Between Theory and History and Beyond Traditional Area Studies: A New Comparative Perspective on Latin America
STOR
Gerardo L. Munck
Comparative Politics, Volume 25, Issue 4 (Jul., 1993), 475-498. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0010-4159%28199307%2925%3A4%3C475%3ABTAHAB%3E2.0.C0%3B2-A
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Review Article
Between Theory and History and Beyond Traditional Area Studies A New Comparative Perspective on Latin America Gerardo L. Munck
Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and the Regime Dynamics in Latin America, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1991. Alain Touraine, Palavra e Sangue: Polftica e Sociedade na America Latina, Sao Paulo, Editora da Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 1989. 1 If it is true that efforts to understand change call for historical perspective, it is also hard to dispute the point that the peculiarities and significance of a historical period become clearest as it draws to a close. Latin America during the last decade is no exception to the rule. As it emerges from the "lost decade" of the 1980s, with a new profile, its students confront a particularly challenging task. From close up, the nature of the changes undergone in the 1980s and the direction of events in the 1990s appear quite unclear. At best, analysts have provided labels, pointing to broad trends. The region is characterized in terms of its mostly democratic governments, larger informal sectors, weakened organized labor, new social movements, neoliberal economic programs, and greater economic integration. However, the task of determining precisely how these trends fit together to inform patterns and variations across countries-a task that should be at the center of the current research agenda-remains for the most part untouched. Fortunately, the historical perspective that is necessary to conduct this analysis is emerging as part of the same process which has made the broad changes of tl}e 1980s so hard to grasp. It is becoming ever so clear that the 1980s were a turning point of epochal significance for Latin America. With the end of oligarchic domination and the concomitant expansion of the political arena, a process which started in some cases in the early decades of the twentieth century, the nature of political participation underwent a dramatic change. The emergence of a "populist" politics and the rise of "national-popular" governments represented a new style of doing politics, widely seen as associated with the "incorporation of labor." Eventually, the political forces that emerged in the postoligarchic period confronted an insurmountable challenge. They became the target most blatantly of "bureaucratic-authoritarian" regimes in South America but were undermined just as inexorably throughout the region. Even in those cases where brutal military rule was avoided, the impact of the economic crisis of the 1980s was probably as, or more, effective in introducing a break in the broad pattern that
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characterized most Latin American politics from 1930 to 1980. As the baseline from which change in the 1980s should be assessed, an understanding of this pattern and variants within it is an obligatory starting point in the task of defining the contours of current politics. In this task of retrieval with an eye toward the present moment, we can tum to the two carefully crafted books, of rare historical depth and relevance to the present, under review. These two books are the most ambitious efforts in recent times to synthesize a voluminous production of country-based studies within an explicit theoretical framework. They both encompass long time periods and numerous cases, in an attempt to understand and explain a peculiarly Latin American populist experience. As such, both books show where the region is coming from and provide an invaluable aid to anyone interested in coming to terms with the tumultuous changes of the last decade. These similarities notwithstanding, some important differences set these two works apart. The two books originate within the very distinct intellectual traditions of American and French academia and use different conceptual models. Methodologically, moreover, the differences are just as great. Counterposing them is thus of great interest, because of the substantive agreements they arrive at by different paths, as well as the rich suggestions toward the formulation of a comprehensive research agenda for the 1990s that can be derived from them. This article assesses both books through an in-depth consideration of their conceptual frameworks, their use of a comparative methodology, and their substantive findings. To help in this assessment, a very sketchy overview of the theories and approaches that have dominated the study of Latin American politics is provided at the outset. This discussion covers modernization theory, the dependency approach, the bureaucratic-authoritarian model, and the theories on transitions from authoritarian rule. Subsequently, the Colliers' and Touraine's works are analyzed. Finally, both books are compared and contrasted, and certain common themes and theoretical insights are highlighted as important building blocks toward a comparative research agenda.
