When President Felipe Calderón took office he declared a war on drug lords, thus initiating a war of attrition which has claimed more than 40,000 lives in the last 5 years. In this paper I document how this escalation of…

This text uses the principle of proportionality to study the social, legal and moral justification of the current drug policy in Mexico. The text focuses on two senses of proportionality: relative and absolute. By relative proportionality, I refer to the…

Studies of authoritarian nations rarely consider the role and activities of regional officials. They are usually assumed to be the involuntary agents of national rulers, or the unwitting victims of local demands for political change. Instead, I argue that regional…

Si los cambios de preferencias electorales durante la campaña se han explicado bajo el supuesto teórico de una alta institucionalización del sistema de partidos, entonces cabe preguntarse: ¿bajo qué condiciones ocurre el cambio electoral en democracias con baja institucionalización? Utilizando…

Why do some terrorist groups cooperate with each other, while others attack each other? Terrorist groups frequently interact. Emerging research shows that these network relationships have important consequences, but it remains unclear why some terrorist groups form ties with other…

This essay examines the effect of Mexico’s security strategy and security situation on public opinion. Political and policy analysts are highly divided as to the merits of the Mexican government’s war against the nation’s drug cartels, with some seeing the…

Does stronger integration in world trade affect levels of democracy? Using a system of simultaneous equations in a panel of 23 Latin American countries between 1970 and 1999, this paper assesses the possible channels through which trade may affect democracy.…

A broad summary of the theoretical literature on economic growth shows that this theory has transcended the neoclassical paradigm and that market rationality does not govern the human development process. Instead human development is the appropriate standard for rationality. Using…

I review the current theoretical and econometric literature on the economic dynamics of urbanization and its relation to economic growth. I then report research results on the short- and long-term impacts of urbanization on human development, using Gray and Purser’s…

Con el fin de contribuir al debate sobre la efectividad versus la representatividad de los gobiernos, en este documento de trabajo se revisa la evolución del sistema de representación en el Congreso mexicano y los consecuentes cambios en el proceso…