Costa Rica: Paradise in Doubt

Long counted among Latin America's most stable and vibrant democracies, Costa Rica has now become a place where the once unimaginable happens. In just the past year, two former presidents of this Central American country of 4.3 million have been arrested on corruption charges, while a third has come under investigation. Voter turnout is dropping. Citizens are unhappy with the tone and content of public life. Agencies and boards responsible for policing the state seem to be working poorly. The public debt is growing to an unhealthy size. The party system, the link between citizens and the state, is disintegrating

Institutional Change and Political Conflict: Evaluating Alternative Explanations of Electoral Reform in Costa Rica.

This article seeks to identify the conditions that prompt executives and legislators to reform electoral laws, especially those with far-ranging and redistributive consequences. It pursues this objective by evaluating the ability of alternative models of political behaviour and institutional reform to account for the promulgation of the 1946 Electoral Code in Costa Rica, one of the oldest and most stable democracies in Latin America and in the world, more generally. The 1946 Electoral Code, among other reasons, merits study because its enactment threatened to loosen the governing party's grip on the presidency in the 1948 elections and promised to eradicate — if not reduce — its majority in Congress in the 1946 midterm as well as 1948 elections. A central conclusion of this article is that, contrary to some recent critiques of strategic models of institutional change, the inability of legislative seat maximization or career protection models to explain the promulgation of the 1946 Electoral Code does not mean that rational choice theories cannot account for the reform of electoral laws. By developing a third model that focuses upon the interest incumbents have in promoting political stability, this article shows that the creation of institutions that promise to punish key sectors of the ruling bloc is prompted, in part, by the threat of a civil war that at least some incumbents fear losing' The establishment of institutions with such redistributive repercussions also stems from the willingness of some within the ruling bloc to fashion a new alliance with those in the opposition who also share an interest in political stability

Explaining Voter Turnout Rates in New Democracies: Guatemala.

This paper uses several ols models to evaluate the impact of sociological, institutional, and spatial approaches to turnout across the 330 municipalities of Guatemala. It shows that economic development and geographic location (urban vs. rural) have little discernible impact on turnout. Turnout, however, varies positively with the share of registered voters who are female, even if fewer women are registered to vote and, as a result, actually cast ballots. As turnout has fallen through time, the share of registered voters who are literate and the share of the population that is indigenous have become negatively associated with turnout. Larger number of citizens turn out to vote as municipal size decreases and as the ratio of registered voters to voting stations falls. That these factors are significant suggests that, even in a research design that privileges socioeconomic variation, spatial–institutional differences help explain voter turnout rates

Does Tenure Matter to Resource Management? Property Rights and Forest Conditions in Guatemala

Objectives. Property rights are central to debates about natural resource policy. Governments traditionally have been seen as the appropriate custodians of natural resources for their citizens. More recently, many argue the privatization of property rights will ensure that users have incentives to manage their resources well. Common property, to the extent it is discussed at all, is seen as leading to the tragedy of the commons. We evaluate these claims by assessing property rights and forest conditions in two private and three communal forests in Guatemala. Methods. Data on biological and social phenomena from five forests (151 plots) and their associated communities were collected using the International Forestry Resources and Institutions Research Program protocols. Ordinary least squares regression was used to analyze four models. We examined t-scores for differences in coefficients for the different models. Results. The models demonstrate that de jure property rights are not a powerful predictor of variations among the sampled forests. Conclusions. We argue that de facto institutions and their enforcement are much more important than de jure property rights to forest management. Communities holding a forest in common can, under certain circumstances, create institutions to manage their resources as successfully as—or more successfully than—private owners

Dual Credit/Concurrent Enrollment Initiatives: A Study of Influences on Students' Postsecondary Decisions

