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It is widely believed that autocratic regimes cannot limit their power through institutions of their own making. This book presents a surprising challenge to this view. It demonstrates that the Chilean armed forces were constrained by institutions of their own design. Based on extensive documentation of military decision-making, much of it long classified and unavailable, this book reconstructs the politics of institutions within the recent Chilean dictatorship (1973-1990). It examines the structuring of institutions at the apex of the military junta, the relationship of military rule with the prior constitution, the intra-military conflicts that led to the promulgation of the 1980 constitution, the logic of institutions contained in the new constitution, and how the constitution constrained the military junta after it went into force in 1981. This provocative account reveals the standard account of the dictatorship as a personalist regime with power concentrated in Pinochet to be grossly inaccurate

ObjectiveThis study seeks to show how authoritarian secrecy complicates the reliable identification of the inner power configuration in dictatorships. This topic is relevant to recent research on autocratic regime subtypes and institutions.MethodsThe study pursues a theoretical and conceptual analysis of the implications of heteronomous structures of authoritarian power for: the opportunity and motive of autocrats to employ secrecy; the reliability of indirect types of evidence, such as the observable presence of institutions, legislation, or the regime's self‐presentation through media, speeches, and interviews; and the production and preservation of direct sources.ResultsI find that autocratic secrecy presents considerable obstacles for studying the highest levels of authoritarian power; that indirect forms of evidence are equivocal sources; and that, ultimately, we need to know how dictatorships actually operate to reliably classify regimes.ConclusionsSecrecy creates methodological problems for the study of autocracies that are largely absent in the study of democracies.

Fil: Barros, Robert. Universidad de San Andrés. Departamento de Ciencias Sociales; Argentina.

A plurality of aspirations are associated with democracy under conditions of dictatorship. Unfortunately, the recurrence of polysemy within this debate has limited its productivity. Democracy has largely been appropriated as a vehicle for each tendency's particular utopia. The contemporary crisis of the socialist project in Latin America is evident: the orthodox left retains the goal of socialism, but at the expense of democracy and any discourse that could appeal to the broader strata