Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This article studies the National Uruguayan Party’s discourse during the 1925 and 1926elections. In the first, Luis Alberto de Herrera, was victorious and became president of theNational Council of Administration, the association’s executive branch. However, duringthe 1926 presidential elections he lost the first mandate by very few votes, which resultedin three months of arduous legal disputes between the Nationalists and the pro-governmentColorado Party. The nationalist press was exhaustively studied and constitutes theprimary source for this investigation. The press articles examined delve into the maintopics that interested National Party leaders and voters. For example, the theoretical discussionsabout the party’s political platform, objectives, the role in the country’s life in antithesis with its adversaries, and debates within the party regarding the best way to facethe elections.

This work aims to fi nd out how the adoption of the liberal model of development and the ongoing project of economic modernization, affected the city of Concepción during the second half of the nineteenth century, in relation to the mechanisms of social control used by the governing elites. The core of this study is centered on the role that the police played in the policy of disciplining in Concepción. For this case,we have considered Michel Foucault’s theory, that the police is a relevant condition for the existence of urbanity. Liberalism, within the period of time considered in this work, understood that in order for the country to achieve socioeconomic progress of the country, it was necessary to establish social order. It was made a priority then, to convert the urban poor from “dangerous people” to “working-class”, because of this educational and punitive policy was combined in the search of such intentions. The role of the police was crucial in this process, as they made the installation of unifying elite discourses in subaltern groups possible. Through the appropriation of these discourses the subalterns themselves helped to contribute towards the building of hegemonies.

This article analyses the policies pursued by the Health Minister Dr. Eduardo Cruz-Coke (1937-1938), a remarkable professor of Biochemistry at the University of Chile who contributed to train a significant number of Chilean medical scientists. His health program was based upon a scientific approach to tackle the main health challenges, particularly problems, and general, maternal, and infant mortality. He set up a National Food Council that defined innovative policies to improve the alimentary weakness, particularly among the popular sectors, and organized Preventive Medicine Services to diminish labour sickness. The measures had a positive impact in Public Health indexes and were followed by its successors. His successful performance made him a political figure in the Conservative Party. He was elected Senator in 1941, was re-elected in 1949, and run as presidential candidate in 1946.

The rise of descriptive representation after the 2017 quota law invites exploration of the impact on substantive representation. This work classifies the pro-woman statements, distinguishing those that reproduce gender stereotypes (practical interests) from those that break with their reproduction (strategic interests). The data were collected through semi-structured interviews from a proportional random sample by political party and sex in the last two legislatures (2014-18/2018-22). It was shown that non-sexist statements about women’s interests of a strategic nature increased from 30.4% to 48%. The largest number of these phrases were concentrated in the discourse of the youngest left and center-left deputies in 2014-18; expanding to young men and women of the center-right in 2018-22.

This research aims to examine to what extent the electoral support for the main Argentine parties is driven by policy preferences. Using original online survey data, we focus on the so-called ‘propensities to vote’ (PTV). We perform a restructuration of the original data matrix into a ‘stacked’ data matrix, according the method proposed by van der Brug, van der Eijk and Franklin (2007). Focusing on the current coalitional structure of party system, shaped into two polarized political blocs, a centre-left and a centre-right, our analyses reveal that programmatic issues effectively contribute to party support in Argentina. We found that economic spheres are crucial for the orientations towards Frente de Todos, while support for Juntos por el Cambio seems to be influenced by a more diverse nature of policy dimensions. Within the two main coalitions, support for PJ and PRO is mainly driven by economic motivations, while their minority partners are more peripheral in this dimension.

