Suchergebnisse

I extensively agree with Lieberman's main argument and especially with his recommendations to graduate students and journal editors, which come at a critical time for our discipline's development and future relevance. However, I depart from Lieberman on two issues. First, I argue that the research cycle is circular, and not teleological as Lieberman implies. For instance, randomized control trial (RCT) studies could be the start (and not the end) of a research cycle that leads to more descriptive and qualitative analysis in order to improve our understanding of causality. Second, I believe that the size of effects in RCT studies does matter, among other reasons because small effects might be symptoms of defective conceptualization of the main research problem.

The essay by Murillo, Shrank, and Luna constitutes a much-needed and welcome wake-up call for those of us who study Latin America—and for political scientists more generally. The authors make a plea for "a rigorous, comparative, and empirically grounded" study of Latin American political economy. I fully agree with their diagnosis of this field and their recommendations. I also praise the authors for defining political economy broadly—rather than narrowly, through a focus on research methods. They understand political economy to encompass all the economic, social, and political factors that are either contextual conditions or consequences of major macroeconomic transformations. Thus the authors lay out an important research agenda for the study of Latin American political economy that includes not only issues of economic development and inequality, but also patterns of democratic politics, state capacities, the rule of law, identity politics, and international linkages, among others. For the authors, the major political and economic transformations that the region has undergone since the start of the twentyfirst century—in its postneoliberal era—cry out for a contextualized research agenda and, I would add, open a host of opportunities for theoretical and conceptual innovation.

While much has been written about democracy and democratization, far less attention has been paid to the institutional organization of authoritarian regimes. Scholars have focused on the causes, economic policies, societal support, intra-elite conflicts, or human-rights violations of authoritarian regimes. More recently, political scientists have also studied the role of elections and legislatures on the survival of authoritarian regimes. However, the very different ways in which authoritarian regimes, and military regimes in particular, organize the government, occupy the state apparatus, and modify the country's political institutions have largely gone under-theorized. This essay contributes to fill in this void by analyzing how the last military regimes of Argentina (1976-1983) and Brazil (1964-1985) organized power within the state and the legacies of such organization on the institutions of federalism. The essay argues that variation in the organization of the state under the military regimes accounts for the divergent origins of post-developmental decentralization, which in turn explains the contrasting evolution of intergovernmental relations in each country. The article contributes to the recent literature on electoral authoritarian regimes by showing that elections and legislatures matter not only to regime survival but also to policy outcomes. Adapted from the source document.