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In its first generation, the literature on the resource curse typically posited that resource dependence shapes a country's economy and politics. More recent work posits that the effects are mediated by institutions. We take this newer approach further by arguing that economic and political institutions not just mediate but actually shape resource dependence. Our focus is on performance across national oil companies (NOCs) in Latin America. We explain performance variation by invoking variations in regime and market features. NOCs that operate in contexts of greater independence from the Executive Branch (stronger checks and balances within and outside the sector) and greater market forces—though not necessarily private actor dominance—exhibit better performance. Institutions thus influence sector conditions, rather than the other way around. We advance this argument using original data from Colombia and Venezuela, and supplementary data from Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. Our study focuses on the oil boom-bust cycle of 2003–2016.

Javier Corrales is Dwight W. Morrow 1895 Professor of Political Sci- ence at Amherst College. Michael Penfold is professor of public policy at the Instituto de Estudios Superiores en Administracion (IESA) in Caracas, and specializes in public policy, political economy, and in- ternational business in Latin America. Together they are the authors of Dragon in the Tropics: Hugo Chavez and the Political Economy of Revolution in Venezuela (2011). The debate about democratic consolidation in Latin America has evolved into a debate about the quality of democratic institutions in the region. In assessing the region's democratic institutions, many scholars have focused on the political consequences of constitutional design, par- ticularly its impact on the separation of powers. Few studies, however, have focused on one of the most important constitutional trends in Latin America in recent times: the relaxation of presidential term limits. 1 The scant attention to this topic is surprising given that, in other regions, the trend toward presidential reelection has been deemed inauspicious for democratic development by some scholars, 2 and in Latin America, it tends to be polemical, with many voters finding looser term limits to be highly objectionable. Reelection bans and term limits were pioneered in the nineteenth century by Latin American democrats seeking to prevent caudillismo, continuismo, and the concentration of power in the executive branch. 3 In the last two decades, however, a number of countries in the region have broken with this constitutional legacy by introducing, through leg- islation, constituent assemblies, judicial rulings, or referenda, consti- tutional changes to permit or expand reelection. In some cases, these changes have been modest, allowing presidents to serve a consecutive term (where either reelection had been banned altogether or incumbents were required to sit out for at least one term). In a few cases, the changes have enabled presidents to run for office indefinitely.

Cuba faces a development dilemma: it promotes equity and human capital while failing to deliver economic growth. For the government, the country's equity and human capital achievements are a source of pride, a sign that its priorities are right. This essay argues instead that this “equity without growth” dilemma is a sign of malaise. Theory and evidence suggest that high levels of equity and human capital should produce high levels of economic growth. Because growth is often weak or negative, some onerous barriers to development must be present. These barriers, it is argued, are restrictions on property and political rights. By comparing Cuba and China across two sectors, the bicycle industry and Internet access, this article shows how these restrictions have hindered growth. It also assesses how Cuba's latest economic reforms, the so-called Lineamientos, will address Cuba's development dilemma. The impact may be minimal, but perhaps more lasting than previous reforms.

President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela has achieved what no other Latin American leader has since the end of the Cold War: bringing security concerns in the Western Hemisphere back to U.S. foreign policy. Might Venezuela provoke a war against neighboring Colombia, spread weapons among insurgents abroad, disrupt oil sales to the United States, provide financial support to Hezbollah, al Qaeda or other fundamentalist movements, offer safe havens for drug dealers, invite Russia to open a military base on its territory, or even acquire nuclear weapons? 1 These security concerns did not exist less than a decade ago, but today they occupy the attention of U.S. officials. Attention to these conventional security issues, however, carries the risk of ignoring what thus far has been Venezuela's most effective foreign policy tool in challenging the United States: the use of generous handouts abroad, peppered with a pro-poor, distribution-prone discourse. While the U.S. debate revolves around ''hard power'' and ''soft power,'' 2 this other form can be called ''social power diplomacy.'' Similar to hard power and soft power, social power diplomacy allows the projecting nation to attract allies but through different means. With social power diplomacy, other nations are not necessarily cajoled into bowing to the economic or military might of the projecting nation, as is the case in the realm of traditional hard power politics. Also, nations are not necessarily attracted to the magnetic appeal of the projecting nation's ideology and values, as is the case with the realm of soft power politics. Instead, social power diplomacy attracts allies because it provides governments with far more latitude in domestic spending than is the case

