Author: Charles Dennison Kenney
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410
Get Book Here
Book Description
This text explores why and how democracy broke down in Peru in 1992. The author's argument is that institutional factors - especially the absence of a legislative majority - were crucial to the collapse of democracy in Peru during and before this period and throughout Latin America since the 1960s.
Author: Scott Mainwaring
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107175526
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 525
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book generates a wealth of new empirical information about Latin American party systems and contributes richly to major theoretical debates about party systems and democracy.
Author: Julio Carrión
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 9780271027470
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380
Get Book Here
Book Description
Offers a comprehensive assessment of President Alberto Fujimori's regime in the context of Latin America's struggle to consolidate democracy after years of authoritarian rule. This book also helps illuminate the persistent obstacles that Latin American countries face in establishing democracy.
Author: Scott Mainwaring
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107433630
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 371
Get Book Here
Book Description
This book presents a new theory for why political regimes emerge, and why they subsequently survive or break down. It then analyzes the emergence, survival and fall of democracies and dictatorships in Latin America since 1900. Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán argue for a theoretical approach situated between long-term structural and cultural explanations and short-term explanations that look at the decisions of specific leaders. They focus on the political preferences of powerful actors - the degree to which they embrace democracy as an intrinsically desirable end and their policy radicalism - to explain regime outcomes. They also demonstrate that transnational forces and influences are crucial to understand regional waves of democratization. Based on extensive research into the political histories of all twenty Latin American countries, this book offers the first extended analysis of regime emergence, survival and failure for all of Latin America over a long period of time.
Author: Catherine M. Conaghan
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822973154
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 326
Get Book Here
Book Description
Alberto Fujimori ascended to the presidency of Peru in 1990, boldly promising to remake the country. Ten years later, he hastily sent his resignation from exile in Japan, leaving behind a trail of lies, deceit, and corruption. While piecing together the shards of Fujimori's presidency, prosecutors uncovered a vast criminal conspiracy fueled by political ambition and personal greed. The Fujimori regime managed to maintain a facade of democracy while systematically eviscerating democratic institutions and the rule of law through legal subterfuge, intimidation, and outright bribery. The architect of this strategy was Fujimori's notorious intelligence advisor, Vladimiro Montesinos. With great skill, Fujimori and Montesinos created the appearance of a democratic public sphere but ensured it would work only to suit their personal motives. The press was allowed to operate, but information exchange was under strict control. The more government officials tampered with the free flow of ideas, the more they inadvertently exposed the ills they were trying to cover up. And that proved to be their downfall.Merging penetrating analysis and a journalist's flair for narrative, Catherine Conaghan reveals the thin line between democracy and dictatorship, and shows how public institutions can both empower dictators and bring them down.
Author: Gretchen Helmke
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316889327
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307
Get Book Here
Book Description
Why does institutional instability pervade the developing world? Examining contemporary Latin America, Institutions on the Edge develops and tests a novel argument to explain why institutional crises emerge, spread, and repeat in some countries, but not in others. The book draws on formal bargaining theories developed in the conflict literature to offer the first unified micro-level account of inter-branch crises. In so doing, Helmke shows that concentrating power in the executive branch not only fuels presidential crises under divided government, but also triggers broader constitutional crises that cascade on to the legislature and the judiciary. Along the way, Helmke highlights the importance of public opinion and mass protests, and elucidates the conditions under which divided government matters for institutional instability.
Author: Gangsheng Bao
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1000586189
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 407
Get Book Here
Book Description
Democratic breakdown as a political and historic event can impact the fate of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people, by changing the political complexion of a country. This book attempts to systematically explain why democracies collapse. The author's main theoretical argument is based on the examination of two factors. One is political cleavages among voters. These can cause serious political conflicts and may lead to fierce political confrontation and major upheaval at the society level. The other revolves around the types of political and institutional arrangements under democratic regimes. Centrifugal democratic regimes are likely to weaken government capacity or state capacity, rendering governments incapable of effectively resolving political conflicts and, when these two factors come together, political conflicts are less likely to be controlled effectively. These situations can evolve into serious political crises and eventually lead to the collapse of democratic regimes. The empirical research of this book is based on a comparative historical analysis of Germany, Nigeria, Chile, and India. Examining democratic collapses from both theoretical and empirical perspectives, this book will be of interest to those engaged in the study of democracy, Political Science, Comparative Politics, and Political Theory.
Author: Mario Vargas Llosa
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374601240
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 242
Get Book Here
Book Description
The true story of Guatemala’s political turmoil of the 1950s as only a master of fiction can tell it Guatemala, 1954. The military coup perpetrated by Carlos Castillo Armas and supported by the CIA topples the government of Jacobo Árbenz. Behind this violent act is a lie passed off as truth, which forever changes the development of Latin America: the accusation by the Eisenhower administration that Árbenz encouraged the spread of Soviet Communism in the Americas. Harsh Times is a story of international conspiracies and conflicting interests in the time of the Cold War, the echoes of which are still felt today. In this thrilling novel, Mario Vargas Llosa fuses reality with two fictions: that of the narrator, who freely re-creates characters and situations, and the one designed by those who would control the politics and the economy of a continent by manipulating its history. Harsh Times is a gripping, revealing novel that directly confronts recent history. No one is better suited to tell this riveting story than Vargas Llosa, and there is no form better for it than his deeply textured fiction. Not since The Feast of the Goat, his classic novel of the downfall of Trujillo’s regime in the Dominican Republic, has Vargas Llosa combined politics, characters, and suspense so unforgettably.
Author: Diana Kapiszewski
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110890159X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 587
Get Book Here
Book Description
Latin American states took dramatic steps toward greater inclusion during the late twentieth and early twenty-first Centuries. Bringing together an accomplished group of scholars, this volume examines this shift by introducing three dimensions of inclusion: official recognition of historically excluded groups, access to policymaking, and resource redistribution. Tracing the movement along these dimensions since the 1990s, the editors argue that the endurance of democratic politics, combined with longstanding social inequalities, create the impetus for inclusionary reforms. Diverse chapters explore how factors such as the role of partisanship and electoral clientelism, constitutional design, state capacity, social protest, populism, commodity rents, international diffusion, and historical legacies encouraged or inhibited inclusionary reform during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Featuring original empirical evidence and a strong theoretical framework, the book considers cross-national variation, delves into the surprising paradoxes of inclusion, and identifies the obstacles hindering further fundamental change.
Author: Philip Oxhorn
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271056614
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
Get Book Here
Book Description
“South America is not the poorest continent in the world, but it may very well be the most unjust.” This statement by Ricardo Lagos, then president of Chile, at the Summit of the Americas in January 2004 captures nicely the dilemma that faces Latin American countries in the wake of the transition to democracy that swept across the continent in the last two decades of the twentieth century. While political rights are now available to citizens at unprecedented levels, social and economic rights lag far behind, and the fledgling democracies struggle with long legacies of poverty, inequality, and corruption. Key to understanding what is happening in Latin America today is the relationship between the state and civil society. In this ambitious book, Philip Oxhorn sets forth a theory of civil society adequate for explaining current developments in a way that such controversial neoconservative theories as Francis Fukuyama’s liberal triumphalism or Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” cannot. Inspired by the rich political sociology of an earlier era and the classic work of T. H. Marshall on citizenship, Oxhorn studies the process by which social groups are incorporated, or not, into national socioeconomic and political development through an approach that focuses on the “social construction of citizenship.”
