Democracies and Dictatorships in Latin America (original) (raw)

cott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñan's book, Democracies and dictatorships in Latin America: Emergence, Survival, and Fall, is a hefty work. In the book, the authors analyzed 65 years of political regime changes in the subcontinent, from 1945 to 2010, with some digressions on the preceding period, since the early twentieth century. For this analysis, the authors made use of a broad collection of data on regimes and political actors within these countries during the analyzed period. The actors were analyzed regarding their stances on certain basic operating principles of a democracy and on public policies. As for the countries, the authors observed if at the end of each year the regime in force was a democratic, semi-democratic, or an authoritarian regime, classified upon certain conditions of political competition, both by criteria established by the authors and based on other databases, such as Polity IV. Lastly, the authors also considered the international scenario (especially the regional scenario) to identify its influence on national political processes. Other variables were also taken into account, such as the level of development, income distribution, social stratification etc, in order to test alternative explanations for the fluctuation of different regimes.