Latin Americans have been voting for a surprisingly large number of ex-presidents and newcomers in presidential elections since the late 1980s. This article looks at both the demand and supply sides of this phenomenon by focusing on economic anxieties and party crises as the key independent variables. Sometimes the relationship between these variables is linear: economic anxieties combined with party crises lead to rising ex-presidents and newcomers. At other times the relationship is symbiotic: the rise of ex-presidents leads to party crises, economic and political anxieties, and thus the rise of newcomers. This article concludes that the abundance of ex-presidents and newcomers in elections—essentially, the new face of Latin America’s caudillismo—does not bode well for democracy because it accelerates de-institutionalization and polarizes the electorate. P residential elections in Latin America since 1988 exhibit an unusual trend. A large number of former presidents have been running for office and often winning. Counting only candidates who are not trivial—that is, who obtain more than 10 percent of the vote—at least one ex-president has run in roughly half the elections in which ex-presidents were constitutionally allowed to compete. They have won in almost 40 percent of the races. At the same time, the number of political newcomers—that is, candidates with virtually no political experience—is also large: nontrivial newcomers have competed in almost 20 percent of all elections. Latin Americans are displaying an electoral preference for two quite distinct candidates: ex-presidents and newcomers. This is an odd phenomenon. The electoral salience of ex-presidents and newcomers is a departure from the experience of democracies in Europe, where these types of candidates are infrequent. This trend also contradicts prominent theories about electoral choice, such as the view that electoral choice is contingent on economics and curricula vitae (Alesina 1994). In moments of economic downturn, according to this theory, voters tend to prefer candidates with resumes that combine reliability (i.e., a proven record of experience in office) with some detachment from the status quo that presumably makes the candidate more able to pursue change (Dalton and Wattenberg 1993). In Latin America

The acceleration of authoritarianism in Venezuela since 2004, together with Hugo Chavez's reelection in 2006, cannot be explained easily with functional theories. Instead, we focus on political opportunities: specifically, economic resources at the state's disposal together with weakened institutions of representation helped crowd out the opposition. We show how clientelism and electoral authoritarianism feed each other. Together with deliberate strategies of polarization, impunity, and job discrimination, lavish spending has allowed the state to mobilize majorities and emerge undefeatable at the polls. This invincibility is, paradoxically, the reason that the Venezuelan state has become an unreliable force for promoting democracy.

What explains the different rates of internet use across nations, otherwise known as the worldwide digital divide? Essentially, this is a question about the determinants of technology adoption, a debate that has been dominated by two schools of thought—one focuses on the characteristics of the technology itself, the other, on the characteristics of the adopting body, that is, the social and institutional context in which adopters operate. This paper attempts to integrate these two theories by focusing on the features of both information technologies and adopting entities. We confirm the well-documented findings that income, trade, infrastructure, market-oriented policies, and political liberties explain one measure of the digital divide. However, we also find a more complex relationship between political liberties and internet adoption. Differences in political liberties do not lead to uniform differences in internet use, as the literature often assumes. Specifically, not all authoritarian regimes discourage internet use similarly. High-income, market-oriented autocratic states are less draconian. Although they fear the political consequences of internet expansion, they also welcome its economic payoffs. We provide quantitative and qualitative evidence that the more authoritarian the country, the stronger the impact of income on internet expansion. This may be beneficial for economic development, but contrary to modernization theories, it may not necessarily bolster forces of democratization in these regimes.

The Venezuelan manufacturing sector, unlike agriculture, cooperated with state’s efforts to liberalize trade in the 1990s, despite the economic costs it absorbed and the political opportunities to sabotage the reforms. This paper offers two explanations for this, which modify and conciliate traditional interest-based and corporatist theories of state-society relations. High levels of sectoral autonomy from the bureaucracy and political parties (and hence Congress), together with low levels of involvement in profit-making on the part of the associations representing the sector, encourage sectoral cooperation with costly and risky state policies. In addition, traditional corporatist instruments used by states—inducements and constraints—hurt rather than enhance state-sector cooperation.

After sabotaging almost every privatization since the 1970s, the Argentine private sector suddenly began to support privatizations in 1991. While public choice approaches that stress the cost impact of policy can explain the anti-privatization behavior of the private sector prior to 1991, they are less successful at explaining this recent shift in behavior. This article explains this shift by focusing on political coalitions. By expanding (or reducing) the set of attainable outcomes, political coalitions shape the political choices of firms. Prior to 1991, the rent-seeking private sector led a huge multi-sectoral anti-privatization coalition that repeatedly preempted the Executive from privatizing. In 1991, this coalition disintegrated as a result of a reordering of economic institutions. Devoid of its traditional allies, the private sector chose to acquiesce to privatizations. Thus, political coalitions can be more important in shaping firm behavior than economic considerations such as the cost-impact of public policy or the size of rent markets. This article also explains why, in many countries confronting comparable anti-privatization coalitions, privatizations are likely to emerge with an unexpected mixture of competition-enhancing and competition-restricting policies.