Latin American Based Comparative Studies: An Analytical Overview The study of Latin America has advanced considerably in the last decade. More and more, we can draw upon a series of studies that neither talk in grand generalities about the region nor fit the category of descriptive national case studies. Moreover, the novelty of the style of recent scholarly writing on Latin America stands out when one considers the changing modes of thinking and writing about Latin American realities over the last few decades. It is proper, then, to talk of the gradual maturation of a research program to understand a changing reality, driven by increasingly high standards. Indeed, over time, academic approaches to Latin American realities have shifted quite markedly. If in an ever so schematic way, some of the main lines of thought and their peculiar styles of analysis can be outlined as follows. 2 The first influential post-World War II school centered around modernization theory. Within this approach, broad correlations were drawn between economic and political variables, in a way that downplayed institutional factors and the autonomy of politics. Samuel Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies represents the limit, or the breaking point, of this school of thought. With him, state autonomy becomes conceivable,
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Gerardo L. Munck but economic change still appears as the driving force. State autonomy, in other words, becomes a dependent variable but is never turned into an independent variable, actively shaping society and the economy. The most popular criticisms of modernization came from the dependency perspective. In spite of its global as opposed to national focus and some radically different conclusions, dependency theory shared with modernization theory both a propensity to view the economic sphere as determinant of political outcomes and a penchant for general statements of wide applicability but fairly restricted analytical value. As stated in a recent article, the emphasis put on the antagonistic character of both schools has obscured the extent to which "both the so-called modernization theories and dependency theories shared the same . . . theoretical matrix." 3 With the debate on bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes during the 1970s, a new level of sophistication was reached. 4 For all the criticisms of economism in Guillermo O'Donnell's work, his model wove together economic, political, organizational, and cultural variables as had not been previously done. It is important to remember that the subject of analysis was fairly narrow, initially defined as an explanation of two events seen to share a common nature-the military coups in Brazil (1964) and Argentina (1966). This initial concern with explaining a specific conjuncture in only two countries contributed greatly to the extremely complex and compelling understanding of regime change O'Donnell provided. However, as O'Donnell himself and others applied the bureaucratic-authoritarian framework further to a larger number of cases, it increasingly lost its utility. A fine-tuned explanation was reduced to little more than a functional argument concerning economic necessities. It was thus only with the debates of the 1980s on the transition from authoritarian rule that theorists broke with the reliance on structural variables and socioeconomic explanations to a larger extent than in any of the previous traditions. As in the debates on bureaucratic authoritarianism, the focus of analysis was on a fairly narrowly defined conjuncture. But now politics gained an autonomy uncommon in previous works. Thus, one notices an important shift in explanatory variables and, increasingly, a concern with understanding a rapidly changing political scene in terms of the strategic choices of key actors. Since the mid 1970s and throughout the 1980s, even as theoretical emphases changed, debate on Latin America has remained focused on regime transformation. Following the lead of O'Donnell, debates have stressed critical events and key turning points. The more focused concern driving this research agenda provided a welcome corrective to overly generalized statements of earlier approaches about the likelihood of democracy or authoritarianism and of economic development or underdevelopment. In this earlier body of literature, fairly mechanistic accounts of the relation among types of economic models, social groups, and associated political regimes were all too common, and causal mechanisms were seldom explored or explained. The agenda of research pushed by O'Donnell has indeed been very productive and constitutes the basis of much of today's political science of Latin America. 5 While creating a sense of excitement in the field of Latin American studies, the rapid shift in scholarly concerns from those dictated by modernization theory to dependency in the 1960s and early 1970s to those centered on the bureaucratic-authoritarian model in the mid to late 1970s, to the problem of transitions from authoritarian rule in the 1980s, and finally to democratic consolidation in the early 1990s has also led to certain shortcomings. On the one hand, the pronounced theoretical shift from structural to strategic choice models has
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Comparative Politics July 1993 made it hard to integrate various approaches, or even specify under what conditions certain approaches are more useful. On the other hand, there has been a narrowing of the scope of most studies. If understandably reacting to the problems associated with the generalizations favored by modernization and dependency theory, analysts have increasingly shied away from "big thinking." In other words, the focus on a small set of countries and narrowly defined conjunctures, if conducive to enhanced theoretical sophistication, has also left a gap in our knowledge concerning broad processes affecting large numbers of countries over prolonged periods of time. The one place where we can look for a broad understanding of processes of change has been in the edited volumes produced in the setting of scholarly conferences. 6 The drawback of much of this collective intellectual production, however, has been that the very necessary generation of ideas, especially in the context of a rapidly fluctuating political scene, has not been followed up by their careful elaboration and testing in any systematic fashion. Thus, the resulting work reflects a division of labor in which country experts are called upon to discuss certain general ideas put forth by the project coordinators. And, as with any division of labor, the gains in sheer output come at the cost of a "standardized" product of lower quality. Combined with shifting funding priorities and the need to quickly produce edited volumes, the result is a massive volume of intellectual output that never attains the minimum threshold needed for some kind of theoretical crystallization. As a consequence, the impression that much intellectual debate results in a meager accumulation of knowledge seems inescapable. This state of affairs, fortunately, does not characterize the entire field. Shaping the Political Arena and Palavra e Sangue, in particular, represent a departure from the literature discussed above in various ways. First of all, they signify a return to the more ambitious goals of the social sciences of the 1960s but imbued with the soberness of the 1980s. In their search for the big picture, they do not fall prey to the sins of the 1960s. They avoid the penchant for grandiose statements common in the 1960s and explore more modestly an area of "middle range" theories. If attempting to provide a general overview of Latin American realities, in the vein of Fernando Cardoso and Enzo Faletto's Dependency and Development in Latin America, they do not make themselves easy targets of the criticism that Tulio Halperin Donghi launched against Cardoso and Faletto, whose work he dismissed because of its "brutal simplicity" and static treatment. 7 Second, in considering the larger picture they provide a balanced account of long and short term considerations, highlighting the broader social processes within which political phenomena are very much embedded. This is a most welcome development, which dovetails, interestingly, with current efforts to rejoin structure and agency in conceptualizing the problems of "democratic consolidation." Finally, both works show evidence of a "sedimentation of ideas," integrating conceptual and empirical matters in a way in which edited volumes are rarely successful. Indeed, these two books show that we do not have to pick between empirically grounded but untheoretical or narrow studies and the empirically broad but theoretically inconclusive collaborative works. Shaping the Political Arena: Explaining Variations through
Systematic Comparative Analysis Shaping the Political Arena is the result of a joint ten year effort, originating in the debate on bureaucratic authoritarianism, by the Berkeley-based couple, Ruth Berins Collier and
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David Collier. In his intervention in this debate, David Collier discussed the need to trace the origins of the breakdown of democracy in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay in the 1960s and 1970s to an earlier date than was considered in O'Donnell's model. 8 This long-term view was also necessary to explain the cases that most clearly contradicted the bureaucratic-authoritarian model. As pointed out in several criticisms of the bureaucraticauthoritarian model, aside from the problems with extending the model from the 1960s coups in Brazil and Argentina to the 1970s coups in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina, two South American countries to which O'Donnell thought his model was applicable, Venezuela and Colombia, had not had military coups and bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes. The problem was that, as the bureaucratic-authoritarian model, elaborated to explain the coups in Brazil in 1964 and Argentina in 1966, was extended to the point of becoming a general theory of Latin American politics, it simply lost its analytical power. 9 What was called for was a new model which could grasp the specificity of the bureaucratic-authoritarian cases as well as explain why other cases such as Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico followed distinct routes. This was the challenge to which the Colliers responded.
