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Democratic diffusion studies too often treat countries as billiard balls, with the effects on regime transition likeliness spread equally around each country. A subnational conception of democratic diffusion has not yet been considered in detail. This paper seeks to determine the extent to which a particular subnational factor, cross-border population flows, affects democratic transition. It seeks to examine this relationship in the case of pre-2000 authoritarian Mexico, using each of Mexico's states as a separate case. When visitors from democratic countries enter Mexico, and when Mexicans travel to democratic countries, political homogenization should occur through social exchanges. Controlling for other variables, states in Mexico with large numbers of cross-border population flows should therefore have experienced a greater vote for opposition, non-PRI parties. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the factors that account for the success or the erratic fortune of right-wing parties in Latin America? The present paper deals with a comparison between right-wing parties in Argentina and Mexico after 1990s by advancing that territorial organizational differences are a large part of this story of right parties' success (Mexico) and failure (Argentina). The inexistence of a traditional right-wing party with strong penetration at different levels of the institutional governmental structure has been a recurrent characteristic of the Argentine political system. Surprisingly enough, since 1995 Argentine right parties are becoming more successful in terms of votes but increasingly less successful in terms of offices. How can this paradoxical outcome be explained in a context in which electoral incentives have remained almost unaltered? Different authors have tried to explain this phenomenon mainly from a perspective focused on the dynamics of the national party system. Less attention, however, has been paid to the impact of the federal linkage in the emergence, survival and eventual success at the national level of particular political forces, their organization and chances of becoming central political actors. Certainly, we argue that the way in which parties organize themselves in a federal setting may provide a meaningful insight to understand this puzzling phenomenon. We advance a theoretical framework that reconciles studies of party organization with party territorial strategies informed by the federal arrangement of power. The empirical analysis is focused on Argentina's recent history and the successful experience of the PAN in Mexico. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some important scholars in the field of comparative public opinion research on Latin America has recurrently indicated that a majority of citizen in Latin America proffer support for democracy over authoritarianism (Lagos 2001, 2003a, 2003b, Zovatto 2002). On the basis of aggregate data of a direct measure, this group of work has yielded that I call an "optimistic view" about the democratic values in the region. However, as other scholars have showed, a good proportion of citizens that declare a preference for democracy shows also support for political alternatives that are clearly not democratic (e.g. UNPD 2004; Schedler and Sarsfield 2004; Sarsfield and Schedler 2005). Then, the support to democracy declines considerably when specific democratic attitudes are probed. Using open-ended questions, some research has shown that the word "democracy" means very different things to many different people. In this way, "there is considerable variation in the meaning of this word across socio-economic status lines and across national boundaries" (LAPOP 2006:2). Linking direct and indirect measures of the attitudes to democracy and on the basis of the World Values Survey, this paper attempts to assess different conceptions of democracy in Argentina and Mexico. In the first place, findings show that there are important differences between Argentina and Mexico in the conceptions of democracy. Secondly, findings show complex and inconsistent attitudinal profiles in both Argentina and Mexico. When I compare an abstract support to democracy with specific attitudes to democratic principles, I find two very different maps in each country. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, Mexico has experienced a dramatic shift away from one-party rule, one which has given opposition parties an opportunity to meaningfully participate in the national government for the first time in nearly seventy years. At the local level, this wave of democratization has not only increased the overall importance of sub-national government, it has also elevated the standing of state legislatures as well: under one-party rule, legislatures were largely rubberstamp institutions subordinate to powerful governors; today, many of these same assemblies are now independent bodies capable of realizing policies they themselves have designed. Nevertheless, because Mexican democratization has proceeded unevenly, there are still a number of state legislatures still operating according to the old rules of one-party government. This analysis will take advantage of this variation in partisan competition to (1) identify the internal rules of state legislatures in Guanajuato, San Luís Potosí, Sinaloa, and Yucatán which encourage multiparty government; and (2) determine the extent to which these rules have an effect on the probability an individual legislator supports a given bill. Using a new data set containing every roll call vote held between 2000 and 2007 in the four state legislatures, I find substantial evidence suggesting that while multiparty legislatures govern in a more consensual fashion than their one-party counterparts, parties occupying the median position in the policy space still enjoy substantial control over parliamentary agendas. This creates a situation in which multiparty legislatures appear as if they still operate under one-party rule. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]