Peter Kingstone and Deborah J. Yashar
The study of comparative politics has been defined in critical ways by research on Latin America. Latin America’s experiments with problems such as democratization, good governance, social movement politics, or socioeconomic development have generated intriguing and enduring empirical puzzles about core social science questions. In turn, those puzzles have fostered conceptual, theoretical, and methodological innovations that have significantly shaped the larger field of comparative politics. In this sense, Latin Americanists have played a critical role in shaping the field of comparative politics as a whole.
Latin America continues to be a laboratory of developmental and democratic struggles with concomitant theoretical exploration. With the third wave of democracy, the region has largely transitioned away from military rule—marking a nearly region-wide regime change that foreshadowed what would follow in other developing regions. Most of these third wave democracies have endured despite the numerous obstacles in place. Yet, if the region is mostly democratic, democratic politics in the region suffers from a host of deficiencies, including weak institutions, uneven patterns of accountability, weak rule of law, and inequality of access—making it hard to sustain and deepen democratic experiences in the region. Moreover, Latin America’s third wave democracies have struggled to redefine state-society relationships—including constitutional and legal debates about how to incorporate social actors—including labor, women, indigenous peoples, and Afro-Latin Americans. Similarly, Latin America has become a critical battleground between market-oriented visions of economic development and a variety of leftist and/or nationalist state-led visions. These contemporary empirical challenges continue to spawn original and vital work on central questions in comparative politics: about regime change and democratic governance; changing state-society relations; the terms of citizenship; and the balance between states and market. As such, there are fundamental social science issues at play in Latin America and some of the most interesting contemporary comparative politics scholarship is taking place in studies of Latin America.
Given the richness and diversity of scholarship on Latin American politics, it is hard to stay abreast of the developments in the many sub-literatures of the field. Scholars have produced many fine edited volumes that explore a single aspect or dimension of Latin American politics, such as informal institutions, electoral authoritarianism, democratic quality or the resurgence of left wing governments. Yet, there is no single volume that provides a broad survey of the literature and identifies the cutting edge of research across the field. The Routledge Handbook of Latin American Politics addresses that intellectual gap by bringing together a comprehensive collection of essays that define the field and where it is going.
The handbook speaks to three different audiences. First and perhaps foremost, the volume is intended for scholars who are interested in an intellectually rigorous overview of the state of the field and a thoughtful (at times provocative) guide to the direction of future scholarship. Each chapter reviews the existing literature in its topic area, identifies the research and theoretical trends, and offers reflections on the most promising and important puzzles for future research. Second, the volume is an invaluable guide to graduate and advanced undergraduate students seeking a comprehensive history of the field, assistance in identifying key questions for future research, and access to leading scholar’s insights on where the field should be going. Thus, the handbook is a vital tool for students looking to begin their own investigations. Third, the handbook should be of interest to policy makers seeking insight into the core issues defining the field.
Compiling leading scholarship on the core issues facing the field posed a real challenge as there are more important topics than any single volume can include. With such a large, disparate, and theoretically rich area of study, it is impossible to cover every issue. We respectfully accept that some may disagree with our choices of what to include, what to exclude, and how to organize the work. Ultimately, we chose topics that we believed were both critical to the theoretical debates in Latin America and comparative politics and/or germane to an understanding of the region of Latin America (and how it fits into the world and/or social science debates). The volume is thus divided into six sections: democratic governance; economic development; social actors and collective action; international relations; methodological debates; and critical reflections by leading senior scholars.
Part One examines crucial topics in the contemporary study of democracy. Latin America used to be defined by political instability—with regime swings between authoritarian and democratic regime. However, since 1979, the region has largely transitioned away from military rule and instantiated enduring democracy in most countries of the region. As such, Part I of the volume focuses on a range of issues associated with the origins of democracy and democratic practices. These questions are all the more important in the region given that democratic governance, while enduring, has remained troubled, conflicted, and uncertain in the third wave of democratization. As a consequence, it has been a vital source of theorizing as well. Thirty odd years of this current wave of democracy have demonstrated the difficulty of defining and measuring democratic “quality” and has revealed the importance of examining a variety of dimensions of democratic rule beyond elections.
