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Political scientists have long said 'institutions matter' without too carefully specifying what that means and how we would know. This book offers the conceptual tools for understanding when institutions are strong, when they are weak, when they matter and when they do not.

This Element analyses the political dynamics of neo-extractivism in Latin America. It proposes an explanation for the end of the progressive era, analyzing its ambiguities and limitations in the dawn of a new political cycle marked by the strengthening of the political rights.

This Element describes Latin American innovations in trials and truth commissions, evaluating both the Huntingtonian and Justice Cascade approaches; influential in showing variation in TJ outcomes. It argues that scholars should complement these approaches with one that recognizes the importance of state capacity building and institutional change.

Latin America is caught in a middle-quality institutional trap, with flawed democracies and low-to-medium capacity States. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the development sequence - Latin America has democratized before building capable States - does not explain the region's quandary. States can make democracy, but so too can democracy make States.

The first section of this Element reviews the history of LGBTQ rights in the region since the 1960s. The second section reviews explanations for the expansion of rights and setbacks, especially since the mid 2000s. This Element concludes with an overview of the causes and possible future direction of the current backlash against LGBTQ rights.

This Element presents the main characteristics of the current social structure in Latin America. We focus on demographic trends, migration, families, incomes, education, health and housing, and examine the general policy trends for all of these issues. Our main questions are: What is the social structure in Latin America like today? What changes have taken place in recent decades, particularly since the turn of the millennium? We argue that although in some dimensions there are continuities, including the persistence of problems from the past, we believe that the Latin American social structure, viewed as a whole, experienced significant transformations.

The way external forces influence political and economic outcomes in developing countries is an ongoing concern of scholars and policymakers. In the 1970s and 1980s, dependency analysis was a popular way of approaching this topic, but it later fell into disrepute. This Element argues that it may be useful to revamp dependency to interpret China's new relationships with developing countries, including Latin America. Economic links with China have become important determinants of the region's development. Stallings discusses the dependency debates, reviews the way dependency operated in the US-Latin American case, and analyzes the growing Chinese presence within a dependency framework.

"The study of environmental politics in Latin America and the Caribbean expands as conflicts stemming from the deterioration of the natural world increase. Yet, this scholarship has not generated a broad research agenda similar to the ones that emerged around other key political phenomena. This Element seeks to address the lack of a comprehensive research agenda in Latin American and Caribbean environmental politics and helps integrate the existing, disparate literatures. Drawing from distributive politics, this Element asks who benefits from the appropriation and pollution of the environment, who pays the costs of climate change and environmental degradation, and who gains from the allocation of state protections"--

"This Element discusses the consequences for the social bond of the conjoint action of the economic and social model inspired by the premises of neoliberalism and of the powerful pressures for the democratization of social relations in Chilean society. It is based upon empirical research developed in the past fifteen years. The main argument in this Element is that these processes have had as one of their most important effects the generation of a circuit of detachment, that is, a process that leads to different forms of disidentification and distancing from logics and principles that govern social relations and interaction. It is a dynamic circuit consisting of four components: excess, disenchantment, irritation, and, finally, detachment. The Element analyzes this circuit and each of its components as well as its consequences for the social bond. It also includes a brief reflection on the impact of this circuit on the political bond"--

The early 2000s were a period of social policy expansion in Latin America. New programs were created in healthcare, pensions, and social assistance, and previously excluded groups were incorporated into existing policies. What was the character of this social policy expansion? Why did the region experience this transformation? Drawing on a large body of research, this Element shows that the social policy gains in the early 2000s remained segmented, exhibiting differences in access and benefit levels, gaps in service quality, and unevenness across policy sectors. It argues that this segmented expansion resulted from a combination of short and long-term characteristics of democracy, favorable economic conditions, and policy legacies. The analysis reveals that scholars of Latin American social policy have generated important new concepts and theories that advance our understanding of perennial questions of welfare state development and change.

This Element introduces the concept of oligopoly of coercion to interpretate the interaction between drug trafficking and reconfiguration of the state in Colombia. Three elements are central to this interpretation: corruption in oligopolies of coercion must be understood as a payment by drug traffickers for acting like a parallel state; the state criminalizes more drug as merchandise than drug as capital - its equivalent in money; the politics and war around drug trafficking in Colombia should be understood as the way in which peripheral societies access global markets through the ruling institutions of private armies. With these elements, the author focuses on the dynamics of the reconfiguration of the state in Colombia after the cocaine boom in the mid-70s and the evolution of the private armies in Colombia.

This Element analyzes the features of current feminist movements in Latin America and their responses to conservative reactions. For this, it focuses on the pro-choice movement vis-a-vis the anti-abortion countermovement in Mexico and Brazil. It offers a relational approach embracing the dynamics within the feminist field and between feminism and the state to capture the movements' potential effects. First, the Element proposes the concept of nested feminist networks, which comprises of three dimensions revealing the plurality of the movement across intersectional and sexual identity issues (horizontal), its relationship with the multifaceted state (vertical), and the intermediation of political parties and participatory institutions in this relationship (intermediary). Second, it argues that nested networks allow feminists to enable policies and block actions from conservatives. In sum, it explores how feminists, leveraging their plurality and connection with the state, can counter conservative attacks.

This Element examines six Indigenous communities with contrasting experiences of extractive projects. It highlights the Indigenous ability to shape different self-determination outcomes, and assesses Indigenous possibilities for self-determination in the light of environmental activism and discourses on Buen Vivir.

Análisis de las características de los movimientos feministas actuales en América Latina y sus respuestas a las reacciones conservadoras.