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Taking the answers of over fifty Latin American scholars to a survey as its foundation, this paper analyses the features of the global and Latin American context and presents some of the potential areas for its development over the coming decade. To do this, the number of poles in the system is considered along with the logics of cooperation and competition that predominate in the relations between countries. In addition, an analysis is made of how different countries define a 'region' in their foreign policy, and the reasons behind Brazil losing its leadership position and Mexico's potential role in the region are set out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature maintains that not all populisms are equal. Some are seen as projects of regeneration or democratisation because they would incorporate an excluded people; others are movements that would weaken democracy by promoting exclusion (xenophobia and racism). The former is "left-wing populism" while the latter is "right-wing populism". This paper shows that what is central to populism is its model of democracy, not whether it is situated on the right or the left. To do this, an evaluation is made of the democratic balance of populisms in three countries in Europe (Austria, France and Hungary) and three in Latin America (Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela). As will be shown, those of the right have no more contributed to the destruction of democracy than those on the left may be presented as democratising successes; but all represent a profound challenge to liberal democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the liberalizing global project of Enrique Dussel, whereby, leave aside the Habermasian project realization and should proceed towards transmodernity, this paper is to find out by the concept of modernity in order to assert a view from Latin America on the political thought. For this reason we start from the premise that the founding myth of modernity is no illustration, is the discovery of America, because there appears the colonial matrix in which Europe becomes the center of the world. Under this assumption the paper ends with a preparatory analysis of the journalistic thought of Antonio Nariño from the perspective of modernity-otherness in which is defended a reading not illustrated. Methodologically the text takes the main works of Enrique Dussel about the two concepts of modernity, and then analyze the thought of Antonio Nariño through its main newspaper articles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many countries in Latin America have made nanotechnology a development priority in their public policy platforms. The main feature of these public policies is to provide support for nanotechnology research and development, aiming to forge ties between public institutions and universities and the private sector, to boost innovation and competitiveness. These public policies do not take into account the global context of strong capital concentration in which nanotechnologies emerge, and which makes it difficult to be competitive within the framework laid out by these public policies to develop these technologies. This paper analyzes the direction of public policy in the international context, and also suggests policy alternatives. [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 objective of this paper is to analyze how despite the economic and political structural differences of the Latin American countries, the common denominator of these economies is its dependence with the global economy as producers of primary goods. This exploitation of raw materials, called neoextractivista model, carries from its own origin hoarding of land, deportation or displacement of rural communities, establishing then, for natural consequences, a spiral of criminalization and repression of resistance by territorial disputes and divergent values around them, in a context of great power asymmetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The New Latin American Constitutionalism (NLAC) is one of the most interesting phenomena of the present compared constitutional Law. One of its features is the incorporation to the Constitutions of a wide carte of participatory tools that contain the last news of participatory democracy converting those texts in some of the most developed ones in this area. The question is if this incorporation of participatory tools improves democracy or worsens it, if achieves its participatory objectives or if participatory democracy ends or diluted in the representative model or becoming a tool in the hands of rulers that want to strengthen their power weakening the other powers of the State. Does the participatory democracy of the NLAC make a democratic improvement or worsening? This paper, by the analytic- synthetic method and through the compared study of the most relevant doctrine and legislation, tries to give an answer concluding that, although the participatory tools themselves are neutral and it will depend of the will of the actor that active them that they will be positive or negative, participatory democracy means the introduction of a direct participation wedge in a essentially representative model and can be source of imbalances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I focus on societal movements against destructive expansion now in progress in Latinamerican countries. On the one hand, I point out some characteristic aspects of the logic which promotes this expansion, stressing in mechanisms to expropriate people and communities. On the other hand, I deal with some characteristic traits of societal movements, emphasizing on territorial and sacred rights alleged by communities to defend their territories. Taking in count that these process are confrontations about the alleged universality of the modern conception of nature, I ask what contribution may offer these particular movements to renew our imagination facing to challenges by global environmental crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper work constitutes an attempt to make complex the analysis matrix about the implications of the extractive industry in Latin America; worning about differents extralegal mechanisms on wich is based the model itself. To achieve such content we appeal to some concepts and analysis axes made out by a french thinker, Michel Foucault, such as: governmentality, biopolitics, power networks, subject, and subjectivity. For the written preparation they were taking into account other literature sources, especially those books and scientific publications made by latinamerican intellectuals critical to the extractive model as they are among other the works of: Alberto Acosta, Maristella Svampa, Eduardo Gudynas, Edgardo