British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

BA PDF Symposium 2005

26 April 2005

Abstracts

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Dr Francisco González

Economic Development and Regime Change: Lessons from Latin America

The region of Latin America experienced the highest number of regime changes in the world during the second half of the twentieth century, making it fertile ground to study this political phenomenon, which has attracted prime attention since 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The current dominant scholarly paradigm to the study of regime change (referred to as the 'well being' theory of regime change) is the best to date in these fields. Its emphasis is on the big impact that structural (economic factors such as per capita income levels) variables had in shaping regime change in 141 countries throughout the world between 1950 and 1990. This paper makes a case for the explanatory power of a different framework, which is based on the impact of political agency/institutionalisation (praetorianism and elite settlements) variables on regime change in 17 Latin American countries between 1940 and 2000. The paper shows that the ?well being? and the ?political agency/institutionalisation? frameworks shed complementary (rather than competing) analytical light for the majority of Latin American countries' political regime trajectories during the period. Moreover, the 'political agency/institutionalisation framework' also provides a systematic, analytically-coherent explanation for outlier cases, such as Argentina, Venezuela, Panama, Colombia, and Nicaragua, which the 'well being' theory cannot account for. This framework is innovative and could be used to enrich and qualify our analytical understanding of regime change worldwide in the second half of the twentieth century.

Dr Francisco González is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford. His research interests include the politics of regime change in Latin America, political and economic transitions in the same region since the 1980s, the role of Latinos in US politics, and US foreign policy toward Latin America since the Second World War. Dr González's latest publications are (with Desmond King) The State and Democratization: The United States in Comparative Perspective in British Journal of Political Science, 34, 193–210. Democracia dividida: MÉxico desde 2000, in Política Exterior, 'Perspectivas Exteriores 2004: Los intereses de España en el Mundo', Madrid, Spain, 2004, 151–159. and 'Has Neoliberalism Delivered "Creative Destruction" in Latin America?' in Development in Practice, 13, 578–580.