  The explosive growth of the COVID-19 pandemic in the year 2020 presented a sharp challenge to the institutional and economic capacity of countries around the world. This article examines efforts to confront and cope with the pandemic in a specific case, that of Colombia. It identifies a crisis of governability in the country that has been exacerbated by the pandemic, but which preceded COVID-19 and is likely to outlast it as well. We describe the context in which the pandemic unfolded and the government’s response, which has laid bare the fragility of Colombia’s socioeconomic and political achievements, evidencing deeper structural problems. The country is subject to a high level of informality in the economy’s, a lack of social safety nets for more than half of the population, and the ongoing presence of violence and illegal groups. With the pandemic added to this backdrop, social tensions rose, and blame games and confrontations between national and subnational governments became part of the daily news. Policy measures were undertaken to reduce the number of infections, including extensive lockdowns; while assessments of their effectiveness in meeting their stated objectives vary, there has undeniably been significant regression on economic and social indicators. The dynamics of the 2022 elections will undoubtedly be marked by the consequences of the COVID-19 emergency.

In this article, electoral personalization is measured on the basis of the percentage of voters casting a preference vote instead of a list vote. A multilevel regression analysis of the 2006, 2010, 2014 and 2018 Lower Chamber elections in Colombia, with 971 open lists at the constituency level as units of analysis, shows that the electoral personalization has remained remarkably stable, in spite of the party system changes during the investigated period. Even so, leveraging the unique feature of the Colombian system that parties can opt for either a closed or an open ballot format, we find that the personalization of the open lists decreases with the number of closed lists, but only in the small constituencies. At the list level, personalization increases with the number of candidates on the list. When this effect is controlled for, we find evidence of a proximity effect in the sense that a larger number of voters in the district coincides with a lower level of personalization.  

In 2021, Chile witnessed the continuation of several political and social processes inherited from previous years, among them the fight against the COVID-19 and the constitution-making procedure. In this article, we analyze two key aspects of the Sebastián Piñera’s last year in office: the intense electoral calendar and the impeachment proceeding initiated against him during 2021’s second half. On the one hand, the results of several different elections confirm the weakening of the center-right and its traditional parties, a process that began in the 2019 “estallido social” (social outburst) and how President Sebastián Piñera handled it. On the other hand, we examine in detail the impeachment proceedings against the chief executive and leader of the center-right coalition, paying close attention to the sponsors’ potential motivations and its impact on Chile’s presidential stability.

This article analyzes the principal events of 2021 -the second year of the coalition government led by Luis Lacalle Pou- which was signed by two main issues. In the first place, the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic in which the government manages to deploy a successful vaccination campaign; and, secondly, the initiative of a direct democracy mechanism led by the political and social opposition to derogate 135 articles of the Urgent Consideration Bill (LUC, for its initials in spanish) approved in 2020. It is argued that the combination of both issues put a (transitory) brake to the urgency and deployment of the government’s agenda. To do this, first the economic and social situation is briefly described, and then the political scenario configured between government and opposition. Third, prolonged presidential approval is analyzed from a twofold perspective: the honeymoon effect and the “rally round the flag” effect. Then, one of the central issues of the LUC and of the public agenda is addressed: security and its relationship with government and public opinion. Finally, we analyze the referendum process and its relevance as a new beginning for the coalition government.

We analyze recent developments in Bolivia’s politics through the lens of political cleavage theory, in particular cleavage displacement. Bolivia’s current party system is characterized by a stable and dominant MAS at one end of the spectrum, and at the other a fractious, unstable collection of parties, movements, and other vehicles that have failed to articulate a coherent set of political ideas. It emerged when the previous party system collapsed in 2003-05, shifting politics from a conventional left right axis of competition unsuited to Bolivian society, to an ethnic/rural vs. cosmopolitan/urban axis closely aligned with its major social cleavage. But society did not freeze in 2005. We analyze the deep roots of Bolivia’s current politics, and explore emerging or changing generational, ethnic, urban-rural, regional, class, and religious divides. Understanding how cleavages interact to determine political outcomes allows us to make sense of the deep tensions and sources of instability that both Bolivia, and the MAS internally, currently face, and to shine a light on major coming challenges.