Lander, Luis Tapia y Raúl Zibechi. [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 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 article analyzes the constitution of the area of studies on the history and development of political science in Latin America over the past ten years. Several studies have been proposed to account for this process showing the growth of the discipline in the region. In this paper we will highlight the main actors and their scientific and academic production, as well as the processes of institutionalization and professionalization of political science. This article aims to classify these studies from the early exploratory approaches up to the production of more sofisticated descriptive works, from a comparative perspective, in order to finally arrive at the new current trends that attempt to perform a “metatheoretical" approach with contributions from epistemology, sociology of knowledge and the history of the science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the conditions under which presidents dominate the legislative agenda. To address this issue we analyze the governmental period of 30 Latin American Presidents, developing a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). The analysis highlights that the combination of a favorable institutional design and a division of Congress in different ideological blocs favors the Executive branch. Two other conditions, reliance on a parliamentary majority and the absence of party fragmentation, are combined with the above elements to ensure the predominance of the Executive. The findings of this comparative study are confirmed by a supplementary statistical analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a theoretical discussion of the configuration of the state order. To do this, first discusses the Latin American political science tradition centered on studies of “transition" and “democratic consolidation" and in recent years in the explanations of the “captured states" and “failed states", second takes up the discussion theoretical of the state from a relational perspective, thirdly, to propose a state order analytical model that incorporates the dynamics of social conflict and contentious as fundamental aspects of its structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constitutionalism is not a Latin American creation, but rather a European and American import. Its implantation throughout these region has been particularly difficult, as shown by the fact that in two centuries of independence, they produced over 200 constitutional texts. This paper gives an analysis of some historical causes of this constitutional instability in Latin America. It also shows how constitutionalism has brought about a number of significant results In the region nonetheless, despite the divorce which often exists between the real and the apparent constitution, and the general lack of confidence in Constitutions. A particular importance is ascribed to Constitutional Litigation Law, whose institutions are in force and are respected in countries where the social legitimacy of Constitutions is rather slight. [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 presents an analysis of the colonial and capitalist construction of hegemony in nation-states, emphasizing their development in Latin America and strict co-dependence between economy and politics in government structures. This situation generates a transnational reproduction of hegemony that impedes the development of more local or national emancipation processes in states of the Andean region. A possible alternative is represented by social movements in Bolivia, that, in their intent to create a counter- hegemonic horizon, attempt a unification of indigenous peoples and an ideal of the plurinational state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the causes of disproportionality — the difference between the percentage of seats and percentage of votes obtained by a party — in 18 Latin-American countries, by measuring the effect of four independent variables. The first part presents the research design, the main theoretical approaches used to study electoral systems and a literature review, where both disproportionality and the independent variables are conceptualized. The second part discusses the general behavior of electoral systems and the independent variables in Latin America. The third part contains the inferential analysis, where we measure the impact of the independent variables on disproportionality. We find that there is a direct relationship between district magnitude and disproportionality. Moreover, we find that the higher the threshold of exclusion — the number of voters that could potentially be left without representation because of the district magnitude and the electoral formula —, the higher the disproportionality. We find that proportional electoral systems, rather than majority or mixed electoral systems, tend to produce less distortion between the percentage of votes and the percentage of seats. We find that a low fragmentation in the party system — that is, a small number of parties with a presence in Congress — weakly contributes to increase disproportionality. Finally, we find that malapportionment (i.e., the disproportionate distribution of seats based on the number of voters in that district) has no statistically significant relationship with disproportionality. [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]

The main purpose of this paper is to analyze broadly, the origins, characteristics and challenges of the "new" left in Latin America, whose promotion dates from the last years or even months, with a significant weight in the political and social life of several countries. For the analysis of this topic, there will be an exhibition of their common features, from a historical perspective as well as its current development, product of recent international socioeconomic changes. This analysis hopes to contribute to the debate of the subject matter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's democracies there is a reconfiguration in the public sphere relations that involves a change in the places of the old political actors while opening up a set of new ones. Therefore political parties have begun to share the citizenship's representation and the demands channeling with a series of new actors that have grown up in the political field. However, there is no answer about the current role of the political parties as well as the new political actors in democracy. For these reasons, this paper analyses the relation between citizens and political system in the new democratic context by making a theoretical approach that is supported with two public opinion surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]