This study seeks to explain the profound discord currently observable in elite political discourse on Chinese investments in many host countries. Using Argentina as a case study, a combination of quantitative content analysis and qualitative discourse analysis was employed to analyze parliamentary speeches on a controversial spacemonitoring station built there by China in 2015. The study finds that the competing discourses about China in Argentinean politics draw primarily on locally embedded contexts and the region's particular historical experiences and geopolitical position. These local narratives are used in different ways by both sides of the debate to support contradicting positions on relevant issues. Questions of regional hegemony, centerperiphery relations, national autonomy as well as Peronist and anti-Peronist ideologies are being drawn on by elite politicians in an attempt to cope with the deep uncertainty about what China's increased engagement means for the country and to compensate for the lack of predictability about China's behavior in its future role as a major global power. Ultimately, however, Argentina's elite politicians end up in a dilemma in which these narratives and historical memories can be spun in both ways to either support or reject a controversial investment project to go ahead on domestic soil that is, at the same time, a symbolic test for the potential depth of the future relationship with China.

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Which factors determine legislative support for the foreign policy initiatives of Latin American presidents? How do political parties and politicians behave when dealing with presidential foreign policy? The issue of whether presidents exercise greater influence over foreign or domestic affairs has been extensively debated in recent years, and the evidence indicates that legislators do behave differently when dealing with foreign policy proposals. Building on this debate, we analyse legislative support for the foreign policies of 22 Latin-American presidents in eight countries from 1994 to 2014, using an original dataset in a quantile regression framework. We also use three selected cases to illustrate our evidence. Our findings are counter-intuitive and bring new elements into the debate about legislative behaviour towards foreign policy in presidential countries. Measures of a political party's ideology, the size of the governing coalition, and the effective number of parties (ENP) play important roles in levels of legislative support for presidential foreign policy agendas. Surprisingly, the popularity of presidents and the nature of their initiatives -high or low politics -do not affect these levels of support.

In this article, we provide a framework to analyze the foreign policy overstretch of middle powers, that is, their recent tendency to expand foreign policy goals and ambitions beyond their capabilities. We propose that overstretch results from the interaction of permissive international environments and the collusion of domestic actors to produce foreign policy myths. These myths, in turn, justify unsustainable swelling of foreign policy expenditures until they are shattered. After laying out our theory, we test it against the case of twenty-first-century Brazil. First, we document how interest groups logrolled to foster and capitalize on a “myth of multipolarity,” which, once entrenched in elite discourse and public opinion, resulted in a tangible overgrowth of foreign policy. Second, we show the extent of overstretch across four indicators—number of embassies, participation in peacekeeping operations, membership in international organizations, and aid projects overseas—using the synthetic control method to compare Brazil with a plausible counterfactual.

Resumo Introdução: O artigo avalia a associação entre fatores políticos e institucionais e a capacidade do presidente Lugo aprovar as suas iniciativas legislativas, desagregando a análise por temas de política doméstica e política externa. O objetivo é averiguar, no marco de um presidencialismo multipartidário, a hipótese da maior propensão do Congresso Nacional em aprovar as iniciativas presidenciais em política externa quando comparadas às de política doméstica. Materiais e Métodos: A análise empírica engloba a tramitação de todas as 839 iniciativas presidenciais realizadas entre 2008 e 2012, cujo objeto de investigação é a aprovação ou não da proposta. Resultados: Por meio de um modelo logístico, encontramos um presidente fortemente constrangido pelo Legislativo nos assuntos domésticos e outro presidente com amplas condições de aprovar a agenda de política externa. Ademais, constatamos que fatores políticos e econômicos como a aprovação popular do presidente, o desemprego e a inflação alteram a propensão da proposta legislativa presidencial ser aprovada no Legislativo. Discussão: A comprovação da tese dos dois presidentes em um presidencialismo multipartidário com baixa propensão institucional ao predomínio presidencial no processo legislativo demonstra a especificidade da política externa quando comparada à política doméstica.

No abstract

This study seeks to explain the profound discord currently observable in elite political discourse on Chinese investments in many host countries. Using Argentina as a case study, a combination of quantitative content analysis and qualitative discourse analysis was employed to analyze parliamentary speeches on a controversial space-monitoring station built there by China in 2015. The study finds that the competing discourses about China in Argentinean politics draw primarily on locally embedded contexts and the region's particular historical experiences and geopolitical position. These local narratives are used in different ways by both sides of the debate to support contradicting positions on relevant issues. Questions of regional hegemony, center-periphery relations, national autonomy as well as Peronist and anti-Peronist ideologies are being drawn on by elite politicians in an attempt to cope with the deep uncertainty about what China's increased engagement means for the country and to compensate for the lack of predictability about China's behavior in its future role as a major global power. Ultimately, however, Argentina's elite politicians end up in a dilemma in which these narratives and historical memories can be spun in both ways to either support or reject a controversial investment project to go ahead on domestic soil that is, at the same time, a symbolic test for the potential depth of the future relationship with China.

O artigo analisa as votações nominais de três poderes legislativos sul-americanos, Chile, Colômbia e Peru, acerca da ratificação do Tratado de Livre Comércio com os Estados Unidos. A pergunta central é: quais são os fatores determinantes do voto do legislador na aprovação do Tratado de Livre Comércio (TLC) com os Estados Unidos? Três fatores centrais emergem da literatura: (i) as relações Estados Unidos x América Latina produzem uma clivagem ideológica (direita-esquerda) entre os partidos políticos do continente; (ii) o pertencimento do legislador à coalizão de governo no poder Legislativo e (iii) os fatores sócio-econômicos dos distritos eleitorais dos legisladores. Por meio da utilização do modelo de regressão logística, apontamos que a ideologia dos legisladores peruanos explica os votos dos mesmos no TLC com os Estados Unidos, indicando que quanto mais à esquerda estiver o legislador, menor a probabilidade do mesmo aprovar o referido tratado. No caso chileno, a taxa de desemprego do distrito eleitoral do deputado possui maior capacidade explicativa, revelando que quanto maior a taxa de desemprego, menor a probabilidade de aprovação do TLC com os Estados Unidos. Já no caso do Senado colombiano, há uma forte associação entre o pertencimento do Senador à coalizão de governo e a aprovação do TLC, revelando a influência dessa variável institucional no voto do Senado colombiano. Além do pertencimento ou não à coalizão de governo, a ideologia do partido político do legislador colombiano também se apresenta como fator explicativo relevante do voto do mesmo.