Mexico's Politics and Society in Transition PDF Download

Author: Joseph S. Tulchin
Publisher: Lynne Rienner Publishers
ISBN: 9781588261045
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
An exploration of the interrelated trends of Mexico's transitional politics and society. Offering perspectives on the problems on the Mexican agenda, the authors discuss the politics of change, the challenges of social development, and how to build a mutually beneficial US-Mexico relationship.

Author: Roderic Ai Camp
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0195377389
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 839

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Book Description
A comprehensive view of the remarkable transformation of Mexico's political system to a democratic model. The contributors to this volume assess the most influential institutions, actors, policies and issues in the country's current evolution toward democratic consolidation.

Author: Andrea Castagnola
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1315520605
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
After more than seventy years of uninterrupted authoritarian government headed by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Mexico formally began the transition to democracy in 2000. Unlike most other new democracies in Latin America, no special Constitutional Court was set up, nor was there any designated bench of the Supreme Court for constitutional adjudication. Instead, the judiciary saw its powers expand incrementally. Under this new context inevitable questions emerged: How have the justices interpreted the constitution? What is the relation of the court with the other political institutions? How much autonomy do justices display in their decisions? Has the court considered the necessary adjustments to face the challenges of democracy? It has become essential in studying the new role of the Supreme Court to obtain a more accurate and detailed diagnosis of the performances of its justices in this new political environment. Through critical review of relevant debates and using original data sets to empirically analyze the way justices voted on the three main means of constitutional control from 2000 through 2011, leading legal scholars provide a thoughtful and much needed new interpretation of the role the judiciary plays in a country’s transition to democracy This book is designed for graduate courses in law and courts, judicial politics, comparative judicial politics, Latin American institutions, and transitions to democracy. This book will equip scholars and students with the knowledge required to understand the importance of the independence of the judiciary in the transition to democracy.

Author: Guillermo Trejo
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108899900
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 379

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Book Description
One of the most surprising developments in Mexico's transition to democracy is the outbreak of criminal wars and large-scale criminal violence. Why did Mexican drug cartels go to war as the country transitioned away from one-party rule? And why have criminal wars proliferated as democracy has consolidated and elections have become more competitive subnationally? In Votes, Drugs, and Violence, Guillermo Trejo and Sandra Ley develop a political theory of criminal violence in weak democracies that elucidates how democratic politics and the fragmentation of power fundamentally shape cartels' incentives for war and peace. Drawing on in-depth case studies and statistical analysis spanning more than two decades and multiple levels of government, Trejo and Ley show that electoral competition and partisan conflict were key drivers of the outbreak of Mexico's crime wars, the intensification of violence, and the expansion of war and violence to the spheres of local politics and civil society.

Author: Kenneth C. Shadlen
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271032480
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
When countries become more democratic, new opportunities arise for individuals and groups to participate in politics and influence the making of policy. But democratization does not ensure better representation for everyone, and indeed some sectors of society are ill-equipped to take advantage of these new opportunities. Small industry in Mexico, Kenneth Shadlen shows, is an excellent example of a sector whose representation decreased during democratization. Shadlen’s analysis focuses on the basic characteristics of small firms that complicate the process of securing representation in both authoritarian and democratic environments. He then shows how increased pluralism and electoral competition served to exacerbate the political problems facing the sector during the course of democratization in Mexico. These characteristics created problems for small firms both in acting collectively through interest associations and civil society organizations and in wielding power within political parties. The changes that democratization effected in the structure of corporatism put small industry at a significant disadvantage in the policy-making arena even while there was general agreement on the crucial importance of this sector in the new neoliberal economy, especially for generating employment. The final chapter extends the analysis by making comparisons with the experience of small industry representation in Argentina and Brazil. Shadlen uses extensive interviews and archival research to provide new evidence and insights on the difficult challenges of interest aggregation and representation for small industry. He conducted interviews with a wide range of owners and managers of small firms, state and party officials, and leaders of business associations and civil society organizations. He also did research at the National Archives in Mexico City and in the archives of the most important business organizations for small industry in the post-World War II period.

