In Colombia, the executive has built and reinforced a militarist memory that appeals to the participation of the military in government affairs. Using the theory of "path dependency", it is shown how a contingent event produces the adoption of an institutional agreement and sets in motion a self-reinforcing sequence or a deterministic pattern that manages to be maintained even after a democratic transition. Unlike most studies on civil-military relations in Latin America, which focus on the armed forces as a political actor or on the institutional mechanisms of civilian control over them, this work focuses on the executive branch and introduces the concept of institutional memory to understand militarization in Colombia not as an institutional legacy but as a political construction activated by it.
Not all violence seen in Mexico's electoral campaigns is carried out by organized criminal groups (ocg). In fact, a great deal of physical aggression is perpetrated by candidates for elected office against their rivals and non-aligned voters. By employing the case of the State of Mexico in the 2021 elections, we find evidence that helps show that candidate-based violence is used not only to depress their rivals' votes on election day, but also to reduce rival candidates' ability to run their territorial campaigns. To analyze this violence, we interviewed political actors and constructed an original data base of all acts of violence, aggression, and threats to better understand this understudied phenomenon.
This research examines the feasibility of monetary integration in South America by incorporating both economic and political perspectives. From an economic standpoint, countries belonging to the CAN are better positioned to adopt a common currency compared to Mercosur countries. However, the political analysis concludes that the necessary political conditions for monetary integration in South America are inadequate. The key political limitations include the absence of a regional leader at both political and economic levels, an overabundance of integration projects, reliance on ideological alignments to advance integration processes, reluctance among states to cede sovereignty, and the lack of supranational institutions. Therefore, it is unlikely that monetary integration will occur in South America in the short or medium term.
Scientific election forecasting has a long and growing tradition in established democracies, but it has not made much progress in Latin America. To make progress, we examine citizen forecasts of Mexican presidential elections from 2000 to 2024. We develop novel statistical tools to study whether citizen forecasts are better at forecasting than chance and than vote intention polls. Using 55 surveys, we find that citizens became better over time. While they forecasted who wins worse than chance at the dawn of democracy in 2000, they forecasted recent presidential elections correctly and are now on par with vote intention polls. While citizens are also better than chance at forecasting vote shares, they remain, however, worse than vote intention polls. To understand why, we analyze the bias and variance of citizen forecasts for the first time. We find that the main reasons for their worse performance are socialization under a one-party rule, inexperience with free-and- fair elections, and unwarranted concerns about the cleanliness of the elections.