In Chapter 1, Gerardo Munck argues forcefully that the origins and durability of democracy is far from a settled matter. Disagreements about the rules of democracy remain relevant and regularly flare up into overt conflict. As Munck states it, “the history of democracy continues to unfold.” Part of that history includes the study of institutions. Beginning with Juan Linz’ seminal work, which called into question the suitability of presidentialism for democracy, scholars have been engaged in an extensive inquiry into the causes and effects of institutional design and its relation to democratic rule. In Chapter 2, Mark Jones addresses this large literature, reviewing the cumulative learning about the presidential form of government, the relationship between presidents and legislatures, and their consequences for democratic governance. Kent Eaton’s Chapter 3 explores federalism and decentralization, issues that require us to think about levels of government, where power is lodged, and how it is exercised strategically by different actors. Decentralization has been widely promoted by international agencies as a solution to development and a mechanism of democratic deepening. As a result, it has become a global trend. As Eaton notes, Latin America has been a leading laboratory for innovative and influential experiments in decentralization. As such, he argues that understanding decentralization as a global trend requires a focus on Latin America, and in turn understanding Latin American politics today requires understanding the myriad ways that subnational actors influence politics. In Chapter 4, Kenneth Roberts turns our gaze to political parties and highlights that while some have experienced a crisis of representation, others have endured with a contrasting resilience in the face of economic crisis. This flux and endurance calls out for attention to the changing social bases of parties that have had to confront both the dual transitions of democratization and economic globalization. The challenge of the rule of law is the subject of Chapter 5. Daniel Brinks observes that a kind of dualism has appeared in Latin American democracies. On the one hand, the judiciary has become more active and courts are increasingly contributing to the creation of more accountable regimes. On the other hand, at the same time that the courts are helping to deepen democracy, pervasive public insecurity undermines the rule of law and the legitimacy of law enforcement and the judiciary. Chapter 6 explores the domestic role of the military. David Pion-Berlin observes that the Honduran military’s ouster of President Manuel Zelaya reminds us that while civilians largely govern, the retreat of the military to the barracks is not a given. As polls show widespread dissatisfaction with the performance of democracy, we lack good answers to vital questions, empirically and theoretically, about what motivates the military.
Both Brinks and Pion-Berlin’s chapters raise questions about the gap between the written “rules of the game” and actual behavior. Steve Levitsky further considers the issue of “informal institutions” in Chapter 7. As Levitsky states: “[a]n exclusive focus on formal rules thus risks missing many of the real incentives driving political behavior in Latin America, which can limit our understanding of how politics works.” In his chapter, Levitsky surveys the state of our knowledge of informal institutions and notes that the tendency is to focus on the way they subvert formal rules, yet such rules often support formal goals as well (supportive functions that have been subject to much less scrutiny). Frances Hagopian’s Chapter 8 also goes beyond simple specification of the rules and considers the myriad mechanisms and processes that have strengthened or weakened accountability and representation since the spread of democracy in the region. Hagopian observes that economic development strategies and broad regime tendencies have moved in a common direction, but the paths that citizens and leaders have followed and the outcomes (in terms of accountability and representation) have varied widely. The result is a patchwork pattern of both old and new forms of exclusion as well as both old and new forms of mobilization, organization and representation. Finally, in Chapter 9, Anthony Pereira explores the legacy of military rule and the efforts to address the human rights abuses of the past. In particular, Pereira considers the problem of transitional justice and whether and how a commitment to social justice and human rights is enshrined in society. He notes, however, the disturbing fact that everyday violence in places like Brazil and El Salvador has produced more casualties than dictatorship or civil war ever did, a disturbing reminder of the need to understand better what produces a just society.
Part II turns to the challenges of development, a central concern of comparative inquiry. The field has long debated why some regions and countries are more successful in pursuing industrialization, economic growth, poverty alleviation, and/or equity. Latin America and Latin American scholarship has been central to these debates, as the essays in this volume highlight. Latin American intellectuals and policy makers have sought to close the developmental gap since independence. Long standing concerns with growth, poverty and inequality have been joined with relatively newer discussions of social policy, human capital, and environmental sustainability. The essays in Part II thus address these classic and new questions from a variety of angles.
