Long-run effects of democracy on income inequality in Latin America

I address the link between democracy and inequality in Latin America, analyzing whether the degree of democracy that birth cohorts experience during the course of their formative years is related to labor income dispersion later, in adulthood. For this, I measure inequality at the cohort level by using pseudo-panel data built from household surveys for fifteen Latin American countries (from circa 1995 to circa 2011) and measure democracy as the discounted cumulative value of the degree of democracy during the cohort’s formative years. I find that cohorts that have higher discounted cumulative values of the degree of democracy show lower income inequality. However, the effect of democracy on income dispersion is driven by those cohorts that benefited from the surge of democracies that came to exist during the second half of the twentieth century. I also present suggestive evidence that education is one mechanism explaining these results.     

Governability and Women's Citizenship

SUMMARY

The fragility of Latin American democracies places the subject of gendered citizenship as an important issue in the context of a most needed democratic governability. This article first develops a proposed nexus between democratic governability and gender equality and assumes the need to place women within a universe of citizenship, as an inherently inclusive democratic perspective would require. We emphasize what we see as women's citizenship deficit according to a traditional definition of the political. The second part of the article analyzes the insertion of Mexican women in the construction of citizenship on the basis of empirical material drawn from the second National Survey on Political Culture and Practice of Citizenship. We then present some conclusions, with an eye on what Victoria Camps has called the public virtues, such as solidarity, responsibility and tolerance, as democratic values of the first order and as characteristics of a gendered citizenship within new political spaces. We believe the fragile democracies of Latin America and the important quality of democratic governability can be strengthened if a new form of gendered citizenship, more inclusive of women's concerns and practices, is recognized and nurtured.     

Cities, states, trust, and rule: new departures from the work of Charles Tilly

In the light of his essay “Cities, States and Trust Networks,” contributors to this collection were asked to consider ways of building on or departing from the late Charles Tilly’s work. The authors in this collection addressed four major themes: (1) historicism and historical legacies, (2) trust networks and commitment, (3) city–state relations, and (4) democracy and inequality. Authors concentrating on historicism examined how, despite unanticipated consequences, social action nonetheless produced systematic, durable, social structures; they particularly focused on processes of identity formation and cultural reproduction. In regard to trust networks, contributors discovered a striking variety of forms and relationships and they investigated their origins and their relationship to institutions and culture. Looking at city–state relations, authors uncovered the richness and intricacy of the ties linking cities and states and showed that city–state relations were important not simply in terms of the autonomy or dependence of mutual ties, but also in the quality of these relationships. Besides the ties between cities and states other authors sought to focus on empires and wondered about the degree to which empire formation involved similar processes as state formation. Several authors developed this theme. Authors pursuing themes of democracy and inequality stressed how changes in citizenship and the expansion of parliamentary democratic forms might have complicated effects. The relationship between democracy and inequality was mediated by elites and institutions. Democracy constrained inequality but inequality also constrained democracy. Increased state capacity might enable states to remedy old inequities but it might also allow them to perpetrate new ones. The authors’ varied responses suggest promising directions for research on cities, states, and trust networks.     

Of Enlightenment and Alaska Early Moderns

This article examines transformations of status-capital in the modern history of the Alaska Native Alutiiq. I redevelop Pierre Bourdieu's forms of capital and habitus to analyze how Alutiiq elites stay on course during massive changes in their social structure. By drawing attention to citizenship statuses of the nineteenth century Russian and American colonial periods, I explore how local structural inequalities emerge in Alaska, yet with leaders of the same Alaska Native kin groups moving into the new privileged positions as Russian Imperial citizen, then later as American citizen. The study identifies citizenship as a key technology of group identification in Alaska and, in particular, how civilizing processes associated with citizenship create marked objective differences among the Alutiiq. Alaska Native society's articulation with the Russian and, later, American cultural-political orders creates new kinds of local structural inequalities. By possessing the requisite cultural capital to comprehend structural shifts in politics and the economy, Alaska Native elites strategically fit into new legal and ideological regimes of belonging. What develops is an example of the durability of an Alaska Native ruling elite by means of the transformation of prestige.     