A Model of Critical Junctures The Colliers' basic idea is that, while many Latin American countries may have experienced a broadly similar challenge of an economic nature in the 1960s and 1970s, the very "shape of the political arena," specified in terms of the central characteristics of the political party system, was the crucial factor determining alternative responses to this challenge. Thus, the study of the process whereby the political arena is shaped provides the best clues as to why democracy collapsed in Argentina and Brazil, and later Chile and Uruguay, and gave way to military regimes in the 1960s and 1970s, while other cases such as Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico did not experience a similar pattern of regime change. The main thesis is that the "type of incorporation" of labor in the formal sector, whereby the state engages in its first sustained attempt to provide a legitimate and institutionalized role for the labor movement, has an important long-term impact in determining the shape of the political arena, signifying nothing less than a "critical juncture" in a country's historical development, which crucially affects future regime dynamics and the prospects of political stability. 10 Though drawing upon the general debates on state theory, corporatism, and political development and upon the more specifically Latin American debates on labor studies and populism, the central theoretical construct is, in effect, the notion of "critical juncture," which draws upon certain general categories linking politics and economics. At the core there is the very simple idea that the decisions of political actors are efficacious, or autonomous of a socioeconomic realm which generally changes in an incremental manner, and introduce a break or discontinuity in political patterns. Political choices, in short, stand behind and explain critical junctures (pp. 37, 39, 770). This conceptualization avoids several critiques. It guards against the critique so often made of comparative work of being overly structural. Instead, the macrophenomenon-the path followed by the "whole country" -is explained in terms of the key choices of actors. 11 But unlike proponents of rational choice theory, who conceive of choice at the ontological level, as a question of freedom of will, the Colliers have a much more contextualized and less trivial understanding of choice, which highlights the when and the how of political
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Comparative Politics July 1993 agency. Choices are made, in the first place, in response to cleavages that result from socioeconomic processes. These choices subsequently become "hardened" in institutional structures that have their own dynamics. Thus, like O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, the Colliers argue that there are certain moments characterized by great uncertainty or plasticity and other moments when political processes are more structurally determined. 12 The difference between O'Donnell and Schmitter's work on transitions and the Colliers' critical junctures model is that the former simply asserts this difference, while the latter provides ample justification for its view. First, the context within which choices are more efficacious, that is, the context shaped by the emergence of the "social question," is specified. Second, justification for labeling the period of incorporation of labor as a critical juncture is provided through a broad historical analysis that shows how the choices made in response to the "social question" result in particular coalitional dynamics and eventually become embodied in institutions which take on a structural dimension for actors. In sum, the critical junctures model highlights how choices set a country on a particular path by shaping emerging coalitions and party systems. The result is a macrocausal analysis that combines and sorts out economic context and political choice and that shows, by tracking down a historical path, how key choices have variable long-term effects that can not be explained by other sources (pp. 10-12, chapter 1).13
The Methodological Challenge The beauty of Shaping the Political Arena lies in how these basic ideas are worked through and specified, so as to provide a novel understanding of the way Latin American countries expanded their political arenas on entering the age of mass politics. This is without any doubt the most rigorous sustained attempt at developing a theoretical framework through comparative analysis in the field of Latin American politics, and one of the best to be found in the entire field of comparative politics. The Colliers are explicitly "testing" a theory and select their cases accordingly. This attention to research design, in short, makes this a theoretically driven book. Specifically, the Colliers select four pairs of countries sharing a similar type of labor incorporation while diverging quite notably in level of socioeconomic development (pp. 15-18). The cases included are Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, Uruguay, Colombia, Peru, and Argentina. Furthermore, given the historical nature of the model, the cases are defined temporally. The time period covered is generally the half century from the 1930s to the 1970s, with the cut-off date usually being before the 1980s. But the time frame is defined conceptually and varies from case to case. The end of the oligarchic state is the opening point, while the cut-off point is defined by the weakening of the legacies of the incorporation of labor. The number of cases is of some importance. As Charles Ragin points out, most comparative studies which attempt to retain a historical texture draw upon one to three cases. Here, however, as in Barrington Moore's classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, eight cases are studied. 14 The methodological challenge the Colliers confront is to bridge the historically informed but generally untheoretical and narrowly based works in "traditional" area studies and the broad-ranging and theoretically driven but ahistorical approach of cross-national studies. 15 Given the exponential increase in methodological difficulties, this is a courageous choice. The reward for successfully tackling such a challenge, in return, is to avoid certain pitfalls that have plagued the study of Latin America.