The argument is often made by scholars and practitioners that economic crises are a blessing in disguise, since they contribute to the adoption and successful implementation of harsh measures of economic stability and structural adjustment (ESSA). Allan Drazen and Vittorio Grilli, for instance, argue that "crises and emergencies may be welfare-improving and hence desirable," because they make citizens and leaders more eager to embrace adjustment measures.' This argument has become almost indisputable. A recent review of the literature states: "[t]hat economic crises seem either to facilitate or outright cause economic reforms is part of the new conventional wisdom on reform."2 In fact, so conventional is this view that some international policy advisers have actually been known to recommend to policy-makers that they wait until things get really harrowing before launching ESSA reforms. This article argues that the hypothesis that economic crises facilitate economic reforms is often incorrect or insufficient. Crises do play a role in politics in general and in processes of economic reform in particular. But this role is hard to predict and seldom beneficial. In addition, the literature offers no consistent guidelines as to what constitutes "the real" crisis. Moreover, focusing on discerning the true parameters of the real crisis entails the risk of ignoring

Our primary research goals were twofold: (1) to determine whether, and to what extent, participation in CMS programs can generate political capabilities, and (2) to identify the factors that facilitate or block the development of political capabilities. To achieve these goals, we utilized a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative analysis of participant surveys with ethnographic field research.

We now turn to the impact of patronage and polarization on two separate domains: (1) participation by parents in CMS and (2) the political survival of the programs. In terms of the former, patronage and polarization had common effects. They reduced participation in CMS in general, and consequently the likelihood of spillovers—though each through different mechanisms.

Initiatives to stimulate participation in governance and development have often prompted arguments from two extremes: unquestioning advocates and dismissive critics. This study has mapped out a middle path. Contrary to participation cheerleaders who assume that new venues for citizen participation will automatically strengthen civil society and democracy, we show how political context and problems in program implementation impinge on PG initiatives. But, unlike those who dismiss participation, we found evidence that PG initiatives can produce spillovers among a non-trivial minority of participants, thereby changing the civic and political life of certain citizens.

Continuing our discussion of the factors that constrain spillovers, we now focus on how patterns of party-society interactions impact PG. The first issue is patronage. In Honduras, patronage is the dominant manner in which parties interact with society. Our two otherwise “most similar” country cases differ significantly in the nature and reach of patronage. The other issue is polarization. In Guatemala, polarization (both among parties and between parties and civic groups) has a much greater impact than patronage. In this chapter, we describe these two different forms of party-society relations, and how each has impacted CMS programs.

LGBT rights have expanded unevenly across Latin America and the Caribbean. Recent scholarship has been able to explain some of the reasons for this unevenness. But new and old questions remain unaddressed. This article suggests areas for further research. Resumen: Los derechos LGBT en la politica de America Latina y el Caribe: Agendas para la investigacion Los derechos LGBT han proliferado en America Latina y el Caribe de modo disparejo. Varios estudios academicos recientes han logrado explicar las razones de dicho crecimiento disparejo. Sin embargo, existen todavia preguntas sin responder al igual que nuevas preguntas por contestar. Este articulo sugiere algunas areas que ameritan mas investigacion.

In the 1990s the Cuban regime displayed two unexpected characteristics. One was survival. The other was the implementation of uneven economic reforms, meaning that some sectors of the economy were revamped, while others remained untouched. This article connects these two outcomes by arguing that uneven eco- nomic reforms explain regime survival. Uneven economic reforms served to strengthen the power of the state vis-a-vis society, and within the state, the power of hard-liners. This new type of state, which I call "the gatekeeper state," dominates society through a new mechanism—it fragments the economy into different sectors of varying degrees of profitability and then determines which citizens have access to each respective sector. While some authoritarian regimes stay alive by providing widespread economic growth, the Cuban regime in the 1990s survived instead by restricting access to capitalist rewards. This has permitted the incumbents to navi- gate through societal pressures and postpone regime transition. The continuity of the Cuban political regime in the 1990s has amazed most Cubanologists of every persuasion (e.g., Hawkins 2001; Suchlicki 2000; Aguirre 2000; Dilla 1997; Bengelsdorff 1994; Ritter 1994; Dominguez 1993b). Despite the demise of dictatorships in Latin America and most of the Soviet Bloc, Cuba's regime has remained unabashedly authoritarian. This continu- ity in politics contrasts with the discontinuities in economics. Between 1993 and 1996, Cuba opened new sectors to foreign direct investment (FDI), liber- alized farm markets, legalized the possession of U.S. dollars and new forms of self-employment, and reduced the fiscal deficit by cutting spending. Compared to economic reforms elsewhere in Latin America, Cuba's reforms were timid. Cuba fell short of privatizing any state-owned enterprises, liberalizing financial markets, and permitting full-scale profit making, as most aggressive reformers in Latin America did in the 1990s. 1 Cuba also fell short in comparison to Communist China 1. By 1999, the accumulated privatization revenues of the top nine privatizing coun- tries in Latin America amounted to 9.1 percent of GDP, among the highest in the world (based on Lora 2001). Average private investment in Latin America increased from 13.6 to 16.5 percent of GDP between 1989 and 1998 (based on Everhart and Sumlinski 2001).

