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[CN]Chapter 11

[CH]Latin AmericainComparative Perspective

How does Latin American politics look when compared to the rest of the world? Is it more or less democratic? Does it, on the whole, incline more toward extremely strong executives or personality-based parties than most other regions? Do key institutions—constitutions, courts, bureaucracies, legislatures, among others—evidence any idiosyncratic patterns that stand out from the norm? How different do things look if we put Latin American politics, or the politics of a particular Latin American state, up against, say, Canada and the United States, as we have done often in the text, instead of sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia? What, that is, does comparative politics tell us about Latin America that we have not yet encountered?

Chapter 1 introduced two distinct but related ways to study the politics of Latin America: area studies and comparative politics. Throughout the book, both approaches have been used, sometimes together, according to which was best suited to illustrate a particular point. This chapter returns to these concepts for a closer look at Latin American politics through a comparative perspective.It will do so by taking a few of the themes investigated in earlier chapters, issues already shown to be important in Latin America—history, institutions, democracy, and political economy—and seeing what these phenomena look and act like in other settings.

Beyond setting this material out, this chapter has three objectives. First, by comparing politics in Latin America to what exists elsewhere, this final chapter aims to deepen your knowledge of Latin America because you will see its politics from a different angle. Second, it will sharpen your analytical skills in comparative politics. Third and finally, if all works as planned, by the end of this chapter you will be convinced that to be a good Latin Americanist you also have to be a good comparativist.

[A] Comparing Polities and Politics

We make comparisons every day. Should I buy this car or that one? Is our goalie better than theirs? Our comparisons are grounded in relevant criteria. Thinking about two cars, we find out which vehicleis more reliable, more fuel efficient, cheaper, which dealer has the better reputation for service, and the like. When we turn to the goalies, we use goals allowed per game, percentage of shots blocked, and how each one plays under pressure. We look for things we need to know in order to make our comparisons meaningful. This principle extends to comparative politics.

Politics and polities (nation-states, states or provinces within federal nation-states, and the various forms of local government) can be compared in various ways. First, wecan look at the same polity at different times to see what changes have occurred and what forces underlay those changes. Second, we can examine case studies of a single political system, done to highlight some special aspect of that polity. Third,we can compare a small number of polities, the small-n study, which again usually centers on some specific institution or attribute shared by the political systems under study. These first three tend to rely on qualitative methods and suppose a substantial degree of familiarity with the places studied. Finally, we can make comparisons of many polities—generally 20 or more cases, large-N studies, which use quantitative methods to search for relations between selected variables. Large-N studies operate at the highest level of abstraction—they necessarily ignore details about specific countries or regions—and are thought to be better suited for theory-building than the other approaches. None of the foregoing is particularly suited to comparing regions, say, Latin America and southern Europe, but all can be used in this context.

[B] Strategies for Comparison

Comparing the same polity or same institution at two different times is a sometimes overlooked strategy, yet it can yield valuable insights. An easy way to see this at work is to look at a country today and 50 years ago, in 1959. For example, in 1959 Canada had no political parties dedicated to having the province of Quebec secede from Canada; in 2009 there are two, one of them with seats in the national Parliament.In 2009, an African American is president of the United States; in 1959, AfricanAmericans living in the country’s south were not only kept from voting or holding office, but they were also subject to laws enforcing the segregation of black people from white. Fifty years ago, the idea that Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) could be defeated was laughable, but by 2009 the PRI had lost two straight presidential elections. The list could go on, but it will end here with the cases of Portugal and Spain. In 1959, each was governed by genuine fascists. Everyone knew that Portugal’s António de OliveiraSalazar and Spain’s Francisco Franco would not be alive in 2009, but very few experts would have predicted that both countries would have become thriving democracies by then. Those experts would have looked at Spanish and Portuguese history and declared that future held more authoritarian governments for both nations. Looking at these changes from the perspective of comparative politics, we can ask why and how they came to pass.