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Gerardo L. Munck Latin Americanists have long had a tendency either to talk about the region as though it were a case of their country of expertise writ-large or to shrink away from any real comparative analysis whatsoever. Examples of the first tendency are found primarily among students of "the southern cone and Brazil," who have been the most guilty of quick and easy extrapolations from "their" countries to the entire region. Even the most sophisticated debate of the 1970s, on bureaucratic authoritarianism, showed precisely this tendency and its attendant weaknesses. The insights of the bureaucratic-authoritarian model, basically derived from two countries, Brazil and Argentina, were used as a springboard to understand trends in all of South America. If the attempt, driven by explicit theoretical concerns, to go beyond a sample of two cases is no doubt laudable, the way in which it was done was methodologically quite primitive and guilty of conceptual stretching. The second and opposite tendency, exemplified by many who study Mexico and call themselves Mexicanists, or by those who study Peru and Colombia and see themselves at best as students of the Andean region, has its own problems. Remaining embedded within a fairly traditional area studies approach, these types of studies tend to emphasize the uniqueness of the object of study to the point of devaluing broader comparative work. The Colliers overcome both these shortcomings. They draw on the ambitiousness of the bureaucratic-authoritarian debate and thus avoid the narrowness of traditional area studies, while overcoming the biases of "the southern cone and Brazil" specialists. To this end, key concepts are defined with exemplary clarity before the work delves into the thick descriptions familiar to country experts. Avoiding in this way the comparative blindness that the study of a single country quite naturally tends to foster, they promise to reinterpret the history of each particular country in a manner possible only through comparative historical analysis. Given the type of demand in terms of intellectual capacities and resources which such a comparative enterprise entails, one understands why this type of study is so rare and valuable.
The Substantive Argument: Four Types of Labor Incorporation and Their Legacies Substantively three main concepts, which focus on distinct temporal phases of a singular process, organize the argument: "cleavage," "critical juncture," and the "legacies" of critical junctures, with the notion of critical juncture serving as the central or hinge concept that ties the sequence together. The Colliers argue that the cleavages that developed in Latin America due to socioeconomic change in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century led to a critical juncture in which labor was incorporated into the national political arena across all eight cases. This comparable challenge, furthermore, was resolved differently across cases. The identification of the distinctiveness of comparable critical junctures and their different implications for each country's historical evolution are the book's central concerns. Going back in time, the Colliers develop an explanation of critical junctures in an interactive state-labor framework which focuses on three key actors: labor, the oligarchy, and the reformers of the new middle sectors. The account starts with a description of the cleavage represented by the initial emergence of the working class (chapter 3). The significance of the emergence of labor was primarily that it put the "social question" on the political agenda. The resolution of this question, however, had more to do with interelite
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Comparative Politics July 1993 politics and choices by actors within the state than with labor itself (pp. 50, 94). Here, the crucial factor the Colliers are interested in is the political strength of the oligarchy, or alternatively the degree and form of subordination of reformers to the oligarchy at the onset of the reform period, that is, the time when the oligarchy's hold on power started to slip away. Variations in the process of incorporation are then explained in terms of the coalitional options open to the middle class reformers. Basically, a weaker oligarchy provided a greater coalitional space within which middle class reformers could mobilize labor. A stronger oligarchy, on the other hand, foreclosed this possibility, making for a process of incorporation in which reformers had to emphasize labor control rather than labor mobilization (pp. 748-49). In all this, labor is seen as having had quite a "passive" role. Its emergence starts the story, but differences in the degree of labor's power are found not to correspond neatly with particular patterns of incorporation (p. 749). The autonomous project of the working class, in short, was defeated, and labor became essentially a reactive actor which responded to projects elaborated from above. It is only in the period following its incorporation that labor's power and its strategies became more important (p. 50).'6 The differences in the process of incorporation are spelled out in detail. Different "types of incorporation" are defined in terms of the "goals and agency of incorporation" (whether control solely by the state or some combination of state control and mobilization by a political party) and of the difference among parties as agents of incorporation, according to the "mode and scope of incorporation" (pp. 162-7). These two dimensions define four basic types of incorporation, associated with certain short-term legacies during the "aftermath" period following incorporation and certain long-term legacies during the "heritage" period. The legacies in the aftermath period are discussed primarily in terms of shifting coalitions and party realignments, which follow from the type of labor incorporation, while the legacies in the heritage period are mainly defined in terms of the institutionalization and reproduction of the new coalitions in various party systems. What is crucial about the party system is that it embodies a particular dynamic, which sets a broad parameter for subsequent political change. In short, three features-whether or not a centrist majority bloc emerged, the union movement established links with the centrist parties, and the union movement participated in the governing coalition-are seen as defining the integrative or polarizing dynamics of the party system (pp. 9, 502-5, 751).17 Using this elaborate conceptual apparatus, the Colliers present the core of their argument. The eight Latin American- cases included in the study displayed four types of incorporation, each with peculiar associated outcomes, which can be attributed to the manner in which the critical juncture was managed and not to the country's level of socioeconomic development. Where control of unions was exercised primarily by the state, "state incorporation" as a type of labor incorporation leads, in the long-term, to a "multiparty polarizing system" and eventually to military coups. This is the case of Chile and Brazil. Alternatively, where labor support is mobilized by a political party, variations in the mode and scope of incorporation define three different types of party incorporation. Where electoral mobilization is the prime concern, incorporation takes place through "electoral mobilization by a traditional party," leading to a party system characterized by "electoral stability and social conflict" and eventually the militarization of the state. This is the case of Uruguay and Colombia, though with the difference that Uruguay had a coup and
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Colombia did not. Where electoral mobilization of labor is accompanied by important linkages between unions and a political party, incorporation takes place through "labor populism," leading to a "stalemated party system" and eventually to military coups. This is the case of Peru and Argentina. Finally, where the two elements of electoral mobilization of labor and union-party linkages are supplemented by the inclusion of the peasantry, incorporation takes place through "radical populism," leading to an "integrative party system" and regime stability in the long run. This is the case of Mexico and Venezuela.
