Latin America has been one of the critical areas in the study of comparative politics. The region's experiments with installing and deepening democracy and promoting alternative modes of economic development have generated intriguing and enduring empirical puzzles. In turn, Latin America's challenges continue to spawn original and vital work on central questions in comparative politics: about the origins of democracy; about the relationship between state and society; about the nature of citizenship; about the balance between state and market. The richness and diversity of the study of Latin...

What should states in the developing world do and how should they do it? How have states in the developing world addressed the challenges of promoting development, order, and inclusion? States in the developing world are supposed to build economies, control violence, and include the population. How they do so depends on historical origins and context as well as policy decisions. This volume presents a comprehensive theory of state capacity, what it consists of, and how it may be measured. With historical empirical illustrations it suggests that historical origins and political decisions help...

This book examines the origins of democracy and authoritarianism using a novel coalitional approach to examine two questions: What are the conditions under which actors found democracy? What are the conditions conducive to its endurance? The book explores these questions by analyzing the cases of Costa Rica and Guatemala. Costa Rica is the longest-standing and arguably the most stable democracy in Latin America, while Guatemala has among the longest and most brutal records of authoritarian rule in Latin America The author's fresh reinterpretation of these two cases demonstrates...