El año 2015 estuvo marcado por varios acontecimientos que definieron las directrices políticas para el tercer gobierno de Evo Morales, como la aprobación para realizar un referendo constitucional para permitir su tercera repostulación y el escándalo de corrupción en el Fondo Indígena. La caída de los precios de los hidrocarburos impactó negativamente la economía del país y dio pie para la emergencia de diversos conflictos sociales. Las elecciones subnacionales consolidaron el poder del MAS, pese a su derrota en las principales ciudades del país, mientras que el referendo autonómico evidenció el rechazo a los estatutos departamentales y un interés por reconfigurar las relaciones con el centro. Este artículo aborda los principales eventos políticos de este año 2015 en Bolivia.
Radical populists in the Andes have combined a populist program and a multicultural agenda. However, while populism centralizes power in the hands of the leader and emphasizes the unity of the people, multiculturalism grants cultural rights that strengthen societal autonomy, generating
an inherent tension between these two modes of incorporation. How are populist governments able to combine unity and fragmentation as well as centralization and autonomy? This article develops the concept of populist multiculturalism, focusing on the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in
Bolivia, which has supported autonomy rights while simultaneously curtailing their implementation. Specifically, it examines the implementation of indigenous autonomous governments and prior consultation and the relationship between indigenous organizations and the ruling party. The article
also extends this concept to Ecuador and Venezuela.
While women are underrepresented in politics, recent improvements in women's representation in legislative and executive bodies have spurred academic interest in the effects of electing women on a wide array of outcomes. Effects on bureaucracies, however, have received less attention. Do women mayors reform local bureaucracies differently than their men counterparts? We take advantage of rich administrative data from Chile to explore the effects of having a woman mayor on the size and gender composition of municipal bureaucracies. Using a regression discontinuity design in close electoral races, we find that women mayors reduce the size of local bureaucracies while simultaneously increasing the share of women public employees. Our findings thus show that women mayors' approach to bureaucratic reform once in office differs from that of their men counterparts, and contribute to existing research on the consequences of electing women.
This article deals with fieldwork in challenging research contexts that make preparation for field research particularly difficult. Challenging contexts include generally insecure places, politicized contexts, and unknown settings. Drawing on our experience in the field, we discuss four challenges that are common across these contexts: access, positionality, researcher well-being, and research design and data collection. Bringing together insights from fieldwork with urban elites and in the countryside, this paper describes problems that occurred in both settings and identifies a set of interpersonal skills that helped the authors to tackle the challenges of the field and seize the opportunities it offered. This article posits that recognizing the importance of certain interpersonal skills, namely: openness, empathy, humility, and flexibility, precedes the identification of practical tools. Interpersonal skills, instead, focus on a general attitude that underlies researchers’ capacity to make informed choices about specific courses of actions, preparing fieldworkers to be prepared to confront problems once they arise.
Extant literature concurs that fiscal transfers affect local democracy when they grant subnational governments nontax revenue. Yet there is nonetheless a mismatch between this concept and existing measures, which consider the whole transfers local governments receive, including both tax and nontax revenue. This article studies the Fondo Común Municipal (FCM), the most important intergovernmental grant in Chile, and provides a novel measure of nontax revenue. It uses this measure alongside the whole FCM transfer to test the rentier hypothesis. On the one hand, it shows that both measures increase the incumbent party vote share, although the effect of our measure is smaller. On the other hand, it finds that the FCM transfer has an impact on the probability of reelection and the competitiveness of elections, but this effect disappears when using our measure. Overall, the findings suggest that rents from transfers do not lead to strong electoral dominance in unitary states.
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