Testing the Argument and Dealing with Problem Cases The exhaustiveness with which this argument is developed-and the detail and analysis that pervades the entire text-makes for a reading exercise that is valuable in itself. Sifting through masses of secondary sources on labor and political histories, the authors provide a coherent and compelling analysis, organizing their historical account according to comparable phases. To this end, much attention is dedicated to justifying the breakdown of each case into the analytically comparable incorporation, aftermath, and heritage periods around which the book's argument is built and which are discussed separately in the book's long central chapters (chapters 5, 6, 7). Basic historical interpretation in the assignment of precise dates to key trends, while usually seen as foreign territory by comparativists, is shown to be an indispensable tool in comparative analysis. Indeed, it provides the basis for a systematic treatment of each country by asking the same questions of each case. To assist the reader, the most crucial information and dates are neatly presented in figures (5.2 on pp. 166-67 and 8.2 on pp. 752-53). Beyond the orderliness that pervades the text, an assessment of the degree to which the Colliers succeed in proving their argument is complex. The scope of the historical account that the Colliers fit into their framework and the complex analysis they sustain without pause throughout the book's nearly 900 pages go a long way to support their argument. This review, indeed, can hardly do justice to the sophistication with which the theoretical argument and the empirical data are woven together. What can be done is to provide a bare bones account of the argument and assess it against the empirical cases, especially those which can be considered problem cases. If one were to search for a central or guiding hypothesis which can be said to underlie the entire analysis, it is that, where the oligarchy was stronger when reformists emerged to challenge them, labor incorporation generally emphasized control over benefits and reduced the scope of incorporation. The result was a fairly conservative type of incorporation based on more of an "accommodationist" as opposed to a "populist" alliance, which had a long-term legacy of political instability. Leaving a "political vacuum within the working class" (p. 185), this mode of incorporation had the indirect effect of radicalizing labor (pp. 161, 366). When labor incorporation emphasized mobilization over control, the long-term impact, in contrast, was the moderation of labor and its inclusion as part of a governing coalition, a configuration more conducive to political stability. In assessing the empirical value of this bare bones argument, the two polar sets of cases, Chile and Brazil, on the one hand, and Mexico and Venezuela, on the other, provide very strong support. As expected, Chile and Brazil, the cases where labor incorporation was purely a matter of control and the ensuing alliance was primarily accommodationist, ended
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Comparative Politics July 1993 with military coups and "bureaucratic-authoritarian" regimes. On the other hand, Mexico and Venezuela, as cases where labor incorporation was most mobilizational and resulted in strong populist coalitions, had considerably more stable political regimes. One intermediate set of cases, Colombia and Uruguay, also fits very nicely within the general argument, though with a slight hitch. The problem is that the final outcome varies slightly. Though in Colombia the process of militarization of the state advanced quite noticeably, it fell short of resulting in a military coup as in Uruguay. This divergence, if weakening the general argument, is not an insurmountable obstacle, as it can be explained particularly in terms of the greater strength of the labor movement in Uruguay (pp. 506, 639, 664--66, 754). Far more problematic are the cases of Peru and Argentina. Problems with fitting Peru and Argentina in the general framework crop up throughout the account and deserve special and fairly long asides. The first problem has to do with the scope of mobilization of labor in the incorporation process. In comparison with the other cases, labor mobilization should have been more reduced, given the power of the oligarchy. This divergence is accommodated by invoking certain "flaws" in the power of the oligarchy, its lack of an electoral base in a peasantry in the case of Argentina and its divisions in the Peruvian case (pp. 748-49). Moreover, the delay in the incorporation process meant that the labor movement had more time to develop than in the other sets of cases and thus had a greater capacity to mobilize (pp. 155-57). A second problem concerns the final outcome. Given the high degree of labor mobilization in Peru and Argentina, one would expect it to have more in common with the cases of Mexico and Venezuela, which display a high degree of stability, than with Colombia and Uruguay, not to speak of Chile and Brazil. Yet both Peru and Argentina experienced coups in the 1960s. Here again, as in the explanation of the incorporation process, the combination of a still strong oligarchy and a very strong labor movement is seen to account for the long-term instability. 18 These special explanations, especially the invocation of the greater power of Argentina's and Peru's labor movements as a factor in the incorporation process, seem to weaken the general argument. But they also point to certain features of historically grounded comparative analysis. Given its reliance on a fairly small number of cases, not amenable to statistical testing, conclusions can not be stated in probabilistic terms. Because it must account for every case, "deviant" cases are given full attention. Thus, what could appear to be a weakness has its positive side. For in the style of analysis provided by the Colliers, the peculiar is not lost from sight nor swept under the rug. More important, even a small number of cases, if carefully selected and rigorously studied, can justify fairly strong conclusions. 19 Having paired up cases with similar types of incorporation but quite different levels of socioeconomic development, the Colliers provide a way to assess alternative economic explanations. The broad similarities in outcome, regardless of socioeconomic differences, strengthen the case for seeing the political choices shaping different types of incorporation as having superior explanatory value. The bottom line, then, is that the eight cases followed broad trajectories in which the political regime dynamics resulted from different emphases on the dimensions of control and mobilization in the incorporation process. Coups were the long-term consequence of types of labor incorporation that stressed control, while long-term stability resulted from a type of incorporation that put greater stress on mobilization. The building of populist rather than accommodationist alliances by reformers, in short, provided for a more secure foundation