In Chapter 10, Javier Corrales reviews the controversy over neoliberal economic development policies and the apparent rise of the left in the region. He contends that the issue cannot be understood in binary terms—i.e., as if neoliberal reforms are right or wrong. Corrales argues that neoliberal reforms have demonstrated important benefits, particularly that macro-economic discipline can be good for growth and can be progressive. However, market reforms do not have good answers for a range of development challenges including social justice issues leftist critics often emphasize. As a result, neoliberal hegemony has weakened as the left has re-emerged. But, as Corrales states, “As long as there exist advocates for state involvement, there will be neoliberals ready to assert the dangers of statist excesses.” Nancy Birdsall, Nora Lustig, and Darryl McLeod tackle one of the central issues of contention in debates about development: poverty and inequality. Chapter 11 relies on recent data to show that both inequality and poverty are in decline in most of the region. For most of Latin America’s history, high levels of both contributed to low growth rates and a host of perverse social and political outcomes. The expansion of basic education, introduction of innovative social policies, and declining relative returns to skilled labor have all contributed to an ongoing and potentially sustainable trend of improvement. The authors note that the improvement has been strongest in the moderate left regimes in the region, i.e., those that have moderated neoliberalism, but not abandoned its emphasis on macro-economic restraint. An additional concern with neoliberalism has been the danger of unfettered markets for the environment. In Chapter 12, Eduardo Silva examines the difficult problem of sustainable development. As Silva notes: in “Latin America, environmental politics inescapably involve conflicts over land, democracy, and civil rights.” How these problems are understood depends on distinct approaches to the environment. Finally, Chapter 13 reviews the dramatic shifts in social policy in the region and their impact on equitable development. James McGuire’s examination reveals the wide array of social and political forces that led to the emergence of innovative and surprisingly effective policies over time. One important conclusion McGuire reaches is that democracy was critical for the expansion of social policy, although not in unidirectional or automatic ways. The weakness of the state is a central element in the analysis of privatization and regulation by Luigi Manzetti and Carlos Rufin. In Chapter 14, the authors warn that the technical nature of the subject has led to little scrutiny by political science. Yet, the wave of privatizations of public utilities in the 1990s represented an important turning point in the region’s development with important consequences for public welfare. Privatization and regulation has produced a surprising record. On the one hand, the weakness of the state in much of the region has led to serious failings such as regulatory capture, clientelism, and corruption. On the other hand, it has also created new opportunities for citizens to hold government accountable and make demands as citizens and consumers. As the authors note, the “implications for democratic governance in Latin America remain to be explored by scholars.”
Part III turns to focus on the social actors that have defined Latin American politics. Studies of class and labor politics, in particular, were crucial to early experiments in democracy and state-society relations, such as in studies of corporatism. More recently, the focus on labor has tended to recede. Nonetheless, there has been a sustained interest in social movements and civil society—even though the cleavages, forms of organization, and targets of policy have changed over time and across the region. In particular, there has been a rising scholarship about ethnic, racial, and gender politics, including an expanding attention to indigenous peoples, Afro-Latin Americans, and women—all of whom have mobilized in significant ways around demands for greater inclusion and social justice.
In Chapter 15, Kathryn Hochstetler considers the long and vivid history of social movements in the region. The dramatic and transformative power of social movements has generated a considerable literature on the causes and consequences of social mobilization. The issue has become more salient in the neoliberal age as debates over the impact of market reforms have raised questions about the conditions under which social mobilization occurs and when it is effective. As Hochstetler notes, the empirical record of mobilization across Latin America and its relation with democracy and market reforms varies widely. The question of state-society relations is the subject as well of Chapter 16. Phillip Oxhorn considers the character of political participation and the tension between alternative conceptions of citizenship: “a normative vision of democracy emphasizing its unique capacity to resolve conflict nonviolently with more instrumentalist perspectives on democracy that focus on the material quality of life and the conflicts of interests this inevitably entails given the region’s high level of socio-economic inequality.” Many observers connect claims about the weakness of social movements and/or civil society with the weakness of labor. In Chapter 17, Maria Cook acknowledges the decline of unions, yet notes that both work and workers remain critical to understanding the politics of the region. Cook’s review points to significant cross-regional variation in the power of workers and unions, the under-studied role of the informal sector, as well as gaps in our understanding of how employees and employers interact and the extent to which this arena has democratized. Cook’s discussion calls attention to a tendency to focus on organized and elite actors. However, in Chapter 18, Sebastian Karcher and Ben Ross Schneider argue that research on business has come in waves, but “despite these waves, research on business politics is first characterized by how little there is.” The authors’ review highlights the need to understand Latin America’s distinctive business profile as well as the need to engage in cross-regional work to better understand business preferences and power.