In-depth studies of one polity may seem out of place in comparative politics, but without a thorough analysis of, say, Costa Rican political parties, we either have to exclude Latin America’s senior democracy from comparative studies of political parties or use sketchier data that could lead to faulty conclusions. Clearly, we want these country studies to use methods that can be adopted by researchers elsewhere and to employ concepts and categories found in other research, to ensure comparability. However, there is little doubt that there are many gaps in our knowledge of how political institutions and processes work in many places and that this limits the ability of political science to develop theories. Perhaps in a perfect world local political scientists would do those studies. Nevertheless, there is a solid argument for having, perhaps,Brazilian political scientists examine federalism in Canada and the United States precisely because theyautomatically bring a comparative perspective to the task.

More easily recognizable as the stuff of comparative politics are focused comparisons among a small sample of polities. For instance, we could examine three small democracies in the developing world, such as Costa Rica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Mauritius. Among the themes that could be considered arethe party system, social and economic policy, presidential versus parliamentary systems, and the role of the courts. Of course, both Trinidad and Tobago and Mauritius have more recent colonial histories and were formerly British possessions, which add another possible line of inquiry.

When doing small-n studies, care must be exercised in selecting cases. One option is to look at most similar cases, while another is to examine those that are most different. Either option, however, can fall victim to selection bias. This problem arises when the cases selected for analysis produce results that are unrepresentative of the larger class of cases. Thus, although the three cases proposed above for a study of democracy in small developing countries may be inherently interesting and produce striking findings, those results may not be characteristic ofthe political systems in that class.

Finally, it is possible to compare many countries. It is probably easiest to use this approach with aggregate data, but that is not a prerequisite. Using aggregate data, such as income or government spending figures, it is possible to discover whether there is a relationship between levels of political violence and income inequality or what factors correlate with greater human rights protection. An exampleof a large-scale study that would not use aggregate data would be to ask whether having a certain percentage of women in a national legislature (the usual threshold is 30 percent) produces more laws beneficial to women or whether parliamentary democracies are less stable than presidential democracies.

The methods we have just seen are complex,and this leads naturally to asking whether such studies pay off in terms of what we can learn about politics in Latin America. Political scientists Rod Hague and Martin Harrop[1]offer four reasons why comparative politics are useful. First, they let us find out more about more places, and the more we know about how Latin America, considered as a region or as countries within the region, converges with or diverges from other places, the better our sense of how Latin American politics functions. Second, comparison improves our ability to classify political phemomena. For example, military coups are a class of political event, so seeing how Latin American coups measure up against coups elsewhere tells more about both coups and their role in Latin American politics.

A third contribution of comparative politics is that they increase our capacity for explanation. If we know more about coups as a class of political action, we should be able to explain better why they occur, which lets us propose hypotheses to test. The ability to predict is Hague and Harrop’s fourth argument for the value of comparative politics. If the hypothesisthat as per capita income rises, the incidence of coups falls[2] is confirmed, we can then make predictions about when coups might occur. Applied to Latin America, this finding would lead us to ask whether there were some income threshold above which coups ceased to occur, thereby letting us make predictions about the future of coups in Latin America.

[A] Some Comparisons

In the first 10 chapters of this book, comparisons were carried out on several levels.Some were between or among states within Latin America; others considered states outside the region; while still others made interregional comparisons. The purpose of this section is to make more focused comparisons centered on themes that were stressed as particularly necessary for developing an understanding of Latin American politics. These are:

  • the role of history and its effects, including path dependence and off-path changes;
  • the question of democracy, which has a historic dimension but also takes in transitions and consolidation;
  • formaland informal institutions, which in practice means machinery of government and parties; and
  • modes of political participation, including the role of violence as a participatory device.

[B]History

Two obvious cases for comparison come to mind when thinking about Latin American history. The first is other postcolonial regions. In Chapter 2, we compared the British North American colonies, now the United States and Canada, with Latin America, noting how both the later origins of the British colonies and the greater levels of self-government afforded them eased their passage into the ranks of constitutional democracies. Both areas were part of the first modern wave of decolonization, which we can date from 1776 to 1825, acknowledging that this omits Canada, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Panama.

