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Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Tables, Figures, and Maps -- Introduction -- Part One. State Formation against State Building -- One. A Theory of Latecomer State Formation -- Two. Independence and State Failure, 1808-45 -- Three. The Triumph of Trade-Led State Formation, 1845-75 -- Part Two. Ports, Parties, and Lords -- Four. A Politician-Centered Approach to State Formation -- Five. Before Argentina -- Six. Port-Driven State Formation in Argentina -- Seven. Port-Driven State Formation in Brazil -- Eight. Party-Driven State Formation in Mexico -- Nine. Party-Driven State Formation in Comparative Perspective -- Ten. Lord-Driven State Formation -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Index

The price boom of natural resources in the first decade of the twenty-first century has been a blessing for all South American economies. For some political regimes, however, it was an institutional curse. In Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, and to a lesser extent Argentina, the commodity boom made possible the emergence of "rentier populism," a new type of political coalition, based on the economic incorporation of the informal sector and funded by windfall gains from exports of natural resources. Based on a new fiscal structure, rentier populism in turn fostered the intensification of plebiscitarian mechanisms of vertical accountability and neutralized constraints of horizontal accountability. The chapter explores the conditions under which a common exogenous shock, the commodity boom, spread across the region with differential coalitional effects. It also delineates the mechanisms that link the rentier populism coalition to the emergence of plebiscitarian and hegemonic forms of accountability. In order to highlight old and new in rentier populism, the chapter places the coalition in historical perspective, using Guillermo O'Donnell's earlier work on political economy as a source of contrasts and similarities. Likewise, "plebiscitarian hegemonies" are compared with delegative democracies, the key concept in O'Donnell's later work on institutions. Adapted from the source document.

Over the course of the last decades of the twentieth century, Latin America has experienced massive institutional change. Democracy has become the dominant political regime. Change, however, has been restricted at the level of access to power. Patrimonial and hegemonic forms of exercise of power persist. Patrimonialism and hegemonic rule are birthmarks of most Latin American countries, but they have adapted to the new democratic context and gained strength from recent economic processes. This dissertation traces, from different angles, the sources of patrimonial persistence and hegemonic consolidation. State structures and coalitional dynamics, not culture or formal rules, have played a crucial role.The distinction between access to power and exercise of power is central to the analysis. It is used to reconceptualize the discussion of regimes and states in Latin America, with the goal of overcoming important analytic problems in the field. To explain the transformations of regimes and states, this study advances a model of "institutional refraction," which in turn is a synthesis of two major strands of macro-comparative analysis, neo-Marxism and neo-Weberianism. These concepts and distinctions are explored in two case studies. An analysis of Colombia in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries examines the interaction between regime and state in a context where a fundamental change in the electoral regime serves to stabilize the state's control of violence within the national territory. The second case study focuses on South American politics since the year 2000. Here the refraction model, along with the distinction between access and exercise, shed new light on how an unprecedented export boom has facilitated a move to the left throughout the region, and has also reinforced hegemonic forms of rule in some--but not all--countries.

Research on comparative democratization has recently expanded its focus to issues of institutional quality: clientelism, corruption, abuse of executive decree authority, and weak checks and balances. However, problems of institutional quality are so different from those involved in regime transitions that it is unproductive to treat them as part of the same macro-process, democratization. Whereas regime transitions are changes in the form of access to power, problems of institutional quality involve the exercise of power. Abuses in the exercise of power affecting institutional quality are best characterized not as indicators of authoritarianism and deficiencies in democratization but as reflecting--in Weberian terms--patrimonialism and failures in bureaucratization. Moreover, struggles over the exercise of power involve causes, mechanisms, and actors that can be quite distinct from those at play in conflicts over access to power. The proposed analytical framework centered on the distinction between access and exercise enhances conceptual clarity and provides a stronger theoretical basis for tackling fundamental questions about politics in Latin America, including the failure of democratization to curb clientelism and foster other improvements of institutional quality, and the prospects of democratic stability under patrimonial administrations.

Although many studies of clientelism focus exclusively on vote buying, political machines often employ diverse portfolios of strategies. We provide a theoretical framework and formal model to explain how and why machines mix four clientelist strategies during elections: vote buying, turnout buying, abstention buying, and double persuasion. Machines tailor their portfolios to the political preferences and voting costs of the electorate. They also adapt their mix to at least five contextual factors: compulsory voting, ballot secrecy, political salience, machine support, and political polarization. Our analysis yields numerous insights, such as why the introduction of compulsory voting may increase vote buying, and why enhanced ballot secrecy may increase turnout buying and abstention buying. Evidence from various countries is consistent with our predictions and suggests the need for empirical studies to pay closer attention to the ways in which machines combine clientelist strategies. Adapted from the source document.