Labor, business, and social movements are long-standing subjects of interest. In Chapter 19, José Antonio Lucero turns his attention to a newly mobilized actor in the region. Citing Ecuadorian Kichwa leader Luis Macas, Lucero observes that “the 1980s was not a “lost decade” for Indigenous people in Latin America but a “década ganada,” a decade in which Indigenous people won.” The new mobilization challenged the established political, economic, and social order. But, as of the 2000s, indigenous mobilization has led to a more varied mix of gains and setbacks. Like Lucero, Ollie Johnson considers people with a long history of exclusion in the region that is only recently changing. Chapter 20 considers the issue of race and the politics of Afro-Latin Americans. Johnson explores the intersection of race, marginalization and discrimination and the important role of Afro-Latin Americans as citizens, activists, and politicians. In order to better understand the centrality of race, especially in certain key countries in the region, Johnson navigates the contested conceptions of race and racism in a region that has tended to hide behind powerful myths of racial harmony and democracy. Finally, in Chapter 21, Lisa Baldez considers the politics of gender. As with both indigenous and Afro-Latin Americans, women have made notable strides in the region. Women have been elected to office, including a number of presidencies, and have successfully advanced an array of women’s rights. As Baldez states, “[t]hese successes challenge assumptions about the prevalence of traditional gender stereotypes that portray Latin American women as submissive, subordinated by men and relegated to the private sphere.” Yet, at the same time, women continue to face important obstacles and gender discrimination persists.
Part IV turns to the international arena. The “war on terror” as well as actual wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya, the global financial crisis, and the rapid rise of China have tended to obscure the importance of Latin America on the international stage. Yet, crucial issues remain, both in U.S.-Latin American relations and inter-American relations. Furthermore, the link between the United States and Latin America manifests in distinct areas including the role of international financial institutions, the presence of large foreign multinationals in key areas of resource extraction and utilities, and through illicit trade.
In Chapter 22, Peter Smith points out that relationships between the United States and Latin America receive less attention than they merit, primarily because of the absence of major wars or crises. Yet, Latin America is part of a global process of changing power relations and spreading democratization. Some Latin American countries, such as Brazil and Mexico, are playing leading roles in the global transformation and the United States’ place in the world is very much affected by its connection to the region. Thus, examining the connection between the United States and Latin America is part and parcel of understanding a changing world. David Mares turns his attention to intra-regional relations. Chapter 23 explores the long history of both cooperation and competition in the region. Latin America has a rich and varied history of both. Unfortunately, like inter-American relations, scholars have paid less attention than the issues warrant. As with inter-American relations, however, the complex pattern across space and over time provides scholars with a rich empirical tableau for conceptual and theoretical innovation. By contrast, international political economy of the region has received considerably more attention. In Chapter 24, Grigore Pop-Eleches continues the argument for putting Latin America in a broader global context by focusing on the links to the global economy. The economic history of Latin America is a continuing shifting between good periods based on capital inflows and commodity booms and painful downturns marked by capital flight and acrimonious relations with international creditors and financial institutions. Finally, Chapter 25 tackles another under-studied topic—drugs and other illicit trade in the region. Peter Andreas and Angelica Duran Martinez point out that the topic suffers from a lack of adequate data and insufficient comparative analysis. As with privatization and regulation, however, the lack of political science attention “is unfortunate, given that some of the field’s central preoccupations, ranging from democracy to development to violence, are intimately intertwined with illicit trade and the domestic and international politics of policing such trade. Nowhere is this more evident than in the Americas.” Andreas and Duran Martinez’ review points to the intimate connections between illicit trade and democracy as well as violence and neoliberal economic reforms.