The Hugo Chavez Frias administration (1999-present) is the most polarizing government in Venezuela since the late 1940s and in Latin America as a whole since the Sandinistas ruled Nicaragua in the 1980s. Supporters admire Chavez for having inaugurated a new form of democracy, so-called ‘participatory’, which is unabashedly anti-party and presumably more attuned to ordinary citizens. They also admire his call for an alternative economic model, a ‘socialism of the 21st century’, which is decidedly anti-globalization and pro-poor, at least in words. For critics, these are pretty-sounding slogans intended to disguise a new form of authoritarianism – one that uses democratic instruments (electoral majorities) to produce undemocratic outcomes (exclusion of political opponents). Each side sees the other as politically threatening. The disputes between them plunged Venezuela into new levels of political instability. Venezuela in the 1970s was considered a paradigmatic case for the study of democratization, and in the 1980s, for the study of democratic decay. In the 1990s, it became a paradigmatic case for the study of policy incoherence. In the early 2000s, it has emerged as a paradigmatic case for the study of political polarization. The best works on the Chavez administration focus on the evolution of the political regime – what exactly happened to Venezuela’s democracy in the past 40 years? Yet, even these works have made insufficient progress in understanding the nature of opposition politics under Chavez. In most democracies, the opposition obsesses about how to defeat incumbents. Only in few democracies do opponents and incumbents take the extreme steps witnessed in Venezuela in 2001-04. This essay is an attempt at drawing lessons from the Venezuelan case to construct theories of political polarization. However, the most recent arguments on the issue of regime type in Venezuela will first be reviewed. This issue is crucial because to understand the dynamics of polarization requires first understanding state policy, which is intrinsically linked to regime type. For that reason, the first part of this essay reviews existing arguments on: 1) the conceptualization of the Chavez regime – is it democratic?; and 2) the origins of the regime, which depending on how the first question is answered, is an exercise in debating theories about the origins of democracy or authoritarianism. I will focus mostly on works published since 2000. After discussing the debate on regime type, I offer some thoughts on how the Venezuelan case can illuminate our theoretical understanding of political polarization.

Zealand, Paraguay, Romania, Spain, and Zambia, statist parties won elections, often running on a traditional platform of state intervention in the economy, only to discover that their very own governments were ready to jettison this platform in favor of market-oriented economic reforms. These turnarounds not only contradicted the parties' historical platforms, but also penalized important constituents of the parties in the short term. Invariably, these parties reacted to these reforms with utter dismay. This dislocation in executive-ruling party relations is a recurrent and understudied political issue in every process of market-oriented economic reform. In contrast to prevailing theories on the subject, which view reform implementation as contingent on struggles between the executive and antireform interest groups and opposition parties, this article argues that the key conflict to resolve is between the executive and the ruling party. If left unchecked, executive-ruling party dislocation will hamper the capacity of governments to implement reforms. This article elaborates the reasons why market-oriented economic reforms produce dislocation in executive-ruling party relations. However, it also suggests that this dislocation is resolvable, depending on the strategies adopted by the executive. Three possible responses to these dislocations are discussed. The first is a partyneglecting approach: the executive simply neglects the concerns of the party and attempts to implement the reforms by bypassing the ruling party. The second approach is party-yielding: the executive cedes to the demands of the party, in essence abandoning the reform program. The third approach is party-accommodating: the executive negotiates some compromise with the party, granting political concessions in return for the party's consent to implement reforms. All of these responses affect the politics of reform implementation. Specifically, they affect two variables: political stability during the reform process and depth of reform implementation. A party-neglecting approach engenders the highest degree of instability and, hence, implementation difficulties. The party-yielding approach might placate tensions in executive-ruling party relations, but at the expense of reform implementation. Whether reform abdication will improve stability in overall