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and led to a more stable political regime. Thus, the Colliers can offer a new explanation of why certain Latin American countries had coups while others did not in the 1960s and 1970s. Coups occur as a long-term result of two types of incorporation, "state incorporation" and "labor populism," but they do not occur in cases of "radical populism." Only with the type of incorporation characterized by "electoral mobilization by a traditional party" do we have a mixed result. This accomplishment is no small matter. 20 The model of critical junctures, which considers different types of incorporation and their legacies, should thus be seen as an alternative to the long debated model of the origin of bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes as well as other economic explanations of regime dynamics. 21 More generally, as a study on Latin America, this book represents an important step in integrating the works of specialists on Mexico, the Andean countries, and the southern cone of South America and Brazil through a methodologically rigorous testing of comparative theories. Through this exercise, indeed, the authors show how comparativists, if unable to draw upon the depth of knowledge of country specialists, can contribute certain insights that do not derive from the simple sum of the parts. Shaping the Political Arena, in short, represents the definite coming of age of Latin American studies within comparative politics. It is as important a step in bringing work based on Latin America into the mainstream of comparative politics as probably no other work since O'Donnell's Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism.
Palavra e Sangue: Derming a Modal Pattern and Exploring Its Limits
Alain Touraine is a French sociologist and director of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales de Paris who has been highly influential among Latin American thinkers, traditionally attracted to a peculiarly French way of thinking. His book, Palavra e Sangue, a very unique example of scholarship, is the fruit of his learning about Latin America over a period of twenty-five years. It aims at characterizing nothing less than the transition in Latin America associated with industrialization by exploring the various actors who have emerged on the political scene and their typical modes of action. Theoretically, Touraine's book is wonderfully intriguing, though it is vulnerable to criticisms on methodological grounds, particularly when compared to the Colliers' work. This difference springs in part from the fact that the Colliers draw on ideas which have already been developed and applied in the literature in another geographical region, western Europe. Therefore, they can focus their energy on expanding and refining the model and then rigorously "testing" certain hypotheses. Touraine, on the other hand, is more concerned with developing sensitizing concepts and generating new ideas. His book's looser organization, furthermore, allows him greater freedom. In contrast to the fixity of the Colliers' gaze on the emergence of labor as an actor, the various responses to it, and the legacies of these responses, Touraine roams freely among church base communities, intellectuals, various women's groups, labor movements, guerrilla groups, political parties, elites, and rural and urban settings. In the process, he also engages with just about every important theoretical debate to have swept the study of Latin American politics during the
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A Model of Collective Action Touraine's central concern is to study the "categories of social action" or modes of collective action found in Latin America since the period when it began to industrialize (pp. 45, 332). Avoiding the all too common tendency to simply jump in and study actors doing things, Touraine argues that collective action can be grasped only within the context of different "modes of development." In contrast to the proclivity among advocates of "strategic choice" models and even more so among practitioners of rational choice theory, his concern with the effects of human will does not slide into a voluntaristic approach. The study of collective action, rather, is finnly embedded within its structural context. Before different modes of collective action themselves are studied, and with the explicit goal of avoiding the ethnocentric tendency to transpose western categories to different realities, Touraine dedicates much effort to defining the typical "Latin American mode of developing" as the region began to industrialize (p. 292). Defining a "mode of development" by the interaction of economic and social dimensions, Touraine identifies four key characteristics. Latin America's mode of development was characterized, in consonance with that of advanced industrialized countries, by a high level of investment and much political-cultural urban participation. In contrast to the advanced countries, however, Latin American industrialization was characterized by certain weaknesses. Economically, it had a limited and dependent capitalism, while socially it was characterized by dualism and structural heterogeneity. On the basis of these features, Latin American countries can be distinguished from other countries which have different modes of development. Latin America, in short, had a "dependent mode of development," in which the elite dirigeante (ruling elite) was not the state or a national bourgeoisie, as in other modes of development, but a foreign bourgeoisie (pp. 45-46). These structural features have certain clear and important implications. Specifically, Touraine posits a correspondence between particular modes of development and particular characteristics of social and political action. In other words, modes of development, as structural parameters, define certain possibilities for and limits to collective action. In the case of Latin America, the four characteristics of the dependent mode of development listed above correspond to four features of actors and collective action. Thus, Latin American actors are defined by the separation of their personal experience from their collective situation or social mobility, the primacy of political over social categories, the prevalence of elite privilege and mass exclusion, and the fragility of class actors. This analysis is very static and of a conceptual density at times quite overbearing. But it puts Touraine in a position to derive the central hypothesis of his book.
