The relationship between economic performance and support for the incumbent government varies across voters and electoral contexts. While some of this variation can be explained by factors that make it easier or harder to hold politicians accountable, an additional explanation is that the electoral importance of economic issues varies systematically across groups and contexts. Because issues that are personally important tend to be more easily accessible when voting, we prose that exposure to economic shocks generates higher incentives to place more weight on economic conditions when voting. We test this hypothesis using archived and original survey data from Argentina, Mexico, and Peru. The analysis demonstrates that economic vulnerability enhances the economy's salience. Specifically, poverty generates incentives to cast an egotropic vote while wealth, insecure employment, informal employment, and exclusion from governments welfare programs enhances sociotropic voting because these groups have greater stakes in the national economy. By implication, elections in developing countries with large numbers of vulnerable voters should be more strongly contested over economics despite the weak institutional environment that potentially undermines the ability of voters to hold politicians accountable. Aggregate elections returns and the CSES survey support this proposition and demonstrate that economic voting is substantially more common in Latin American than in Western Europe or North America. Thus variations in economic voting provide opportunities to not only learn about the conditions under which elections can serve as mechanisms of accountability but also a laboratory to model the process of preference formation and the demands voters place on their representatives. / Dissertation

Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 123 pages / Thesis (M.A.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: Since gaining independence from Colombia in 1903, Panama has witnessed both elitist democratic governments and authoritarian populist governments. The oligarchic system in place throughout much of Panama's history was a significant hindrance to real democracy taking hold within the country. Democracy was further set back by the inordinate power exerted by the US presence on the isthmus throughout the twentieth century. Omar Torrijos's time as head of the Panamanian government from 1969 to 1981 exhibited populist, paternalistic and personalistic characteristics. His government marked an attempt to establish a form of government based on popular democracy. While a number of social programs were implemented and the social welfare of a greater percentage of the population was generally improved during the years Torrijos was in power, his military regime did not ultimately institutionalize a model for democratic participation. / ABSTRACT: This study argues that some form of popular democracy should replace the status quo in Panama. This would allow for genuine representation of a greater number of the population and in turn broaden the base of decision-making, something that has not been fully accomplished under previous authoritarian or democratic forms of government. The Torrijos regime was the first and only government in Panama to have attempted this move toward popular democracy. As such it is seen as a useful case study in examining its contributions to the political landscape and the political culture that makes up contemporary Panama. Deductions are made from it for the political future of the country in terms of the democratization process. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Bachelor's thesis. / Format: PDF. Bibl.

To learn how to address health issues specific to Hispanic cultures in an effort to address health disparities, learning from cultural aspects that affect health from the countries of origin would be most useful. Community programs built on rigorous and systematic research prove to be more powerful than ad-hoc programs. Qualitative research techniques offer powerful alternatives for public health professionals to develop adequate and directed programs at the community level, especially among underserved communities and those represented by oral/spoken traditions. The study was conducted among 132 working class single and married Mestizo women between the ages of 20-40 living in Panama City, Panama. This group of women has the highest incidence of HPV in Panama so are at the highest risk of cervical cancer. Using social construction as the theoretical framework, this study uses four different qualitative research techniques: free listing, pile sorting, individual semi-structured, and group interviews. Key findings include the importance of religion and family, women's understandings of the relationship between sexuality and health, influence of media, other women, and husbands help construct screening knowledge among women in the study. Culturally relevant health education interventions and programs delivered in a group format at the community level in a participatory mode would be most effective in reaching women in Panama and other Hispanic populations. Future quantitative studies and influences of social networks are suggested.

Crime and violence are regularly seen as being ripe for politicians to turn into campaign issues and win votes. This study argues, in contrast, that success on public security is not so automatic: human rights values constrain the use of security and the winning of votes on it. Even in Latin American countries, where voters' concerns about rampant crime and violence are among the highest in the world, considerations of human rights combine with low trust in security forces to restrict the viability of the issue in key ways. Examination of presidential campaigns in Colombia in 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2010 supports this claim. Success on security is a two-step process: invoking the issue and then gaining voter support on the topic. Usability depends on the absence of recent repression and the degree of organization of security threats. Then, winning votes on it depends on having a civilian background, a campaign that balances security with other issues, and messages of careful enforcement. These messages of careful enforcement promise targeted, deliberate use of security forces' enforcement activities in a way that pays attention to human rights, rather than promising unbridled enforcement, increased punishment, or programs of long-term prevention. This study therefore shows how candidates are forced to walk a fine line between promising to establish order and promising to protect basic rights and liberties. These findings are powerful, providing an understanding of public security in electoral campaigns that maintains a much closer fit with empirical reality than existing research. The results also provide a critique of the sociological school of vote choice and points to ways in which ownership of the issue of security may be leased away. Furthermore, because the results are driven by the spread of human rights values, the results demonstrate the importance of quick shifts in political culture as a factor that explains changes in political patterns. / text

