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Resisting Backsliding
In the past two decades, democratically elected executives across the world have used their popularity to push for legislation that, over time, destroys systems of checks and balances, hinders free and fair elections, and undermines political rights and civil liberties. Using and abusing institutions and institutional reform, some executives have transformed their countries' democracies into competitive authoritarian regimes. Others, however, have failed to erode democracy. What explains these different outcomes? Resisting Backsliding answers this question. With a focus on the cases of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Alvaro Uribe in Colombia, the book shows that the strategies and goals of the opposition are key to understanding why some executives successfully erode democracy and others do not. By highlighting the role of the opposition, this book emphasizes the importance of agency for understanding democratic backsliding and shows that even weak oppositions can defeat strong potential autocrats.
Opposition at the Margins
This book examines how opposition strategies can help or hinder potential autocrats' ability to erode democracy.
Human Rights, Imperialism, and Corruption in US Foreign Policy
This book provides a novel account of the role of human rights discourse in the US foreign policy. The book analyses the US State Department’s Annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices as a means to monopolise and, more importantly, legitimise a specific framing of the human rights agenda to further US foreign policy. The US agenda’s deviation from established international human rights standards has very serious implications considering the preponderant global influence exercised by the US. Furthermore, more recently, the reports have added a separate section on "corruption" as a human rights issue. “Corruption”, a controversial concept from the outset, is understood in a narrow way as a public sector issue that largely prevails in and subverts the so-called developing and transition countries. This book shows how this recent inclusion ultimately serves the US global neoliberal imperialist agenda and becomes the hegemonic discourse in international organisations.
Capturing News, Capturing Democracy
The Voice of America (VOA) is the oldest and largest U.S. government-funded international media organization. In 2020, Donald Trump nominated Michael Pack, a right-wing documentarian and close friend of Steve Bannon, to lead the organization and curb what Trump saw as the network's overly negative reporting on the U.S. During the seven months that Pack oversaw the agency, more than 30 whistleblowers filed complaints against him, a judge ruled that he had infringed journalists' constitutional right to freedom of speech, and he refused to respond to a subpoena issued by the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. How did such a major international public service media network become intensely p...
Shifting Legal Visions
An in-depth study of processes of judicial transformation that enabled the success of human rights trials in Latin America.
None of the Above
Around the world each year, millions of citizens turn out to vote but leave their ballots empty or spoil them. Increasingly, campaigns have emerged that promote “invalid” votes like these. Why do citizens choose to cast blank and spoiled votes? And how do campaigns mobilizing the invalid vote influence this decision? None of the Above answers these questions using evidence from presidential and gubernatorial elections in eighteen Latin American democracies. Author Mollie J. Cohen draws on a broad range of methods and sources, incorporating data from electoral management bodies, nationally representative surveys, survey experiments, focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and news sourc...
A Dynamic Theory of Populism in Power
The relationship between populism and democracy is contested among scholars. While some propose that populism is inherently harmful for democracy because it is anti-pluralist and confrontational, others argue that populism can reinvigorate worn-out democracies in need of greater popular participation. In A Dynamic Theory of Populism in Power, Julio F. Carrión advances this debate by examining the empirical relationship between populism in power and democracy. Does populism in power always lead to regime change, that is, the demise of democracy? The answer is no. The impact of populism on democracy depends on the variety of populism in power: the worst outcomes in democratic governance are f...
Voice and Inequality
"How do poor people in Latin America participate in politics? What explains the variation in the patterns of voting, protesting, and contacting government for the region's poorest citizens? Why are participation gaps larger in some countries than in others? This book offers the first large scale empirical analysis of political participation in Latin America, focusing on patterns of participation among the poorest citizens in each country, and comparing those patterns to those of individuals with more resources. Far from being politically inert, under certain conditions the poorest citizens in Latin America can act and speak for themselves with an intensity that far exceeds their modest socio...
Narcomedia
Exploring representations of Latinx people from Scarface to Narcos, this book examines how pop culture has framed Latin America as the villain in America’s long and ineffectual War on Drugs. If there is an enemy in the War on Drugs, it is people of color. That is the lesson of forty years of cultural production in the United States. Popular culture, from Scarface and Miami Vice to Narcos and Better Call Saul, has continually positioned Latinos as an alien people who threaten the US body politic with drugs. Jason Ruiz explores the creation and endurance of this trope, its effects on Latin Americans and Latinx people, and its role in the cultural politics of the War on Drugs. Even as the foc...
Party Systems in Latin America
This book generates a wealth of new empirical information about Latin American party systems and contributes richly to major theoretical debates about party systems and democracy.
