Editorial

In January 2021, we had the great honour to become the new editors-in-chief of the Journal of Politics in Latin America (JPLA). We have taken over from Jorge Gordin, who served as editor for eleven years, decisively contributing to JPLA’s reputation as an internationally respected journal on Latin American politics. We take this opportunity to thank him for this effort publicly. We have assumed our new responsibilities with great enthusiasm and a deep commitment to preserving and further strengthening the journal’s unique characteristics. During our tenure as editors, we plan to consolidate three key features of JPLA. First, as all of the GIGA’s journals, JPLA is fully open access. This unobstructed access is an indispensable tool to (further) democratise knowledge production and guarantee a broad reach to the Latin American community of scholars. Second, we commit to continuing to publish high-quality, peer-reviewed research that provides a deeper understanding of political processes, institutions, and actors of the Latin American region. Finally, we renew JPLA’s approach to the study of Latin American politics within a framework of methodological and theoretical pluralism.

During the next few years, our key goal as editors of JPLA will be to sustain the journal’s excellence, holding it to the highest standards of quality in scientific publishing. We will also seek to increase its visibility, scope, and impact. For this task, we are fortunate to count on the expert advice and feedback of the journal’s Associate Editors and to rely on an excellent pool of peer reviewers with a broad background in different subfields, topics, and countries. The current challenges that the region is facing have highlighted the importance of the social sciences in general and political science in particular. After three to four decades since democratisation, democracy has been exhibiting clear signs of deterioration and even regression in some countries, such as Nicaragua and Venezuela, while support for and satisfaction with democracy has recently declined in general, amidst low trust in political institutions. In the last years, protest and social discontent have increased in several countries, even in more robust democracies such as Chile. Additionally, Latin America continues to be the most violent region in the world. Organised crime, corruption, and impunity remain problematic. Moreover, the emergence of COVID-19 posed further challenges to the region. Countries that exhibited weak state capacities had to adopt and implement policies requiring high coordination, technical capabilities, and broad territorial reach. With limited resources, insufficient public infrastructure, understaffed hospitals, and poor administration of services, Latin American governments struggled to deal with the pandemic.

JPLA seeks to engage with the region’s problems and academic questions of the time, promoting constructive debates from different perspectives. In this vein, we recently opened a call for papers for a special issue on the “The Politics of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Latin America,” which aims to publish new empirical research on the politics and policies of the COVID-19 pandemic in the region. The issue, which will appear at the end of 2021, is particularly interested in analyses of government responses to the pandemic and/or the political consequences of COVID-19. To maintain our journal at the forefront of Latin American politics’ key themes and discussions, we plan to continue organising special issues in the future. We also renew our commitment to publishing excellent individual contributions by and for the political science community in Latin American studies.

We look forward to your proposals!

Rossana CastiglioniFacultad de Ciencias Sociales e Historia, Universidad Diego Portales, Chile [e-mail] Mariana LlanosGIGA Institute for Latin American Studies, Germany [e-mail]