A range of methodological discussions feature in Part V of the volume. Latin American politics has been a key context for debates and disagreements about the benefits and costs of different methodological approaches. This section offers a review of the key strengths of diverse modes of inquiry.
In Chapter 26, Aníbal Pérez-Liñán and Néstor Castañeda-Angarita review the burgeoning literature on political institutions. As they note, the transition to democracy brought increased attention to “the rules of the game” with the accompanying desire to understand how they shaped preferences for key actors in ways that were conducive (or not) to democracy. Institutionalism “yielded promising answers and has become one of the dominant perspectives for the study of Latin American politics.” Yet, Pérez-Liñán and Castañeda-Angarita warn that specifying the institutions is not sufficient and lay out an agenda for understanding “when (and not just how) particular rules become relevant. Perhaps the most important lesson of the institutional approach is that institutions matter most when they matter the least—that is, when they are potentially crucial and yet not respected.” In Chapter 27, Sujatha Fernandes considers the cultural turn and postmodern approaches in Latin American politics. Postmodern and cultural theorists challenge the broad explanatory frameworks of modernism and positivism—highlighting not only multiple realities but also alternative ways of assessing the meaning and experiences of social actors. Scholars in these traditions contend that the exercise of power needs to be understood in a decentered fashion that privileges culture and cultural identity. This insight has informed studies of political organizing, governance, subject formation, among other topics. Within cultural studies and postmodernist studies of Latin America, however, a lively debate continues, including the ways in which class and culture interact. By contrast, in Chapter 28, Barbara Geddes examines the value of a positivistic approach in her exploration of rational choice in the study of Latin American politics. As she notes, those who study values may find it less useful, but “[r]ational choice has become a part of the standard toolkit for many Latin Americanists, as it is for many other social scientists, because it helps us to understand some aspects of the political world.” Among other areas of importance, the logic of collective action is routinely brought into accounts of mass behavior and rational choice is particularly valuable in understanding both elite decision-making as well as the individual behavior operating in political machines and clientelist networks. Rational choice’s focus on individuals’ cost-benefit calculus has shaped much contemporary scholarship on the workings of democracy. She observes that this is so even among those who do not consciously identify with it. In Chapter 29, Jennifer Cyr and James Mahoney review the enduring contributions of historical-structural approaches and their concern with mid-level theorizing and explaining specific cases. Like rational choice, historical-structural approaches are widespread in the field, both explicitly and implicitly. Cyr and Mahoney explore the contributions of the approach to a host of issues and contemporary problems showing its significant contributions to knowledge forty years after the publication of classics such as Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto’s Dependency and Development in Latin America. Cyr and Mahoney argue that historical structural approaches have been dynamic—evolving over time as scholars have increasingly introduced a greater attention to agency and incorporated mixed-methods. As a result, it “continues to offer a powerful basis for addressing both longstanding questions and the most pressing contemporary issues.” In contrast to the long tradition of historical-structural approaches in the field, Chapter 30 turns to the emergence of new methods of inquiry in recent years. Thad Dunning notes that confounding poses a vexing problem in the social sciences that neither qualitative nor conventional quantitative methods adequately solve. As a result, a sharp increase in the use of natural and field experiments has occurred, with Latin America producing some of the most interesting exemplars. Dunning provides both a review of some of the powerful contributions of experiments as well as a discussion of the kinds of questions they can answer and the limits/challenges to doing so. The various types of experiments have yielded powerful insights on a range of issues such as the impact of social policy and the effects of electoral institutions. As Dunning argues, combining strong research design with contextual knowledge holds out great promise for bolstering causal inference and informing a host of broad debates in the field. Finally, Chapter 31 considers the state of public opinion research in Latin America. Elizabeth Zeckmeister and Mitchell Seligson point out that public opinion research began with The Civic Culture, but then largely disappeared from the field. In recent years, renewed interest, improved data and methods, and vital questions related to the link between citizens and state/regime have led to a boom in public opinion research. Scholars are asking crucial questions about attitudes towards issues like hyperpresidentialism, partisan attachments, and satisfaction with regime performance, but that the surface has barely been scratched in our efforts to understand how citizens’ views affect contemporary democracies.
