Volume 35, Number 1, October 2002

Does democratization automatically democratize police forces? Can brutal and unaccountable forces be supplanted by internal security systems rooted in respect for citizen rights, elected civilian control, and accountability? Significant demilitarization of internal security is possible in Latin America, but only where the armed forces are seriously weakened in conjunction with transitions toward democracy. Failure in warfare has usually been necessary to debilitate military regimes in Latin America. A comparison of war transitions (democratization through failure to win a war) to democratic transitions in which the armed forces were not strategically weakened demonstrates that war transitions best account for internal security reforms in new democracies.

Recent political and economic transitions in Latin America have shaped a third transition in the nature of civil society and democratic representation. The conceptual territory of democratic representational regimes can be mapped out in four theoretical patterns of state-society relations: adversarial, delegative, deliberative, and cooptive. A comparison of representational regimes in state-society relations in Argentina and Brazil shows a shift in civil society towards organization in nongovernmental organizations, in addition to social movements. Despite this common characteristic, the different emerging representational regimes in these two countries carry different implications for the quality of democracy.

After introducing pharmaceutical patents in the 1990s, Brazil subsequently adjusted the patent system to ameliorate its effects on drug prices, while Mexico introduced measures that reinforce and intensify these effects. The different trajectories are due to the nature of the actors pushing for reform and the patterns of coalitional formation and political mobilization. In Brazil government demand for expensive, patented drugs made health-oriented patent reform a priority. The existence of an autonomous local pharmaceutical sector allowed the Ministry of Health to build a supportive coalition. In Mexico government demand made reforms less urgent, and transformations of the pharmaceutical sector allowed patent-holding firms to commandeer a reform project. The existence of indigenous pharmaceutical capacities can broaden the political coalitions underpinning health reforms.

What accounts for the durability of the postwar democratic political settlement in Mozambique, one of the world’s most unlikely success stories? The fragile postwar political system in Mozambique owes its survival to the coexistence of two contradictory tracks for the management of political conflict. The first comprises the formal processes and institutions of majoritarian democracy. The second consists of informal elite bargaining processes involving the top leadership of the two major parties. This dualistic system has so far succeeded in accommodating contrasting elite notions of democracy and system legitimacy and in compensating for actors’ asymmetrical levels of trust and political capacity.

The political constraints created by dismantling central planning and more recently by fulfilling membership criteria for the European Union present eastern European politicians with an unprecedented lack of public policy options in critical areas of government, such as the economy. East European political parties have thus had little choice but to compete over operating styles rather than substantive programmatic alternatives. Continued party system instability in eastern Europe is a direct consequence of this type of party competition. Parties have had, in effect, to satisfy two constituencies, one informal and the other external, with the very existence of the latter inhibiting the development of the former.

Studies of European monetary cooperation have concentrated largely on the process of domestic preference formation. Ideational, interest-based, and institutional approaches can help explain why European Union member states pursued monetary cooperation. Ideational theories are elite-oriented and emphasize cognitive factors in the decision-making process. Interest-based approaches highlight the material costs and benefits of different social groups. Institutional theories focus on the role of independent central banks in the decision-making process. These approaches are complementary rather than incompatible. Future research should investigate the interrelationship and mutual interdependence of ideas, interests, and institutions and their embeddedness in larger international structures.