In settings of deep poverty and inequality, implementing policies that balance urgent needs with long-term development is crucial. What strategies are used to build public support for long-term oriented policies? Evidence shows that both left- and right-wing governments have played a role in the expansion of social policy. This article explores the context and meanings that governments with different ideologies assign to distributive policies, focusing on how these policies are communicated. In particular, I argue that ideology significantly shapes the framing presidents use when discussing and announcing social policies. Left-leaning governments emphasize social inclusion while right-leaning governments stress the productivity-enhancing aspects of these policies. Using text analysis techniques, including à la carte embeddings (ALC) this study analyzes presidential communications from Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. The findings show how ideology drives communication strategies, revealing that in more polarized societies, presidents distinguish themselves more consistently through how they construct and communicate these policies.

This article investigates whether state efforts to combat violence against women (VAW) shape personally held stigmatizing attitudes toward victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) and views of the stigma society attributes to them. Drawing on the policy feedback effect and source cues literature, we argue that credible sources delivering messages about anti-VAW laws can reduce stigmatizing attitudes toward IPV victims and persuade people that society is more welcoming to victims, thereby reducing public stigma. Using survey experiments collected from Mexico and Guatemala, we find that credible sources matter in predicting a host of attitudes related to personally held and public stigma toward victims, but these effects are conditional on gender and hostile sexism. This article demonstrates that even in contexts of impunity, state efforts can positively shape social norms on VAW.

Over the last 20 years, many countries have experienced the rise of radical right-wing populist (RRP) actors that threaten democratic governance, including in Latin America. These actors have deployed a variety of discursive frames based on economic grievances and (perceived) changing social values. The 2018 elections in Costa Rica were part of this phenomenon: a right-wing populist outsider presidential candidate deployed several frames and earned the most votes in the first round of voting. We analyze support for this candidate to understand which sectors of society were galvanized by the deployment of economic, anti-establishment, and cultural frames. We find that economic frames had much weaker traction than anti-establishment and cultural frames and that opposition to same-sex marriage was the frame with the strongest galvanizing effect across a wide range of demographic groups, beyond the expected ones. These findings support extant scholarship demonstrating the effective politicization of cultural issues by RRP actors for electoral purposes.

This study examines the complexity of public opinion on abortion in Argentina following the landmark 2020 legalization. Moving beyond binary “pro-life” versus “pro-choice” classifications, we analyze attitudes through the lens of value conflict and ambivalence within a contentious policy domain. Drawing on original survey data (N = 1,021) from May–June 2022, we utilize a heteroscedastic probit model to estimate both the direction and variance of responses across seven scenarios, ranging from historically established grounds to voluntary interruption. Findings reveal that while consensus is high for historical grounds, ambivalence peaks in voluntary scenarios, driven significantly by the interaction between conflicting core values: the sanctity of life and bodily autonomy. Crucially, this value conflict generates measurable response instability even among citizens with firm opinions, challenging the narrative of a rigidly polarized society. Results demonstrate that legislative resolution does not erase moral tension, suggesting democratic discourse must account for citizens’ cognitive complexity rather than reducing public opinion to absolute alignments.

In this article we argue that relational work between the state and civil society is crucial for social change, focusing on the relational work between activist bureaucrats and citizen representatives in the development of Bogotá’s gender and care policies. While existing literature shows that social movement embeddedness within the state helps explain why some governments achieve more egalitarian outcomes, this structural concept lacks micro-level foundations. Highlighting the role of relational work fills this gap. Drawing on three years of ethnographic research—including 54 semi-structured interviews and over 300 hours of observation—we show that the intense relational practices of citizen representatives and activist bureaucrats (materialized in open and effective participation, joint and coordinated advocacy, and translation of bureaucratic jargon to common language) was crucial to advance feminist agendas. This study contributes to an understanding of how everyday relational practices between state actors and citizens can generate policy change.

Research shows that quotas and feminist movements impose gender mandates on congresswomen, shaping their legislative outputs. However, this scholarship treats women as a homogeneous collective, rendering invisible intragroup differences. This article addresses this gap by asking how gender quotas shape the representation of marginalized women’s interests in contexts characterized by strong gender mandates. Analyzing the Chilean case, I compared the legislative terms pre (2014–18) and post (2018–22) quota. First, I examined how many marginalized women entered Congress in each cycle. Then, I reviewed the contents of all laws and bills on gender issues and marginalized groups sponsored by the congresswomen, to determine how well they represented marginalized women’s needs. Finally, I analyzed who were the main sponsors of intersectional legislation. The findings indicate that marginalized women’s interests, though better represented after the quota implementation, remained a marginal portion of congresswomen’s legislative output.