Tinker Visiting Professors' Courses

How Dictatorships Shaped Democracies in Latin America

LACS 22600/32600
Alejandro Bonvecchi
M 3:00 – 5:50 PM

The aim of this course is to provide analytical tools to understand how dictatorships shaped the structure of the state and the main public policies inherited by successor democratic regimes. The study of authoritarian legacies has typically been focused on the outcomes of autocracies and the restrictions they imposed on democratic governments. But while describing these outcomes and their consequences is certainly important, it is also insufficient to explain their origin and their resilience. Building on the recent literature on authoritarian politics, and focusing on the cases of the military dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil and Chile, this course explores how the institutions and dynamics of autocracies built their legacies by generating and destroying state capacities, consolidating and abandoning public policies. Guided by the works of Michael Albertus, Barbara Geddes, Erica Frantz, Anne Meng, Paul Schuler and Milan Svolik, the course will analyze how the sociological nature of autocratic coalitions and the balance of power amongst their factions informed the institutional design of dictatorships, shaped their state capacities, and determined the course of their policies. It will thus account not only for the legacies they inherited to democracies but also for the cross-country differences in their reach and their resilience.