This study focused on three major areas of influence on students' postsecondary decisions as related to the DCCE initiatives: the knowledge-base of the students and their advisors, the college enrollment aspirations for the students, and the students' college planning practices. The research investigated whether these elements are being addressed by the DCCE initiatives and the level of effectiveness of any efforts to address these major areas of influence on students' postsecondary decisions. The study was a three-phase, mixed methods study using participant data from students from nine North Carolina community colleges. The first phase involved a student database search; the second phase involved a combined student interview, which represented the first data collection methodology used in the study, and the third phase was the administration of an individual student questionnaire. The research revealed that there are several major influences on the students' decisions regarding enrolling in DCCE courses. The primary influence was the students' parents. Other helpful and influential sources of information in the students' DCCE enrollment decisions were student advisors such as teachers. Students' decisions regarding DCCE participation also were influenced by knowledge of tuition-waived college credit, transferability of college courses, getting an early start on college courses, and a quicker pathway to career goals. A majority of the respondents felt that their pre-DCCE level of understanding of how they could apply their DCCE experience to achieve their college goals was very high. Only half of the respondents reported knowing where they wanted to go to college or what they wanted to study once they graduated from high school before they started taking DCCE courses, and a majority of the respondents did not start planning for college until their sophomore or junior year of high school. A majority of the respondents were already taking DCCE courses when they developed their college goals. The data suggest that the students' college goals actually evolved throughout their DCCE experience via their participation in the DCCE program

Political Competition and Electoral Fraud: A Latin American Case Study

For an activity that was (or is) so central to the practice of politics in so many countries, electoral fraud remains poorly understood. Why and how politicians and parties violated (or violate) laws to falsify electoral outcomes constitute a set of topics the importance of which few would deny. Understanding how they illegally increased their vote totals or decreased those of their adversaries is not only essential to the history of many democratic systems, but an ongoing activity in many others. The study of electoral fraud is an ideal way to shed light on whether political behavior is shaped more by sociological factors or by institutional arrangements, especially where and when survey data is not available. This study aims to begin filling this void by drawing upon a rich documentary source--the petitions to nullify electoral results (demandas de nulidad)--from Costa Rica, a country noted for its long history of democratic government. The petitions contain a wealth of material about the frequency, nature, and geographical basis of accusations of electoral fraud. They were generally lodged by those with legal training and typically published by the daily government gazette (La Gaceta). They were one of the weapons most frequently used by the opposition to combat the prerogatives largely held by presidents until the mid-twentieth century, namely, the production of the electoral registry, the holding of elections, and the tally of the vote. They are valuable precisely because of their partisan origins: By virtue of what they say and do not say, they trace the frontier delimiting acceptable from unacceptable behavior

Measuring Political Democracy: Case Expertise, Data Adequacy, and Central America.

Recent writings concerning measurement of political democracy offer sophisticated discussions of problems of conceptualization, operationalization, and aggregation. Yet they have less to say about the error that derives from the use of inaccurate, partial, or misleading data sources. Draw-ing on evidence from five Central American countries, the authors show this data-induced mea-surement error compromises the validity of the principal, long-term cross-national scales of democracy. They call for an approach to index construction that relies on case expertise and use of a wide range of data sources, and they employ this approach in developing an index of political democracy for the Central American countries during the 20th century. The authors’ index draws on a comprehensive set of secondary and primary sources as it rigorously pursues standards of conceptualization, operationalization, and aggregation. The index’s value is illustrated by showing how it suggests new lines of research in the field of Central American politics

What Counts as Original Appropriation?

I here defend historical entitlement theories of property rights against a popular charge. This is the objection that such theories fail because no convincing account of original appropriation exists. I argue that this argument assumes a certain reading of historical entitlement theory and I spell out an alternative reading against which it misfires. On this reading, the role of acts of original appropriation is not to justify but to individuate people?s holdings. I argue that we can identify which acts count as original appropriation against the background of a general justification for a practice of property rights. On this view, what I will call „natural? acts of original appropriation are acts by which a person begins to satisfy the general conditions for justified ownership. Finally, I offer an interpretation of John Locke's theory of appropriation along these lines and argue that it provides an attractive reading of his view

Can Parties Police Themselves? Electoral Governance and Democratization.

This article outlines the logic and consequences of the classical theory of electoral governance. By empowering the executive with the administration of elections and the legislature with the certification of the vote tally, the theory expected elected officials to generate widely acceptable election results. This article argues that the classical theory breaks down when the same party controls the executive and the legislature. Developments in several presidential systems offer tentative support for its central hypothesis. Only when parties delegated election governance to an autonomous court system did election conflicts stop promoting political instability. Comparisons between US and Latin American separation of power systems also suggest that political developments in North and South America are much more similar than commonly assumed