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Studying Latin American Politics: Methods or Fads?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Michael J. Francis
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Extract

Political scientists refer to the comparison of various governments as being the field of comparative politics. Within that category, those that deal with less-developed countries are said to be specialists in political development, a term that has long been controversial due to its value implications. But within this political development category, there is a strong tendency for scholars to either specialize in a specific country and/or a specific set of countries. The sets are generally geographic, so among political scientists one can be a Latin Americanist, an Africanist, and so forth.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 42 , Issue 1 , January 1980 , pp. 35 - 55
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1980

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References

* This discussion directly results from my period as a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan on a Consortium for World Order Studies fellowship. Several individuals read and gave me helpful criticism on an earlier version of the paper. In particular I would mention Peter G. Snow of the University of Iowa, Yale Ferguson of Rutgers, Hernan Vera of the University of Florida, Margaret Jenks of Lafayette College, and the following from the University of Notre Dame: Peter R. Moody, Ken Jameson, William Phelan and Robert Fatton, Jr. Also the Development Workshop was helpful to my revision.

1 An excellent discussion of the topic is Huntington, Samuel P. and Domínguez, Jorge I., “Political Development” in Handbook of Political Science: Macropolitical Theory, ed. Greenstein, Fred I. and Polsby, Nelson W., vol. 3 (Reading, Mass., 1975)Google Scholar.

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9 The paper was initially delivered at the 1971 meeting of the American Political Science Association. I attended that particular session and found the paper fascinatingly perverse, yet Wiarda's argument received no particular notice at the meeting — although most papers at these gatherings are greeted with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. It should be noted that there were other writers outside political science making an argument similar to Wiarda's at about the same time. E.g., Pike, Fredrick, Spanish America 1900–1970: Tradition and Social Innovation (New York, 1973)Google Scholar; Dealy, Glen, “The Tradition of Monistic Democracy in Latin America,” Journal of the History of Ideas (10–12, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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37 Horowitz, Irving and Trimberger, Ellen, “State Power and Military Nationalism in Latin America,” Comparative Politics, 8 (1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Vera-Godoy, Hernan and Francis, Michael, “A Totalitarianism in Latin America: Chile's New Military Messiahs,” Third World Review, 3 (1977)Google Scholar.

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51 Ibid., p. 899.

52 A good critique is Smith, Tony, “The Underdevelopment of Development Literature: The Case of Dependency Theory,” World Politics, 31 (1979)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 It should be noted that dependency theory is not just a methodological problem since some authors simply reject the concept. A particularly strong example of that is Packenham, Robert A., “The New Utopianism: PoliticalDevelopment Ideas in the Dependency Literature” (Working papers for Workshop on “The Peruvian Experiment Reconsidered,” The Wilson Center, Washington, D.C., 1978)Google Scholar.

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57 Ibid., p. 21.

58 Ibid., p. 20.

59 Ibid., pp. 7–11, 20.

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64 In his unpublished paper “The New Utopianism: Political Development Ideas in the Dependency Literature” Robert A. Packenham sees dependency and Huntington's interest in what produces a strong governing structure as being the two major currents in the development literature.

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67 A good compilation of writings on the subject is Schmidt, Steffen, Scott, James, Landé, Carl and Guasti, Laura, eds., Friends, Followers, and Factions: A Reader in Political Clientelism (Berkeley, 1977)Google Scholar.

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71 Skidmore, Thomas, Politics in Brazil, 1934–1964 (New York, 1967)Google Scholar; Roett, Riorden, ed., Brazil in the Sixties (Nashville, Tennessee, 1972)Google Scholar.

72 Payne, James, Patterns of Conflict in Colombia (New Haven, 1968)Google Scholar.

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75 O'Donnell, “Corporatism and the Question of the State.”

76 Kaufman, , “The Patron-Client Concept and Macro-Politics: Prospects and Problems,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16 (1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.