All about ideology? Reading Piketty´s with Latin American lenses

This review essay evaluates Capital and Ideology in light of the Latin American experience. Given its history of exploitation and high levels of inequality, the region constitutes an essential case study. By considering the Latin America case, we can also benefit from the many insights coming from within the region and often overlooked by the Anglo‐Saxon (dominant) literature. The paper makes two different arguments. First, asymmetries in economic and political power are the main drivers of long‐term inequality. Following insights from structuralism, I show how the organization of the global economy has shaped domestic patterns of income distribution in many parts of the world. The dependent character of economic development together with the power of domestic elites explain Latin America's stubborn inequality; ideology has historically been more an instrument than an underlying driver. Second, we cannot understand the evolution of income distribution without considering the role of dictatorships. While Capital and Ideology explains convincingly why liberal democracies are not working, it never properly considers the risk and costs of (conservative) authoritarian regimes. In thinking about policy responses, the essay also highlights the importance of strengthening democracy, fighting dictatorships, and enhancing the influence of social movements.     

Are Latin America's corporate elites transnationally interconnected? A network analysis of interlocking directorates

Conflicting perspectives appear when thinking about the emergence of a cohesive transnational corporate network in Latin America. On the one hand, regional political integration, foreign investment growth, increased cross‐border mergers and acquisitions, and cultural and linguistic homogeneity may have fostered transnational networks among Latin America's corporate elites. On the other hand, domestic‐based business groups, family control and trade orientation to the USA may have hindered the emergence of a cohesive transnational corporate network in Latin America. Based on a network analysis of interlocking directorates among the 300 largest corporations in Latin America, I ask whether the region's corporate elites interconnect at the transnational level and form a cohesive transnational corporate network. I found few transnational interlocks, a lack of cohesion in the transnational corporate network and no regional leaders. Corporate elites in Latin America are not transnationally interconnected and so a cohesive transnational corporate network has not emerged. I discuss implications and avenues of future research.     

Uneven Development and Local Inequality in the U.S. South: The Role of Outside Investment,Landed Elites,and Racial Dynamics

This paper develops a historically contingent understanding of patterns of uneven economic development in the U.S. South. We conceptualize spatial variation in economic development and its consequences for inequality to be embedded in both local and international dynamics. The character of local economic development, it is argued, reflects the organizational base and heterogeneity of local elites, the divisions and relative power of nonelites, and the embeddedness of the local political economy in national and world systems of politics and production. These ideas are developed and made historically and spatially specific through an analysis of uneven development in one Southern state, North Carolina. Our findings suggest that contemporary patterns of uneven development and the resulting income deprivations and inequality reflect conditional interactions between elite economic projects and racial divisions within the working class. We find that outside investment seems to reproduce rather than disrupt local patterns of inequality and poverty.     

Police Unions and the Politics of Democratic Security and Order in Postcolonial India

State attempts to ensure a secure liberal democratic order through legal regulation and enforcement may work to prevent harm, provide public resources, or realize civic and human rights. Such attempts may also increase generalized risk of harm, reinscribe social inequality, circumscribe citizenship or instigate mass protest. These contradictory forces and relations, and their conditions of possibility—what we may call broadly the “politics of democratic security and order”—tend to be analyzed through the lens of government impositions on, and opposition to, the general public, for example focusing on how anti-terrorism legislation violates peoples’ civil liberties. This article addresses the politics of democratic security and order from a different and under-theorized angle that troubles the assumed opposition between a powerful state apparatus and subjugated citizens’ rights: namely, special restrictions placed on the rights of security enforcement agents themselves. Through ethnographic and archival research in India on attempts to form police unions—which are legally banned by a parliamentary act, yet politically active in many states of the country routinely touted as “the world’s largest democracy”—I demonstrate how conflicts related to these organizations may create new possibilities for mass politics, state-society alignments, and legal advocacy for civic and human rights, even as extant laws, regulations and, perhaps most importantly, public discourses around security and police discipline place extraordinary constraints on the political subjectivity of state security actors.     

Permanent migrants and temporary citizens: multinational Chinese mobilities in the Americas

In this article, I examine the multinational mobility and citizenship practices of ethnic Chinese who moved to Chile after living in another Latin American country. Despite being permanent residents or Chilean citizens, some hope to return to a previous country of residence in Latin America. Based on 18 semi‐structured interviews conducted between October 2016 and August 2018, their experiences illuminate two aspects of multinational migrations. First, unlike pre‐planned serial migrations of global elites or ‘step‐wise’ migrant workers, these multinational mobilities are nonlinear and open‐ended, due to their contingence on volatile and racialized political economies. Second, unlike transnational migrants who typically maintain links to ‘origin’ countries, they seldom visit China or Taiwan, and instead visit other countries in the Americas, due to business, familial, and affective ties. I discuss the main factors shaping the contingent nature of their mobilities and attachments to Chile, which influences the multiple onward pathways possible in their futures.     