Finally, Part VI offers a unique opportunity to learn what some of the leading senior scholars in the field identify as the critical issues in the field—past and present. We gave these scholars an open slate, asking them to write about where they see the field going and what they would advocate. In this section, each author offers their unique view of central contributions or puzzles facing the field—engaging with some of the core theoretical issues identified in earlier sections of the volume.
In Chapter 32, Barry Ames, Miguel Carreras, and Cassilde Schwartz observe that the study of Latin American politics has been very productive, benefiting in particular from the way democracy has facilitated research and the large increase in sophisticated Latin American researchers. Nevertheless, important gaps remain. In particular, the authors point to bureaucracy and business lobbying as two areas critical to understanding contemporary politics and political economy, but about which we have little knowledge and on which there is little active scholarship. Furthermore, they note that we have focused extensively on the workings of institutions, but not on their formation or transformation. They conclude by advocating analytic narratives as a promising tool for understanding the process of institutional change. Jorge Domínguez also argues that political science research on and from Latin America has been very productive. In Chapter 33, he focuses his attention on several problems (including the political economy of globalization, political regime transitions, presidentialist institutions, and voting behavior) that have led to considerable theoretical innovation that “contributed insights of value not just to those focused on Latin America but also more generally to scholars in comparative politics.” As such, he calls our attention to the synergy and two-way flows between Latin America as a field of inquiry and comparative politics. In Chapter 34, Robert Kaufman points out that research on Latin America has responded to a history of tumultuous events and profound social problems. One consequence is that our efforts aim at a moving target and sometimes overreach or are premature in our efforts to explain. Nevertheless, Kaufman argues that earlier research, despite the prevalence of descriptive monographs, built a lasting foundation of knowledge that informs contemporary debates and is the base for more sophisticated research designs. In his chapter, Kaufman makes the case that the endurance of democratic regimes and the deepening of markets make conceptual and methodological tools developed for analyzing the United States appropriate. But, a fuller understanding of politics continues to benefit from its integration with rich, contextual approaches that “may require us to “think smaller and deeper”—to focus on critical cases, small-N comparisons, or intensive examinations and comparisons of sub-national regions.” Adam Przeworski’s Chapter 35 considers the problem of understanding the dynamics of political regimes. In his discussion, he notes that Latin American cases, contemporary and historically, challenge conceptions of democracy. Since the independence of the region, Latin America has featured a host of regimes that defy simple classification as either democracy or dictatorship. They have featured regimes in which at least some portion of the citizenry could vote and the opposition was permitted to compete, but not win. It also includes a host of regimes in which no leader was able to remain in office, regardless of selection process—in effect regimes characterized by turmoil. For Przeworski, this variation on two dimensions—suffrage and competition—calls into question many stereotyped or conventional notions of democracy and democratic quality, both within the region and in comparative perspective. Finally, Ruth Berins Collier and Christopher Chambers-Ju close the volume with a reflection on popular representation in Latin America. The authors note the pervasiveness of the problem of popular representation and that the struggle of the lower classes for inclusion has gone on for over a century. The contemporary period of democratization and market reform has raised the issues anew across a host of issues. But, for Collier and Chambers-Ju, “these studies have generally remained ahistorical and fragmented, usefully focusing on discrete components or aspects of structures of popular representation and frequently limited to a restricted set of comparisons.” In this concluding chapter, the authors lay out an agenda for analyzing popular sector representation at a macro level over time and across cases.
In a volume as comprehensive as this one, it is difficult to point to a single unifying lesson or theme. Indeed, the prior discussion highlights how rich and diverse the individual essays are. As such, we strongly encourage readers to engage with these readings and wrestle with the agenda-setting suggestions made at the end of each chapter. At the risk of overgeneralizing, however, we conclude this preface by highlighting three themes that strongly resonate throughout the volume.