Author: Sarah Babb
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 9780691117935
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 326

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Book Description
Just one generation ago, lawyers dominated Mexico's political elite, and Mexican economists were a relatively powerless group of mostly leftist nationalists. Today, in contrast, the country is famous, or perhaps infamous, for being run by American-trained neoclassical economists. In 1993, the Economist suggested that Mexico had the most economically literate government in the world--a trend that has continued since Mexico's transition to multi-party democracy. To the accompanying fanfare of U.S. politicians and foreign investors, these technocrats embarked on the ambitious program of privatization, deregulation, budget-cutting, and opening to free trade--all in keeping with the prescriptions of mainstream American economics. This book chronicles the evolution of economic expertise in Mexico over the course of the twentieth century, showing how internationally credentialed experts came to set the agenda for the Mexican economics profession and to dominate Mexican economic policymaking. It also reveals how the familiar language of Mexico's new experts overlays a professional structure that is still alien to most American economists. Sarah Babb mines diverse sources--including Mexican undergraduate theses, historical documents, and personal interviews--to address issues relevant not only to Latin American studies, but also to the sociology of professions, political sociology, economic sociology, and neoinstitutionalist sociology. She demonstrates with skill how peculiarly national circumstances shape what economic experts think and do. At the same time, Babb shows how globalization can erode national systems of economic expertise in developing countries, creating a new class of ''global experts.''

Author: Germán Vergara
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108918077
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Around the 1830s, parts of Mexico began industrializing using water and wood. By the 1880s, this model faced a growing energy and ecological bottleneck. By the 1950s, fossil fuels powered most of Mexico's economy and society. Looking to the north and across the Atlantic, late nineteenth-century officials and elites concluded that fossil fuels would solve Mexico's energy problem and Mexican industry began introducing coal. But limited domestic deposits and high costs meant that coal never became king in Mexico. Oil instead became the favored fuel for manufacture, transport, and electricity generation. This shift, however, created a paradox of perennial scarcity amidst energy abundance: every new influx of fossil energy led to increased demand. Germán Vergara shows how the decision to power the country's economy with fossil fuels locked Mexico in a cycle of endless, fossil-fueled growth - with serious environmental and social consequences.

Author: National Research Council
Publisher: National Academies Press
ISBN: 0309165075
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
Given current demographic trends, nearly one in five U.S. residents will be of Hispanic origin by 2025. This major demographic shift and its implications for both the United States and the growing Hispanic population make Multiple Origins, Uncertain Destinies a most timely book. This report from the National Research Council describes how Hispanics are transforming the country as they disperse geographically. It considers their roles in schools, in the labor market, in the health care system, and in U.S. politics. The book looks carefully at the diverse populations encompassed by the term "Hispanic," representing immigrants and their children and grandchildren from nearly two dozen Spanish-speaking countries. It describes the trajectory of the younger generations and established residents, and it projects long-term trends in population aging, social disparities, and social mobility that have shaped and will shape the Hispanic experience.

Author: Wil G. Pansters
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804784477
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
Mexico is currently undergoing a crisis of violence and insecurity that poses serious threats to democratic transition and rule of law. This is the first book to put these developments in the context of post-revolutionary state-making in Mexico and to show that violence in Mexico is not the result of state failure, but of state-making. While most accounts of politics and the state in recent decades have emphasized processes of transition, institutional conflict resolution, and neo-liberal reform, this volume lays out the increasingly important role of violence and coercion by a range of state and non-state armed actors. Moreover, by going beyond the immediate concerns of contemporary Mexico, this volume pushes us to rethink longterm processes of state-making and recast influential interpretations of the so-called golden years of PRI rule. Violence, Coercion, and State-Making in Twentieth-Century Mexico demonstrates that received wisdom has long prevented the concerted and systematic study of violence and coercion in state-making, not only during the last decades, but throughout the post-revolutionary period. The Mexican state was built much more on violence and coercion than has been acknowledged—until now.

Author: Scott Mainwaring
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107175526
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 525

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Book Description
This book generates a wealth of new empirical information about Latin American party systems and contributes richly to major theoretical debates about party systems and democracy.