Unfinished Imagined Communities: States, Social Movements, and Nationalism in Latin America

This article addresses two shortcomings in the literature on nationalism: the need to theorize transformations of nationalism, and the relative absence of comparative works on Latin America. We propose a state-focused theoretical framework, centered on conflicts between states elites and social movements, for explaining transformations of nationalism. Different configurations of four key factors — the mobilization of excluded elites and subordinate actors, state elites’ political control, the ideological capacities of states, and polarization around ethnoracial cleavages — shape how contrasting trajectories of nationalism unfold over time. A comparative analysis of early– and mid–twentieth century Mexico, Argentina, and Peru illustrates the explanatory power of our theoretical framework. José Itzigsohn is Associate Professor of Sociology and Ethnic Studies at Brown University. He is the author of Developing Poverty (Penn State University, 2000). His current research focuses on two main topics. The first is the formation of ethnic, racial, and national identities. The second is grassroots economies and workplace democracy. Matthias vom Hau is Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Sociology at Brown University. He is currently completing his dissertation, a comparative-historical analysis of nationalism in twentieth-century Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. His research interests involve the intersections among culture and identity, state power, and social movements.     

Civil society,social movements and Democracy in Southern Africa

The article reviews the theory of civil society and social movements in a general perspective and relates the theoretical argument to recent economic and political changes in Southern African states. Salient aspects of civil society and its role in the democratic process is considered and the role of different key institutions and organizations in the democratic process are analyzed. The role of economic elites is equivocal, both because of the racial dimension in their composition and in the way they avoid addressing problems of living standards of the working class. The most important institutions of civil society seem to be the universities and the church, whereas the role of media is less important than one might have expected, because of widespread state control and state ownership. The article analyzes the particular role of different social movements and offers an interesting comparison of their strengths and weaknesses in democratization processes in various Southern African countries.     

Post‐Authoritarian State Formation in Argentina: Transitional Justice as the Accumulation of Symbolic Power

Looking at the transitions to democracy in Latin America during the late 20^th century, a number of scholars observed that human rights and transitional justice had become the central legitimizing axis of the new, post‐authoritarian order. But the question of how human rights and transitional justice measures became such powerful sources of legitimacy in the first place was left unexplored. In this article I use Bourdieu's concept of symbolic capital along with Mara Loveman's explanation of the accumulation of this capital to explain how transitional justice came to function as a form of post‐authoritarian state formation in Argentina.     

Taking Tilly south: durable inequalities, democratic contestation, and citizenship in the Southern Metropolis

Drawing on Charles Tilly’s work on inequality, democracy and cities, we explore the local level dynamics of democratization across urban settings in India, South Africa, and Brazil. In all three cases, democratic institutions are consolidated, but there is tremendous variation in the quality of the democratic relationship between cities and their citizens. We follow Tilly’s focus on citizenship as the key element in democratization and argue that explaining variance across our three cases calls for analyzing patterns of inequality through the kind of relational lens used by Tilly and recognizing that patterns of contestation are shaped by shifting political relationships between the nation and the city. We conclude that Tilly’s theoretical frame is nicely sustained by the comparative analysis of cases very different from those that stimulated his original formulations.     

Immigration and Transnationalism: Rethinking the Role of the State in Latin America

As more Latin American migrants make their way to the United States, the issue of transnationalism has received increased scholarly attention. Transnationalism refers to the delinking of the individual from his or her government and an increase in international ties as a result of the economic globalization that promotes the movement of people, goods, money, and ideas. Prevailing consensus is that the state, particularly in Latin America, is weakened by transnationalism because individuals are freer than ever from state control. This article argues that examining Latin American emigrant policies yields a different conclusion, namely that the state's response to transnational pressures has made governments more active and relevant in certain ways than in the past. Studies of transnationalism must therefore incorporate state strategies for a better understanding of its impact on Latin American governments.     

Indigenous Immigrants from Latin America (IILA): Racial/Ethnic Identity in the U.S.