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The Substantive Argument: The National-Popular Model The central argument that runs throughout Palavra e Sangue is that, because of the characteristics of the Latin American mode of development and the associated characteristics of actors, collective action in Latin America during roughly the 1930-80 period was effective only when it simultaneously combined three dimensions, specifically, when it combined class objectives with the goals of antiimperialism and national integration (p. 149). This gave rise to a typically Latin American dominant mode of political action-the "national-popular" model-in which social actors are subordinated to political power and the state is not clearly differentiated from the political system (pp. 177, 185-92, 331-37). One of the central characteristics of the national-popular model is the subordination of social movements to the actions of the state (pp. 182, 231). This feature is important because it points to a constraint on the capacity for autonomous collective action, while it explains why political actors are determined by interventions of the state and not by the actions of social actors which are formed independently of the state and subsequently represent their interests at a political level. In the Latin American political model, a "top down" thrust, in which a political logic subsumes the actions of social actors, prevails (p. 331). The simplicity and elegance of this proposition comes as a just reward for the reader's perseverance in plodding through the preceding thick and demanding conceptual elaborations. From here on the text comes alive with a panoply of actors.
IDustrating the Argument I: The Easy Cases Having theoretically derived the centrality of the national-popular model to Latin American political actions, Touraine moves on to clarify its empirical referent. Drawing upon economic data of the PREALC-ILO (Latin American and Caribbean Program of Employment), his own extensive field research, monographs, country studies, and unpublished dissertations by his graduate students, Touraine starts off with the cases that most obviously fit his argument. He distinguished the relevant cases, furthermore, according to whether the national-popular forces are based on a political party, as in the cases of Gaitan and the Liberal Party in Colombia, Yrigogen and the UCR in Argentina, Haya de la Torre and APRA in Peru, the MNR in Bolivia, Bosch and the PRD in the Dominican Republic, and Maurice Bishop and the New Jewel Movement in Grenada; whether they are a political current within the state, as in Uruguay under Battle y Ordonez, in Argentina under Peron, in Costa Rica under Figueres, and in Chile under Frei; or whether they are under military control, as in Peru under Velasco Alvarado (pp. 192ff, 341). 23 The range of cases includes many frequently discussed under the label of populism as well as others to which the label is rarely attributed but which show resemblances to his national-popular model. More important, what these positive cases prove is the broad applicability of Touraine's conceptual framework. But Touraine is clearly more interested in the reverse side of the coin. Seeing the prevalence of the national-popular model as a hindrance to the development of a capacity for autonomous collective action, he inquires about the prospects for social movements (pp. 181-82, 233, 333-34). 24 Because of the centrality of social movements in the unfolding of a capacity to escape dependency and improve the prospects of development, Touraine argues that it is necessary to identify those forces favorable and unfavorable to their emergence (p. 283). Hence he embarks on a journey of recovery, across time and geography, that takes up
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Comparative Politics July 1993 the bulk of the third part of the book. Struggles in the countryside and in urban settings are dealt with in two chapters, and labor unionism is treated separately in a third chapter. This terrain is much less commonly tread than the populist regimes mentioned above; Touraine shows a truly admirable grasp of Latin American history and indeed writes about and analyzes Latin American social movements as no one else does. Turning to the countryside first, Touraine focuses on three types of struggles: movements in defense of threatened communities, struggles over land, and unionism of agricultural wage workers. Only the second type of struggle, over land, has led to the emergence of full-blown social movements, especially with Zapatismo in Mexico, but also in El Salvador, Peru, and Ecuador in 1932 (pp. 245, 251). Thus, rural social movements developed in the Latin American countryside early in the twentieth century, when the political system was closed and urbanization levels were fairly low (p. 267). If rural social movements were already rare at that time, even their potential to emerge disappeared with the disappearance of the conditions that gave rise to them. With respect to labor unionism, Touraine distinguishes, as the Colliers do, between state incorporation in the Brazilian case and party incorporation in Mexico. But his main concern is to distinguish among different degrees of labor autonomy over time. Labor is found to be most dependent or subordinate to political action in Mexico through the 1970s and Brazil through 1964, while labor movements as such emerge only in a handful of cases, such as Uruguay, Bolivia, and Chile. Considering labor trends under military rule in the 1960s and 1970s and in the new democracies of the 1980s, Touraine points to a certain maturation process, meaning that labor has acted more as a basic class in industrial society. But labor unions continued to define themselves in relation to the state rather than in relation to the business class and nearly always remained subordinate to political parties. He thus rejects the theses that posit a convergence of the patterns of action of Latin American and western European labor. Labor in Latin America is not only a class actor within an industrial society, but also an actor in national development, meaning that it generally subordinates its goals to political action (pp. 317-18). Being shaped by the specificities of the Latin American mode of development, labor, in short, displays the general subordination of social action to state intervention characteristic of the national-popular model (pp. 279-80, 333). To summarize the discussion of social movements, Touraine finds struggles in the countryside to be the most dependent on state intervention, while labor unionism, though displaying certain tendencies toward greater autonomy, particularly in the more industrialized countries, has remained nonetheless dependent on the political system. The norm around which Latin American politics centered for most of the half century spanning from 1930 to 1980, that is, the national-popular model, entailed social actors who were neither autonomous, as in the West, nor absorbed by the state, as in the East (p. 332). The very rarity of strong social movements supports this argument. To the positive cases of national-popular forces which most obviously fit his argument, Touraine adds the negative case of the lack of social movements. Having established this, he moves on to a discussion of the frontiers of the national-popular model.
