Civil Society Organizations Advocacy And Policy Making In Latin American Democracies

What explains civil society participation in policy making in Latin American democracies? Risley comparatively analyzes actors who have advocated for children's rights, the environment, and freedom of information in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Successful issue framing and effective alliance building are identified as 'pathways' to participation.

*Winner of the AEJMC-Knudson Latin America Prize 2017* Social movements throughout contemporary Latin America are successfully influencing and shaping media policy. In this highly original, detailed, and in-depth study, Silvio Waisbord and María Soledad Segura scrutinize the goals, tactics, and impact of civic media movements across the region, demonstrating the full extent of media activism on domestic policy and politics. Media Movements goes beyond simple conceptions of 'the national' versus 'the global' to reveal the complicated process of media policy-making, and to evaluate the significance of local political elites and citizens, global actors, and legal frameworks. With success rates varying across the region, the authors offer an assessment of the impact of citizens' mobilization on policy-making, as well as the effects of legislation on ownership, funding, community media, non-profit media, and public media.

The Youngest Citizens traces the historical evolution of children’s rights in Latin America before turning its focus to the dramatic shift in discourse and policy experienced by the continent in the last 20 years. This book explores the new global regime on childhood, child advocates’ sustained efforts to influence domestic policy, the ongoing challenges they face, and the implications for democracy and citizenship in Latin America. Risley addresses the disconnect between rights granted and the realities that young people face through in-depth case studies of child advocacy and legislation to prove that rights in theory do not suffice; the status of children must be improved in practice. Key issues are discussed, such as child labor in Bolivia and Brazil, child soldiers in Colombia, child sexual exploitation in Costa Rica and Mexico, and unaccompanied child migrants detained at the United States’ southern border. The Youngest Citizens takes the cautiously optimistic view that children themselves are increasingly being recognized as rights-bearing subjects and included in the decisions affecting them. This book is an essential text for both undergraduate and graduate students interested in Latin American studies, with a focus on themes surrounding childhood and the family, human rights, and migration.

What explains civil society participation in policy making in Latin American democracies? Risley comparatively analyzes actors who have advocated for children's rights, the environment, and freedom of information in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. Successful issue framing and effective alliance building are identified as 'pathways' to participation.

A dense web of private associations drawn from multiple social classes, interest groups and value communities makes for a firm foundation for strong democracy. In Latin America today, will civil society improve the quality of democracy or will it foster political polarization and reverse recent progress? Distinguished theorists from the United States, Canada and Latin America explore the diverse impact of civil society on economic performance, political parties, and state institutions. In-depth and up-to-date country studies explore the consequences of civil society for the durability of democracy in three highly dynamic, controversial settings: Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela.

This book examines democratizing media reforms in Latin America. The author explains why some countries have recently passed such reforms in the broadcasting sector, while others have not. By offering a civil society perspective, the author moves beyond conventional accounts that perceive media reforms primarily as a form of government repression to punish oppositional media. Instead, he highlights the pioneering role of civil society coalitions, which have managed to revitalize the debate on communication rights and translated them into specific regulatory outcomes such as the promotion of community radio stations. The book provides an in-depth, comparative analysis of media reform debates in Argentina and Brazil (analyzing Chile and Uruguay as complementary cases), supported by original qualitative research. As such, it advances our understanding of how shifting power relations and social forces are affecting policymaking in Latin America and beyond.

Setting out to explore critically the way civil society has entered development thinking, policy and practice as a paradigmatic concept of the 21st century, Howell (development studies, U. of Sussex) and Pearce (Latin American politics, U. of Bradford) trace the historical path leading to the encounter between the ideas of development and civil society in the late 1980s and how donors have translated these into development policy an programs. They find that there are competing normative visions, which have deep roots in Western European political thought, about the role of civil society in relation to the state and market both among donors and within the societies where donors are operating. This leads to donors playing a major role in shaping the character of service provision. They also argue that their study exposes the hitherto unexplored power of the market, as opposed to solely the state, to distort donor programs. c. Book News Inc.

"How do poor people in Latin America participate in politics? What explains the variation in the patterns of voting, protesting, and contacting government for the region's poorest citizens? Why are participation gaps larger in some countries than in others? This book offers the first large scale empirical analysis of political participation in Latin America, focusing on patterns of participation among the poorest citizens in each country, and comparing those patterns to those of individuals with more resources. Far from being politically inert, under certain conditions the poorest citizens in Latin America can act and speak for themselves with an intensity that far exceeds their modest socioeconomic resources. We argue that key institutions of democracy, namely civil society, political parties, and competitive elections, have an enormous impact on whether or not poor people turn out to vote, protest, and contact government officials. When voluntary organizations thrive in poor communities and when political parties focus their mobilization efforts on poor individuals, they respond with high levels of political activism. Poor people's activism also benefits from strong parties, robust electoral competition and well-functioning democratic institutions. Where electoral competition is robust and where the power of incumbents is constrained, we see higher levels of participation by poor individuals and more political equality. Precisely because the individual resource constraints that poor people face are daunting obstacles to political activism, our explanation focuses on those features of democratic politics that create opportunities for participation that have the strongest effect on poor people's political behavior"--