PRD politicians and officials widely use clientelism to structure their relationships with citizens. This is due not only to the entrenchment of clientelism in Mexican politics or to high rates of poverty and inequality, but also to the limited institutionalization of democratic rules inside the party. The last stems largely from the party's electoral strategy in its formative years, and has resulted in uncontrolled factional battles that play out through clientelism. The Brazilian PT faced external and internal conditions quite similar to those of the PRD, but its early focus on organization building and policy change allowed it to avoid clientelism to a greater degree. This analysis problematizes the trend of using minimalist definitions that assume clientelism to be nondemocratic because these approaches result in conceptual stretching and decreased explanatory power. T he Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) is Mexico's largest left-wing political party. It was established in 1989 in opposition to the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which had dominated the country's politics since its inception in 1929. In some ways, the PRD has been extraordinarily successful; in others, it has been a great disappointment. Candidates for the PRD and the electoral coalition that preceded it have twice come close to winning presidential elections, most recently in 2006, when its candidate came within 1 percent of his opponent. The party was instrumental to Mexico's democratic transition, and it has given hope for political and economic betterment to millions of people. At the same time, the PRD has been handicapped by factionalism, personalism, and clientelism, losing many supporters who became disillusioned by its practices. Why have PRD politicians come to use clientelism despite their efforts to avoid the methods of the PRI?A series of external factors-poverty, the long history of clientelism in Mexican politics, the PRI's extensive use of this method to ensure political stability, and the PRD founders' proficiency in this method-are important in answering this question. These factors, however, did not guarantee that the new party would be marked by clientelism to the degree it has been. Instead, a succession of internal events, among which the party's strategy for bringing about a transition to democracy © 2008 University of Miami stands out, have a more direct causal relationship with the outcome of clientelism.The PRD was established from a wide range of left-wing parties, social movements, and individuals, with diverse ideological visions. Coordinating these currents under one organizational roof could have taken various forms, based on individual direct participation, ideological or programmatic groups, centralized or decentralized power, and so on. However, the emergence of one predominant leader, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and the primacy of his political strategy set the party on a path of personalistic factions and centralized power, despite the best intentions not to replicate these characteristics of ...

The concept of clientelism has lost descriptive power. It has become indistinguishable from neighboring concepts and is applied across analytical levels. Using Gerring's (Polity 31:357-393, 1999) characterization of a "good" concept, I establish the core attributes of clientelism, which, in addition to being an interestmaximizing exchange, involves longevity, diffuseness, face-to-face contact, and inequality. Using secondary sources and fieldwork data, I differentiate clientelism from concepts such as vote-buying and corruption and determine its analytical position at the microsociological level. I argue that labeling sociopolitical systems as clientelistic is awkward since, operating at a higher analytical level, they have characteristics beyond microsociological clientelism and they affect the political nature of the clientelism they contain. I conclude that differentiating clientelism by confining it to the microsociological level will aid theory-building.

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Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have now had 20 years of experience with community policing programmes (COP), yet high rates of public crime and violence, police violence and corruption, as well as public distrust of the police continue. The introduction to this special issue frames a set of contributions that, together, tell the story of COP's problems and promise in the region. It argues that, in Latin America and the Caribbean, COP is often locally and regionally (mis)appropriated in ways that challenge common assumptions both of what COP is and of what it can be in contemporary highly unequal politico-economic systems. Indeed, regional and local specificities mean that COP has been used as much to legitimise harsh policing tactics, as it has been used to undertake serious reforms. At the same time, there are directions for general improvements that have the potential of a wide impact.

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