In recent decades, migration from all corners of the world has created one of the most racially/ethnically diverse immigrant populations in the history of the United States. While today migratory flows are predominantly from Asia, immigrants from Latin America continue to make up the largest immigrant group in the United States. The influx of this group reflects the heterogeneity of the Latin American region, including Latin American immigrants who identify as indigenous in their countries of origin. Through a brief overview of how indigeneity, race, and ethnicity have been historically framed in Latin America, I discuss how Indigenous Immigrants from Latin American (IILA) position their indigeneity within their racial/ethnic identity in the United States. I consider how migration shapes indigenous identity and propose the use of Social Identity Theory (SIT) to explore how IILA negotiate a racial/ethnic identity while maintaining their indigeneity in a U.S. context.     

The Social Foundations of Latin America's Recurrent Populism: Problems of Popular Sector Class Formation and Collective Action

The article is an attempt to offer a 'bottom-up' explanation of political instability in Latin America by examining patterns of class formation in the region. It argues that the heterogeneous class structure characterizing the popular sectors creates collective action problems that historically have resulted in popular sector mobilization by populist elites, if not apathy or civil war. The possibility of an alternative basis for popular sector mobilization that is more favorable to democratic consolidation is explored on the basis of a neo-Marxist interpretation of class formation. By incorporating variables dealing with the state and the nature of civil society that are not directly related to the relationship of individuals or groups to the means of production, an effort is made to outline the basis of a new popular sector collective identity which offers a totalizing synthesis of this social heterogeneity. Some of the implications of this are briefly discussed in a concluding section.     

Social protection in Chile: Reforms to improve equity

At the beginning of the 1980s, Chile pioneered the implementation in Latin America of structural reforms that fully or partially privatized pensions, health‐care and social assistance systems. Implemented without prior social dialogue, these reforms – which subsequently influenced similar reforms in other countries of the region and elsewhere – led to reduced social solidarity and equity and intensified poverty and inequality. Over the past 18 years, however, democratic governments have corrected many design faults in the original reforms. The author examines the progress achieved and areas of persistent social inequality in terms of coverage, gender balance and funding, and identifies future challenges.     

The state of internal communication in Latin America: An international Delphi study

The amount of internal communication research has flourished during the past decade, and scholars have examined the role of internal communication in affecting employee and organizational outcomes. Despite the increasing literature, knowledge, and research of internal communication in Latin America is largely missing. Given this reality, this study explored the status of internal communication in Latin America through the lens of 20 experienced internal communication professionals from nine Latin American countries. Taking a multi-iteration consensus-building approach, this Delphi study enabled the expert panel to individually elaborate and collectively evaluate shared observations regarding the definition, characteristics, importance, and current reality of the field. Specifically, this study examined how practitioners define and understand internal communication, the skills and knowledge needed to perform internal communication, the value of internal communication, and the state of internal communication practice in Latin America. The findings of the current study enriched and diversified the extant body of knowledge that is U.S. and European-centered.     

Mobilisierung, Staat und Demokratie

The explanation of the emergence and consolidation of democratic regimes is one of the most important topics of political sociology. The main theoretical approaches can be divided into actor- and elite-theories on the one hand and structure- and modernization-theories on the other. This article combines actor- and structure-centered theories following the discussion of Lipset’s thesis of the connection between socio-economic modernization and democracy. Its theoretical starting point is the assertion that the emergence and consolidation of democratic regimes can be explained with reference to the power resources and interests of collective actors. These are determined in two ways by structural conditions: first, the social structural basis for the mobilization of collective actors changes with socio-economic modernization processes. Second, the mobilization of actors is dependent on certain conditions, which are influenced by modernization processes. The role of the state is emphasized, because the state can strongly affect the conditions of mobilization for collective actors in the civil society, and therefore block processes of democratization. The interests and power resources of state elites are not only conditioned by endogenous modernization processes, but furthermore by exogenous, geopolitical conditions. Therefore, the final result is, that socioeconomic modernization processes are a necessary but not sufficient condition for democratization.     

Sociology on Latin America in the 1960s: Developmentalism, Imperialism, and Topical Tropism

This article reveals the emergence of the idea of development in the sociological study of Latin America in the United States as a specific product of history. We show how in the 1960s, it was the result of interaction between the economic, political, military, and scientific fields generated by the mobilization of resources based on their respective rules. We criticize the idea that sociology had clearly-defined goals during this period. Our research demonstrates, for instance, how the research conducted on Latin America during that period was rooted in “topical tropism”. Our investigation is based on the analysis of empirical data including institutional information, journal articles and historical archives.