 3) the reconsideration of the alleged new flexibility of the presidential system; 4) timing and rules of the presidential fall and the timing and rules of the president's replacement; 5) the situation of "ruling gaps", both in relation to the presidential interruption, and the president's replacement; 6) the so-called "thin line" between the parliamentary coup and impeachment; 7) expectations and cycles of presidential strength and weakness that show a certain structural vulnerability of the system. These issues add to the debate by introducing new approaches to studying the phenomenon of presidential interruptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes constitutional design as it pertains to the powers, composition, selection procedures, and duration of the mandate of supreme courts and constitutional tribunals in 17 Latin American countries between 1900 and 2009. The analysis is based on an original database that contains the text of all constitutional articles in the central organs of the judiciary. The paper relies on this information to demonstrate to what degree the job stability of magistrates can be explained in terms of the institutional conditions that regulate the judicial system. Our analysis emphasizes that the survival of magistrates is determined by the stability of the constitutional framework, rather than any specific legal content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article introduces the concept of green tax reforms ("reforma fiscal ambiental") and examines its pertinence for the region, based on the analysis of the opportunities and difficulties for implementing those reforms in two essential public services: the provision of electric power and urban public transportation. Those services are analyzed in their specificities but are considered illustrative of more general situations. After a conventional analysis of objectives and instruments, it is shown that the markets are interdependent and that environmental goals are cross-cutting. From those methodological principles, the shortcomings of the public policies conceived like parallel and autonomous channels become more obvious. Although there seem to be spaces for fiscal innovations with environmental objectives, the paper analyzes the distribution and the competitiveness challenges, and the political economy and institutionalist issues; the results make possible to situate the energy and public transportation agendas in a more general and productive context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this article is to contribute to a burgeoning comparative literature about nationalization of party competition (political parties and party systems), clarifying its terminology and evaluating three different indices of measurement of this phenomenon and used recently in Latin America. This paper argues that despite the confusion in the terminology, the term nationalization should be understood as homogeneity of electoral support across the territory and that a proper measure of nationalization should take into account four basic elements: party presence across the country, number of subnational units where it is measured, its magnitude and the size of the party. The revision of the literature dedicated to Latin American countries reveals that more case studies of longterm evolution of party systems and explanation of its changes and party-centred variables are necessary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Latin America, institutions are either fragile or excessively strong. These are the main conclusions that can be inferred by looking at the institutionalist literature that focuses in the region. Although there are numerous studies about the effects of both traits, there are few analyses about the determinants that explain such results. Taking advantage of this theoretical vacuum, this paper introduces an analytical typology that build upon historical and rational choice institutionalism. We argue that to have better assessments of institutional stability and resilience it is critical to focus on the range and timing of the agreements reached by the agents involved in the institutional design. We claim that this focus will help understand institutional stability and instability as well as their degree of legitimacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of new political and legal conditions, social actors in Latin America have recently developed new forms of collective action, including in particular legal mobilization. This paper intends to contribute to the study of this development, through the incorporation of elements of three scholarly traditions that have generally developed separately from each other: social movement theory, legal mobilization studies and constitutional theory. It points out in particular the contribution of democratic constitutionalism to the analysis of the role of social movements in legal change. It also proposes the use of the terms counter-movement and counter-legal mobilization for the study of collective action and legal strategies developed by conservative sectors that oppose the advancement of social movements in Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyze the growth and convergence of human development in Latin American countries, grouped in areas of economic interest, through the hybrid Human Development Index for the period 1970-2010. We find that all groups of Latin-American countries have higher levels of human development than the world average, mainly due to social variables, being below the average in per capita income. The analysis of sigma and beta convergence shows a decrease of disparities in hybrid HDI across Latin America to common steady states until early 2000. The hybrid HDI components responsible for this convergence have been life expectancy for all groups of countries, and educational variables for the Andean Community (Ancom) and the Central American and Caribbean ones. In gdp per capita, all Latin American countries seem to have converged to different steady states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking as its starting point the concepts of governance of Rhodes and Kooiman, the article develops a critique of the theory of shared government between elected governments and civil society or market actors for its potentially adverse implications for democracy, such as the uncertainty regarding accountability of nongovernmental actors, the lack of presence of major groups of the population in the networks of actors and the absence of redistributive policies in the discourse of governance. On this basis, it argues the need to look back to the traditional political arena as an area of public statement, aggregation of social demands and the main option for political participation by large groups of the population in Latin America. The paper argues that strengthening democracy goes through the development of politics, rather than by their escape into the networks of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the effects of citizen perceptions of democratic legitimacy in Latin America. In the aftermath of the electoral processes, citizens who voted for losing candidates, or who cast blank or spoiled ballots, have less of an incentive than those citizens who backed the winning candidates, to support the government whose leaders they did not choose. Based on data from the 2008 Latin American Public Opinion Project (lapop) survey, that centers on ten countries in the region, it was possible to estimate two probit models. These models confirmed that individuals who belonged to the group of "losers" after the elections are less likely to legitimize democracy than those in the group of winners. However, this relation is mediated by political-institutional and attitudinal variables. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some democracies around the world --including those from Latin America--present equal or higher levels of state repression than the global mean of autocratic regimes. Despite the political and normative relevance of this phenomenon, comparative research on democratic repression is scanty and poorly systematized. Introducing the distinction between centralized and decentralized state repression, and considering advances derived from the global agenda and area studies of Latin America, this article presents a review of theories and empirical explanations that can contribute to the construction of a theory of democratic state repression. Moreover, this paper presents a catalog about the challenges related to the processes of theory generation and empirical evaluation, and offers alternatives to those challenges. The main conclusion is that modeling the use of state violence in terms of principal-agent relations (elected politicians-state security agencies, state security agencies-citizenship) LA-area studies offer fruitful analytical tools for comparative research on democratic state repression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]