This dissertation focuses on trends in pay inequality in the formal sectors of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile from the early 1990s into the latter part of the first decade of the new millennium. In-depth, single-country studies of inequality of each country of study seek to understand and explain the sources of movement in inequality in each country, relating changes in inequality to shifts in the relative roles of key economic sectors and geographic jurisdictions. In addition to these single-country studies of inequality, this dissertation develops a regional perspective on the dynamics of inequality by synthesizing findings from the three countries of study, identifying both commonalities and differences. This dissertation also evaluates the relationship between trends in inequality and the macroeconomic policies and factors that influence them. By eschewing the inequality of household incomes and focusing instead on measures of inequality in the underlying distribution of pay, this dissertation presents empirical evidence that fluctuations in countries' inequality levels are intrinsically related to macroeconomic factors. This dissertation applies Theil's T statistic, which belongs to the family of generalized entropy inequality measures, to develop new measures of economic inequality. The calculations presented in this dissertation are performed on data obtained from semi-aggregated datasets in which employment and average wage data organized by economic sectors and geographical jurisdictions, as derived from administrative records. Sectoral analysis shows that the changing levels of overall inequality are explained to a great extent by variations in the performance of a reduced number of "key" high-pay sectors, especially finance, extractive industry and civil service. In terms of the dynamics of geographic distribution, the role of these key sectors is observed in the driving role played by key geographic units: those composed of, or containing, the countries' main metropolitan centers, and those with high concentrations of economic activity in extractive industries. / text

This study links both census and religious service data, aggregating them at significant geographical levels. This makes it possible to test (1) if there is empirical evidence of the Catholic Church prioritizing the pastoral service to the poorest population of Mexico, and (2) if the results at different levels of analysis are consistent. To answer these questions, I will introduce the analysis by an overview of the research and the conceptualization of poverty and the way the Catholic Church has faced this social condition, particularly in Latin America and Mexico. Following the overview, the research design is presented specifying research questions, hypotheses, data, and the procedures followed to process and analyze such data. In my analysis I will present the geographical distribution of five dimensions of poverty in Mexico (deprivation of material goods, lack of running water, limited access to health services, illiteracy, and ethnicity) and the main indicator of pastoral services offered by the Catholic Church (number of parishes). Data from different sources will be linked and aggregated at different geographical levels through statistical and GIS platforms. Two main innovative tools to achieve this are the Areas of Direct Pastoral Influence (ADPI) and the Maximum Historically Consistent Geographical Units (MxHCGUs). These resources help to distribute and link socio-demographic and pastoral data. ADPIs facilitate focusing on the detailed relationships whereas MxHCGUs can be re-aggregated to higher-level units of analysis. The analysis includes descriptive geo-statistical tools to identify geographic patterns and test for spatial autocorrelation. Negative binomial regressions test the correlation of poverty and pastoral services at different levels of aggregation of the data. Besides identifying the levels and dimensions of poverty where there is empirical evidence of the priorities of pastoral service, I address the consistency of the different geographical aggregations and explain the differences. I emphasize the analysis of the levels of geographical aggregation directly relevant to the organizational structure of the Catholic Church: the ecclesiastical circumscriptions and the parishes. I will explain in detail the characteristics of both administrative-territorial levels and their importance in order to understand the provision of pastoral care. Although former sociological studies have never considered these levels in the study of poverty, they are the very units of aggregation used by the Catholic Church in pastoral strategies and decisions. Therefore, these are the most pertinent levels of analysis for a study about the priorities of pastoral services. It should be noted that the main limitation of this research is the lack of longitudinal data that would be necessary to test causality. However, this study links these kinds of data for the first time and there is no source of more complete information: the data presented here are actually the basis for the official maps of the Mexican Catholic Church. Therefore this means a major advance in this kind of research. On the one hand, the dataset that I put together sets the basic structure to organize historical censuses and ecclesiastical data; on the other hand, although the results are limited to cross-sectional data, this exploratory step is crucial for my broader research agenda because this study will evaluate basic procedures that will enable the later incorporation and analysis of longitudinal data from more than 120 years. / text