First, while this volume focuses on Latin America, the theoretical issues raised in the following chapters strike at the core of comparative politics, a point emphasized especially in the chapter by Jorge Domínguez. Theorizing about the third wave of democratization has many of its strongest roots in studies of and about the region—including discussions of regime change, institutional design, informal institutions, emerging party systems, and the like. Moreover, Latin American has provided fertile ground for theorizing about economic growth and redistribution, policy reforms, and international financial institutions. Social movement and civil society theorizing has, moreover, learned a great deal from studies of labor, ethnicity, gender, and race. In this regard, Latin American politics and comparative politics have long been engaged in a healthy cross-fertilization—with the former informing debates in the latter; and with theories and techniques in the latter reinvigorating debates in the former. Reading this volume’s chapters together highlights how central Latin America has been to theory building in the discipline as a whole. In this regard, we are thankful to the contributing authors for identifying areas for future research—areas that we think will continue to invigorate the field of Latin American politics but which will certainly reverberate in studies of comparative politics as a whole.
The key to this research, as all authors highlight, is attention to assessing the comparative scope of the questions at hand. Lisa Baldez, for example, argues for greater comparative research: “My vision for future work in this field is to make it more comparative and more gendered. Political scientists who conduct research on Latin America are also comparativists, and most of us are by now familiar with debates about the comparative method (for example, Brady and Collier 2010; King, Keohane, and Verba 1994).” Pop-Eleches, moreover, argues: “This does not obviously mean that Latin America cannot be productively be analyzed on its own terms or that it invariably needs to be imbedded in a global sample of countries but that our understanding of the region’s insertion into the world economy can benefit from more explicit comparisons to the experiences of other region.” As other authors highlight, the challenge is not simply to expand the cases and regional scope of our research, but it is also to pay attention to variation (including keeping track of, and paying attention to, themes that wax and wane in political salience; or that vary across cases). In this light, Hochstetler cautions against overprivileging studies of “positive” cases in the study of social movements and contentious politics.
Second, a related concern that emerges in the volume is the need to sustain a focus on core political issues, even when intellectual winds seem to shift. Theoretical debates on core issues are rarely resolved quickly. Thus, we should remain focused on these issues, even when their political salience seems to decline over time—raising the critical question of why change occurs. Otherwise stated, original research means that we need to pursue research that not only responds to the intellectual market (where the spotlight is shining at this moment) but also brings attention to issues where the spotlight might be less bright. This is not just to give a comprehensive picture of politics but, more importantly, to gain insight into change and variation. Yet, a cursory overview of the field highlights that intellectual foci has been more episodic—dependency, bureaucratic authoritarianism and corporatism in the 1970s; democratization and neoliberal reforms in the 1980s and 1990s; institutions and globalization in the 2000s; etc. These were all powerful and innovative debates and yet their salience has waxed and waned in ways that can hinder the accumulation of knowledge and the pushing of intellectual boundaries. As such, future scholarship should resist the bandwagon temptation to pursue only the most “topical” subjects of the day—a dynamic that can short circuit debates that remain unresolved or overshadow dynamics that remain salient. As both Munck and Przeworski highlight in their chapters, the study of democratization and regime change is not closed; there are new ways to pursue these questions that can shed light on unresolved debates about how we identify regimes, why and how regime change occurs, as well as why and how regimes function. So too, if attention to democratization has declined, attention to labor has dwindled, although both Maria Cook and Ruth Collier and Chris Chambers-Ju raise concerns about abandoning it since the dynamic field of work and labor continues to pose challenging research questions that merit the attention of political scientists.” Indeed, Roberts highlights how our understanding of labor is critical to understanding the contemporary shape and trajectory of political parties in the region. Otherwise stated, labor movements might have declined, but class analytics are still essential to our understanding of politics the region. In a similar vein, Smith, Mares, and Andreas and Duran Martinez call on us to refocus attention on international relations of America, where there has been an apparent decline in focus. Yet, the issues facing Latin American relations are very much part of the process of global change and the lack of attention undermines empirical understanding and theoretical elaboration of critical global trends. If studies of international relations have lost momentum in recent years, scholarship on ethnicity and race has gained it. After many years of intellectual oversight, race and ethnicity has become an important field of political science inquiry in Latin America, with significant theoretical and political implications. Indeed, Lucero and Johnson highlight how much we have learned but also how much more there is to do. In light of these advances, both scholars encourage ongoing research on these critical and pressing issues.
