This article analyzes the relationship between collective protest and social spending in Latin America from 1970 to 2007. I argue that under democracy, organized labor is in a better position relative to other groups in society to obtain social policy concessions as a consequence of their collective action efforts. Labor insiders mobilize around specific demands, and labor strikes carry significant economic and political costs on governments. In contrast, other groups in society rarely protest around specific social policy issues and are more often subject to successful demobilization tactics from political leaders. Results from an error correction model (ECM) show that in democracies, collective protest has differentiated effects on social spending. While strikes have a strong positive long-term effect on social security and welfare spending, none of the different forms of collective protest affect education or health spending. Importantly, I also find evidence of a deterrent effect of mass protests in democratic regimes; cutbacks in human capital spending are less likely as peaceful large-scale demonstrations increase.
Violent crime has been commonplace in Latin America over the past decades. While existing research has made progress in explaining the rationale and outcomes of government coercive strategies against crime, it has overlooked the non‐coercive strategies implemented to improve public security. It is argued in this article that political authorities make human capital enhancement efforts to shape actors’ incentives about criminal activity and mitigate crime. Accordingly, it is hypothesised that violent crime increases human capital enhancement efforts, and that the effect of violent crime on human capital enhancement efforts is larger when left‐oriented governments are in power because they stress actors’ motivations over windows of opportunities as the main drivers of crime. Support for these hypotheses is found in a sample of Latin American democracies in the period 1990–2007.
Along with the pressures of time, though, come the limits of space. While this book skillfully describes territorial controls within cities, it does not include the controls and politics in the larger metropolitan areas of which they are a part. The sprawling urban areas of Latin America share the same security challenges but are fragmented by competing governments unable to muster the coordination needed to meet them. As seen in nearly every large and medium-sized city-such as the Federal District of Caracas, where dozens of municipal police work and clash with each other and with federal forces-the structure of municipal governments in Latin America could not be more ill suited to curb the criminality that flows across the administrative and political lines that splinter them. While the geography of territorial control is a pillar of the book's theoretical framework, more centrally, it does not neatly square with the case studies in this book or with other Latin American cases. Moncada shows that increased government-business collaboration "reduces the scope of the politics of urban violence by generating a more united local ruling class able to fend off mobilization by opposing interests" from below and above (156). But as also seen in the cities of Colombia and other countries, such collaboration stems from a civil society unable to unite due to a violent fragmentation that also obstructs any policy that emerges from such collaboration. The solid recommendations that are proposed in the book's final chapters, though, address such limitations. Moncada's practical suggestions to incorporate business, focus on local order, and take other proven steps all provide focus without losing sight of security's underlying complexity. This book, deeply historical and clearly presented, demonstrates the utility of understanding the full trajectory of reform to know how it might fare in other cities. Only by clearing away illusions of security's promise can it be pared down to its most robust elements.
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