There has been tremendous variation in the development trajectories of Latin America's leftist parties. Whereas some have successfully entrenched roots in society, built their party organization, and become relevant national parties, other leftist parties have languished organizationally, suffered debilitating internecine rivalries, and witnessed a mass defection of followers, at times despite substantial initial electoral success. For instance, Brazil's Workers' Party (PT) abandoned socialism, moderated its program, and built itself up into one of Brazil's two main parties. Venezuela's Radical Cause (LCR) and Peru's United Left (IU), however, did not. While they had similar origins to the PT, both failed to adapt: LCR and IU fractured and became electorally irrelevant, having been unable to adapt to external challenges. What accounts for this puzzling empirical variation in otherwise similar parties in relatively similar contexts? More broadly, this dissertation seeks to answer under what conditions do leftist parties in Latin American democracies transform from undemocratic, radical, weakly institutionalized parties into democratic, moderate, professional parties? Conversely, under what conditions do they fail to adapt, experience organizational stagnation, and succumb to irrelevance? It argues that the political context in which each of these leftist parties emerged had an indelible effect on the parties' later ability to adapt institutionally and ideologically to future endogenous and exogenous shocks. First, where authoritarian repression dismantled preexisting leftist parties, a political vacuum on the left emerged that created the incentive for the rise of a new type of leftist party that intrinsically valued democracy. Second, the implementation of legal requirements by outgoing authoritarian regimes during a party's formative years encouraged parties to institutionalize, ensuring the development of a disciplined, majoritarian party organization. Finally, obstinance on the part of the military's move to extricate itself from politics encouraged leftist parties to participate in democratization and, thus, widen their electoral appeals. Those leftist parties that were formed under such regimes were induced to take certain actions and adopt certain institutions that made them adaptable in the long run. Those that formed afterwards or never experienced life under authoritarian rule had little incentive to change and, thus, proved unable to respond to external challenges down the line that demanded institutional professionalization and ideological moderation. / text

What explains the resilience of formerly nationally dominant parties at the subnational level? This dissertation demonstrates that factionalism is key. When intra-party factions are united, subnational dominant parties retain power even under adverse electoral conditions. By contrast, divisions and conflicts among internal groups lead these parties to lose even in favorable electoral contexts. I test these claims using a variety of quantitative and qualitative evidence from Mexico, focusing on the electoral performance of the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) in contemporary gubernatorial elections. Democratization potentially undermines unity in dominant parties because it provides politicians with viable exit options (i.e., joining the opposition) and because authoritarian central party committees no longer control subnational politics. Yet, I argue that factions can cooperate under democracy when they were more autonomous from the center during the authoritarian period. The negotiation skills acquired in the past help them "get along" in the absence of an external enforcer. By contrast, previously subordinated factions never acquired such skills and quickly became antagonistic to each other under democracy. As I show, collaboration had positive electoral consequences in subnational elections whereas antagonism had pernicious ones. / text

This paper examines the relationship between Fulgencio Batista and the Communist Party of Cuba. At odds during the first several years of Batista's rule, when strikes and repression were the topics of the day, the two sides eventually saw in each other a means to an end. In efforts to understand the Cuban Revolution of the late 1950's, historians often portray Batista as a dictatorial puppet of American business and policy. Contrary to this image, in his first regime (1934 until 1944), Batista presided over the creation of a nominal constitutional democracy. To do this he needed the support and good conduct of organized labor, in which the Communists could be a powerful force. In 1935 the Communist Party International, based in Moscow, adopted a shift in tactics. So as to combat fascism, the Party turned away from its traditionally isolationist line. It sought to make alliances with like-minded groups and wanted to serve in the government. In mid-1938 an agreement was reached between Batista and Party heads from which sprang a mutually beneficial alliance lasting through the first batistato. The relationship is often overlooked in Cuban historiography and many questions remain.To truly understand its significance we need more information as to origins, conditions, and consequences of the agreements. This paper explores the conditions on both sides, seeking to understand how and why the unlikely bedfellows came together. As well, it traces the relationship until the end of Batista's term in 1944, focusing on the ebb and flow of support concerning major issues of the day, such as organized labor, the constitutional assembly, the election of 1940, and involvement in World War II. Finally, this study shows how the alliance with the Communist Party is a necessary point in a full understanding of Fulgencio Batista and the era.