Books in the Elements in Politics and Society in Latin America series

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.

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.