Turning to Africa, we have to remember that European colonialism did not last nearly as long in Africa as in Latin America (about 80 years on average, compared to more than 3centuries) and ended much more recently, between 1956 and 1994, or 1980 if we do not count the arrival of majority rule in South Africa.[3] However, the era of the caudillos in Latin America bears a disturbing resemblance to post-independence Africa. Goran Hyden, a political scientist whose work centers on Africa, presents data demonstrating that it is only since 1990 that electoral defeat and retirement have begun to approach armed overthrow as the common method for African leaders to leave office,[4]a situation similar to that described in Chapters 2 and 4. And Africa is not alone. Much of Asia knew military rule or party dictatorships until near the end of the twentieth century.These cases point to problems with what 40 years ago was called nation-building but which might better be seen as studies in attempts to unite divided societies in newly formed states. Interestingly, Latin America has known more instances of secession and state breakup: Gran Colombia devolved itself into Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador; Central America split from Mexico almost immediately after independence, while the Central American Union finally failed in 1840; the department of Nicoya abandoned Nicaragua to become part of Costa Rica in1824; and Panama left Colombia in 1903.[5]

Looking at the histories of Spain and Portugal since most of their American colonies became independent (1825) is also instructive because for many years Iberian and Ibero-American politics closely paralleled each other. There have been experiments in radical democracy, such as the two Spanish republics (1868 and 1931); monarchies (the Portuguese ending in 1910, and the Spanish in 1931,although it wasrestored in 1975); civil wars (Portugal, 1820–1832; Spain, the Carlist Wars in the nineteenth century and the 1936–1939 Civil War); dictatorships and military governments (Salazar and Franco); and periods of civic oligarchy dominated by rural bosses that differed from Latin American oligarchic democracies. Yet the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 set that country on a new path, while the death of Franco let Spain change its trajectory equally dramatically. In Latin America, electoral democracy has become the almost universal governing model since democratic transitions began in 1982 in El Salvador. These two sets of histories show plainly that big off-path changes are as possible as they are unpredictable.

Looking at the history of more than one polity or region should reveal what is really distinctive about the place and what characteristics it shares with other political systems. We can then ask why these unique and shared traits exist and how they give political systems their individuality. And by looking at several political systems,we can also ask how significant political change, such as the changesin Spain and Portugal in the 1970s, can occur.

[B] Democracy

Along with the citizens of a handful of other nations, Canadians and Americans take democracy for granted. If the states of Latin America had been lucky in the nineteenth century,their citizens would be in that group too. Unfortunately for the Latin Americans, even barebones electoral democracy did not become the rule everywhere—exceptin Cuba—until the end of the twentieth century (see Text Box 11.1).

Text Box 11.1. Democracy in Latin America in 2009

All Latin American states currently declare themselves democratic. Cuba is an outlier here because its democracy is that of socialist revolutionary vanguard whose objective will only be achieved when society is no longer divided along class lines. Four other states, the so-called Bolivarians—Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua—want a twenty-first-century socialism and are using electoral democracy to try to get it. Moving toward the center of the ideological spectrum, we find a number of social democratic countries—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, and Uruguay; and probably El Salvador and Paraguay. These six are distinguished by acknowledging that they work within a capitalist framework, but all demand that government take an active role in redistributing society’s costs and benefits more equally. The remaining nine nations have governments that can be classified as centrist or rightist, depending on the degree to which each still embraces increasingly discredited neoliberal policy prescriptions, as well as the extent to which each crafts a foreign policy independent of Washington’s. Although many would argue that Cuba does not belong on a list of democracies, this classification is otherwise unremarkable.

Grouping Latin America’s polities by the ideological color of their democracies suggests a series of comparisons that can be made with states outside the region. Cuba has far fewer peers than it did 25 years ago, but the world’s remaining one-party Communist systems—the People’s Republic of China, Laos, Vietnam, and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—could still be examined. Similarly, measuringCuba against an ideal-type socialist revolution would be rewarding and comparing its politics to those of other one-party states, such as Eritrea, could also provide useful insights.

The Bolivarians find their peers among a heterogeneous group of other states seeking rapid social change:South Africa, Iran, and perhaps Nepal, now that it has a Marxist government. Another plausible comparison would be with Zimbabwe, an experiment in radical democracy gone wrong. Finally, the fact that this new political model is especially strong in Latin America is itself a question that merits examination.

Latin America’s social democrats need to be examined in the company of other social democrats, meaning Western European countries. However, their performance on social and economic measures should be compared to what the four Bolivarians have achieved, as well as with Latin America’s centrist and right-of-center democratic states. We would also want to compare the latter group with the states of ex-Communist Europe and the electoral democracies of Africa and Asia, perhaps excluding India, due to its size and complexity.