Journal of Politics in Latin America

On 30 December 2020, the Argentine Senate legalised abortion on demand until 14 weeks of pregnancy. How was this legal change possible in a region characterised by strong restrictions on reproductive rights? Based on in-depth interviews and participant observation, this article shows how the emergence of a strong social movement around abortion reform was able to shift the negative perceptions associated with this medical practice and build a multi-party coalition to advance the legalisation of abortion in Congress. The secularism espoused by all political parties across the ideological spectrum allowed for the presence of feminist politicians within them, most of whom would become key interlocutors of the movement jointly working towards legalisation. A supportive executive, while helpful, could not ensure the passage of legal abortion alone, making the creation of a multi-party coalition a requirement for success.

The article analyses the configurations of social inequality in Argentina and Chile between 2000 and 2019 through a comparative biographical approach that combines three dimensions: macro-social (welfare models), meso-social (labour policies), and micro-social (occupational trajectories). In Argentina, welfare schemes oscillated between moderate protectionism and a liberal approach; in Chile, a movement was observed between revised neoliberalism and a protectionist liberal welfare approach. Regarding labour policies, a transition from employment regulation to self-management was observed in the Argentine job market; in Chile, a meritocratic discourse remains that advocates for worker self-management, regardless of changes in welfare schemes. These differences have no appreciable impact on the configuration of class trajectories, which are similar in both countries. While the service classes generally construct advantageous trajectories, the intermediate classes are ambivalently affected by crises and insufficient protection and the working classes accumulate disadvantages since they are conditioned by welfare schemes and social-labour policies.

A growing literature in comparative Latin American Politics highlights how policy feedback effects help explain the resilience of neoliberal reforms in the region. These works emphasize private actors/interest groups to explain neoliberal policy continuity. Nonetheless, given their focus on continuity, these works do little to explore other instances in which neoliberal feedback cannot preclude change. This paper presents an instance in which powerful private actors favored by neoliberal reforms were incapable of resisting change. An Act of the Peruvian Congress adopted in 2016 opened the door for individual pensioners to withdraw up to 95.5 percent of all their accumulated savings at the point of retirement. Ensuing reforms approved by Congress during the COVID-19 emergency (2020–2021) further weakened private administrators of these pension funds (AFPs). The case shows how the conflicting interests between private service providers and future pensioners make the service providers vulnerable; a divide also found in other neoliberal reforms.

Party elites may hinder racial and ethnic minorities from winning public office by withholding resources. Prior studies have explored the distribution of money, media access, and party-list positions. In Brazil, party elites provide each candidate with a unique identification number. Voters must enter their preferred candidate’s identification number into an electronic voting machine to register their support. In this article, we replicate and extend Bueno and Dunning’s (2017) analysis of candidate identification numbers. They conclude that party elites do not provide white candidates with superior identification numbers than non-whites. We contend that assessing intraparty variation is theoretically and methodologically warranted. Using party fixed effects, we find that party elites provide non-white candidates with worse identification numbers than whites. We demonstrate that our findings are generalisable using data from other elections. Moreover, we show that party elites also withhold advantageous numbers from women and political novices.

Recently, many political scientists have argued that democracy may be threatened more by the erosion of its principles, embodied in the democratic institutions, than by traditional breakdowns. This debate led to a series of initiatives that sought to identify and evaluate this process of institutional erosion. This research note contributes to these efforts by assessing the importance and current performance of a set of formal and informal democratic institutions. We present results from a survey, conducted in 2020 with 419 Brazilian political scientists, which sought their opinions on the importance of a series of democratic principles and the status of Brazilian democracy. This survey is part of the Bright Line Watch project that brings together a group of political scientists to monitor democratic practices, their resilience, and potential threats.