Latin America had long been the one region in the world without major ethnic parties, but in recent years a couple of inclusive ethnic parties have registered important electoral victories. A substantial literature maintains that ethnic parties win by mobilizing their base through exclusionary ethnic appeals, but this article argues that such appeals are unlikely to be successful in regions such as Latin America, where ethnic polarization is low and ethnic identification is fluid and multiple. In these areas, inclusive strategies are more likely to be successful. Indeed, some parties, which the author refers to as ethnopopulist parties, have won votes from diverse ethnic constituencies by moderating their discourse, forming cross-ethnic alliances, and formulating a broad populist appeal. This article focuses on the most successful ethnopopulist party to date, the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia. It shows how the MAS used an inclusive ethnic appeal and classical populist strategies to fuse traditional populist constituencies—politically disenchanted urban mestizos with nationalist and statist views—to its rural, largely indigenous base. The article also examines the extent to which these arguments can account for the varying performance of other parties in the region.

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The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Latin America explores why indigenous movements have recently won elections for the first time in the history of the region. Raúl L. Madrid argues that some indigenous parties have won by using inclusive populist appeals to reach out to whites and mestizos. Indigenous parties have managed to win support across ethnic lines because the long history of racial mixing in Latin America blurred ethnic boundaries and reduced ethnic polarization. The appeals of the indigenous parties have especially resonated in the Andean countries because of widespread disenchantment with the region's traditional parties. The book contains up-to-date qualitative and quantitative analyses of parties in seven countries, including detailed case studies of Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

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In recent years Latin American countries have enacted sweeping privatisation measures and major trade, financial and tax reforms, but they have moved much more slowly to reform their pension systems and labour laws. This pattern of reform partly reflects differences in the intensity of organised labour's opposition to the reforms. Organised labour has undertaken greater efforts to block labour law reforms and, to a lesser extent, pension reforms, because these measures impose severe losses on more unions than other types of reforms. These greater efforts, moreover, have had significant effects on policy outcomes. The article shows how organised labour reacted quite differently to various types of market-oriented reforms in Argentina and Mexico in the 1990s, and describes how the reaction of the unions helped shape the fate of the reform proposals.