Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall

Abstract

Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall * (Mainwaring, Scott and Perez-Linan, Anibal. Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival and Fall. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013)Scott Mainwaring and Anibal Perez-Linan's book, Democracies and dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall, is a hefty work. In the book, the authors analyzed 65 years of political regime changes in the subcontinent, from 1945 to 2010, with some digressions on the preceding period, since the early twentieth century.For this analysis, the authors made use of a broad collection of data on regimes and political actors within these countries during the analyzed period. The actors were analyzed regarding their stances on certain basic operating principles of a democracy and on public policies. As for the countries, the authors observed if at the end of each year the regime in force was a democratic, semi-democratic, or an authoritarian regime, classified upon certain conditions of political competition, both by criteria established by the authors and based on other databases, such as Polity IV. Lastly, the authors also considered the international scenario (especially the regional scenario) to identify its influence on national political processes. Other variables were also taken into account, such as the level of development, income distribution, social stratification etc, in order to test alternative explanations for the fluctuation of different regimes.The book presents two declared objectives: a theoretical and an empirical. The theoretical objective aims to contribute to an approach that will prove useful to comparative studies wanting to understand the survival and collapse of political regimes, whether authoritarian, democratic, or semi-democratic (the three analytical categories considered by the authors). The empirical objective, in turn, is to provide a better understanding of political regime changes in post-war Latin America.The book is successful in achieving both objectives. Regarding the first objective, the work offers a clear theoretical perspective for understanding the emergence, survival, and fall of different regimes - which can be replicated for contexts other than Latin American, commonly analyzed by democratization studies. As for the second objective, by the end of the book we have a better and broader understanding of the several political regime alternation processes, their main causes, and relevant factors.The novelty of the work lies in its professed proposal, i.e., to be the first attempt to understand regime changes in several countries over a long period of time based on an approach focused on the actors. Through such an approach, Mainwaring & Perez-Linan's book refutes theories, which, as the authors show, do not adequately explain the Latin American experience in the last century, namely: modernization theory, class-based theories, theories based on economic performance, theories focused on the political culture of the masses, theories that privilege an understanding of formal institutions, and traditional theories on leadership and agency. The suggested alternative underscores the preferences of political actors, regarding both political regimes as well as public policies. Such an approach considers these preferences to be the determining factor in explaining the falls, emergence and survival of democracies and dictatorships.The crucial actors for the problem at issue are the organizations and their leaders (e.g. presidents), structured in coalitions either favorable or against each regime type and with relevant resources for a political dispute within that particular historical quadrature. Their relative strength will ultimately define the prevailing regime. The significance of these actors lies in the fact that their normative preferences toward democracy and public policies are more significant than structural factors - key variables in the refuted theories. …