Political parties provide a crucial link between voters and politicians. This link takes a variety of forms in democratic regimes, from the organization of political machines built around clientelistic networks to the establishment of sophisticated programmatic parties. Latin American Party Systems provides a novel theoretical argument to account for differences in the degree to which political party systems in the region were programmatically structured at the end of the twentieth century. Based on a diverse array of indicators and surveys of party legislators and public opinion, the book argues that learning and adaptation through fundamental policy innovations are the main mechanisms by which politicians build programmatic parties. Marshalling extensive evidence, the book's analysis shows the limits of alternative explanations and substantiates a sanguine view of programmatic competition, nevertheless recognizing that this form of party system organization is far from ubiquitous and enduring in Latin America.

In this article we explore the relationship between the investments of multinational corporations~foreign direct investment! and income inequality in Mex-ico+ We argue that Mexico's liberalization of foreign direct investment~FDI! inflows in the 1990s provides a natural experiment to test how FDI affects income inequality in a middle-income country+ We use an instrumental variables approach as our identification strategy to mitigate problems of endogeneity and omitted variable bias+ In an empirical test of the determinants of changes in income inequality from 1990 to 2000, we find that increased FDI inflows are associated with a decrease in income inequality within Mexico's thirty-two states+ The authors would like to thank

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Political intervention into markets can take a nearly endless number of forms. During the latter part of the twentieth century, there was a widely shared sense that governments should decrease their role in the economy. Still, there were important variations in this trend. In response to onerous banking crises, countries chose policies that varied dramatically between rescuing insolvent banks (Bailout) and enforcing bank closures (Bagehot). Bailouts are often portrayed as regressive wealth transfers from taxpayers to bankers as the result of "crony capitalism." However, government policy choice may be patterned as much by domestic institutions-political regime and central bank autonomy-and international constraints-economic openness and support from international financial institutions-as by political promises to stand by crony allies in hard times. I test these arguments by fitting a Bayesian hierarchical item response model of policy making that takes full advantage of data on government responses to banking crises.