Third, the various chapters make clear the value of methodological pluralism. We would go so far as to say that methodological pluralism is an imperative for the field as a whole. Different ways of seeing and different ways of knowing yield distinct and important insights about politics and political processes. No method or approach can claim to reveal the fullness of the political world. The generation of diverse insights not only enriches our analytical understanding of the world around us; but it also keeps us intellectually “honest”—forcing us to consider and evaluate the power of alternative insights and arguments—arguments that can have quite powerful and consequential policy consequences. From this perspective, no one method or approach should a priori dominate our intellectual horizon. Otherwise, we are likely to fall victim to the narrowness generated by the proverbial blind men who seek to understand one part of the elephant—or to recreate a version of Kurosawa’s Rashomon. To the contrary, we need open, rigorous, and ongoing debate rather than sacred cows. As Geddes notes, while the field at one point hotly debated the salience of rational choice approaches, it is now seen as part of our intellectual toolkit, with many scholars combining insights from this approach, but not necessarily limited by it. As she states: “Currently, few studies ignore the insights provided by rational choice completely, and fewer still limit themselves to ideas from rational choice alone.” Yet she also concludes that no study should presume that rational choice is necessarily the right tool to deploy in all situations. This kind of methodological pluralism is key to ongoing innovation and rigorous debate in the field.
Accordingly, a wide array of methods and approaches are self-consciously included in this volume: qualitative approaches (comparative historical, analytic narratives, interviews, ethnography, among others); quantitative analysis; original surveys; and experiments. Similarly, distinct theoretical approaches (including Marxist, Weberian, rational choice, and/or interpretivist, to name but a few) are vital to ongoing debate. These contributions however are not only interesting in their juxtaposition, but more strikingly where scholars seek to attack problems from multiple perspectives. Many authors conclude by calling on future scholarship to combine methods in ongoing comparative research. This is because the world improves through openness to employing and combining alternative ways of seeing, knowing, and evaluating—a point forcefully made by many authors, including Ames, Carreras and Schwartz; Dunning; Kaufman; Cyr and Mahoney; among others. Some of the authors in the handbook state the need for this diversity of approaches—with a special call for sustained empirical research in the field; they remind us that more sophisticated methods provide the best insight where they are combined with a deep and original knowledge of the cases. Thus, Barry Ames, Miguel Carreras, and Cassilde Schwartz make the case that insight must rest on “soaking and poking” or risk “not so much incorrect findings as simply limited findings.” They express concern that narrow empiricist or excessively economic thinking have led to less research based on time and labor intensive field work—even though deep “soaking and poking” actually constituted the basis for much more rigorous quantitative work on the U.S. Congress that many young scholars emulate today. Ames et al. exemplify this call for intellectual pluralism as they make a strong argument for the explanatory power of analytic narratives built on deep knowledge of the case. Similarly, Robert Kaufman welcomes the introduction of sophisticated methods and the treatment of Latin American politics through “normal science” approaches. But, he goes on to argue that these methods “should be accompanied by a sustained skepticism about whether they can account fully for the continuities and changes we can see in Latin America’s complex political landscape.” Thad Dunning’s chapter reviews the impressive explanatory advantages of experiments and argues that here again sophisticated methods depend on rich, textured knowledge of cases. Finally, Pop-Eleches’s own research fruitfully highlights how qualitative, quantitative, and formal methods can work together to evaluate different aspects of international political economy, among other issues.
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This handbook can be read in many ways—telescopically or panoramically. For those interested in a single theme, they can readily read individual chapters according to interest; chapters can easily be read as stand-alone essays and provide a comprehensive analysis of individual issue areas. That said, we hope that readers will take advantage of the thematic organization of the volume and the conversations that take place across them. For this volume is more than a compendium of individual essays. It provides a rich opportunity to reflect on focused debates within issue areas as well as to reflect on conversations that might readily take place across them. In this sense, this volume hopes to enhance our Hirschmanian understanding of the theoretical ground on which we all stand as well as to stimulate cutting-edge research that trespasses across thematic boundaries (taking insight from theoretical debates, methodological innovations, and agenda-setting comments made across the chapters). Lastly, we thank all our contributors for their incredible insight and commitment to this project. These conversations would not have been possible without the remarkable work of our colleagues, excellent research assistance of Steven Williamson, and the intellectual vision and support of our editor, Michael Kerns.