Illustrating the Argument Il: The Hard Cases The limits of the national-popular model are evident in three situations that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. The first is the
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emergence of limited democracies, defined by the development of parliament as a key arena, as in Chile during the years 1938-73. Rather than as a deviation or sharp departure from the national-popular model, Touraine argues for seeing parliamentary regimes more as a particular modality of it (p. 363). Revolutionary governments, such as Cuba under Castro and Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, represent a second limit. In these two cases, the victory of guerrilla forces led to a clear rupture with the national-popular model and the installation of a revolutionary model, which is anticapitalist and primarily antiimperialist. The activities of guerrilla groups in countries like Uruguay and Argentina in the 1970s, on the other hand, are seen to embody a form of political violence manifesting the decomposition, or a particular form of crisis, of the national-popular model. Again, as in the case of social movements, the very rarity of revolution in twentieth century Latin America strengthens rather than weakens Touraine's argument. The third and most important limit of the national-popular model is represented by the military governments usually labeled as bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes. Touraine reconceptualizes the military regimes in Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile in the 1960s and 1970s as "antipopular dictatorships" (pp. 436-38). This label is seen as more appropriate because these military regimes acted in relation to the tendencies and crises of the national-popular model, rather than in terms of an alternative political model. Thus, even when the military rulers acted as agents of the destruction of national-popular regimes, it is only in relation to the national-popular model that their actions can be understood. With the exception of Cuba and Nicaragua, the various frontiers Touraine explores are seen as expressions of crises and weaknesses of the national-popular model. In sum, the key break in Latin America's mode of political action did not result from the displacement of national-popular regimes by antipopular dictatorships, but rather came at the moment when the dynamics underlying the various forms of creation and destruction of the national-popular model were altered by the economic crisis of the 1980s. Above all, the political and social effects of the crisis destroyed the integrative capacity central to the national-popular model and called for new responses by social and political actors (p. 443). The possibility of the creation of a new political model, closely associated with the prospects of representative democracy, finally comes into view.
The Underlying Methodology The hypothesis about a specifically Latin American mode of collective action, defined and explained in the first two parts, serves as a clear organizing principle throughout the nearly 600 pages of Touraine's book. The way the author goes about supporting his argument, however, is not explicitly addressed or particularly straightforward. It is left up to the reader to assimilate the extensive and dense empirical material, piece it all together, and uncover the methodological underpinnings of the work. Empirically, there is much overlap between this book and Shaping the Political Arena. The number of countries and the time span encompassed by Touraine include the same range as the Colliers' study and even go beyond it. As with the Colliers, the starting point of Touraine's inquiry is defined by the end of oligarchic domination. Though starting with the Mexican revolution, most cases are picked up around the 1930s. From there on, the account refers to some twenty-four countries, located over the entire Latin American and Caribbean region, through the late 1980s (pp. 18-19). But all these countries are not the equivalent of
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cases in the methodological sense. Rather, from these countries Touraine picks the wealth of cases he draws upon to support his argument. Unlike the Colliers, who construct an argument based on the historical path of each country they study and select four pairs of cases which show similarities within the pair and differences across pairs, Touraine is primarily interested in finding similarities in styles of collective action. The sheer frequency of examples gathered throughout the entire region which fit the national-popular model is thus seen as the best indicator of support for the argument. Differences across countries, furthermore, are not of great concern because this similarity is posited at a regional level. This search for similarities, as seen above, takes on different forms in each part of the book. First of all, in the third, the longest and most crucial section of the book Touraine discusses how the national-popular model has operated, with what consequences for social movements. The examples he raises, that is, the "easy cases," all clearly fit the model, either as positive examples in the case of the national-popular forces and negative ones in the case of social movements. The model is supported by examples that are similar to his model in terms of both the modes of collective action it represents and suppresses. Second, in the fourth part Touraine explores the limits of the model in terms of three alternative forms of governments, representative, revolutionary, and military. These "hard cases" do not appear at first glance to fit his model, but he shows that they can be reconceptualized in terms of the model. Through argumentation, then, these examples are shown to be best understood in terms of the national-popular model. These two parts cover the bulk of the cases presented with a certain amount of detail. But Touraine takes one further step in support of his argument when he deals with the social and political impact of the economic crisis of the 1980s in the fifth part of the book. Focusing on regional trends, he is concerned for the first time with differences. However, difference means, not variations within a shared process, but a new process that marks a qualitative departure from his original model. From the perspective of the 1980s, the modes of collective action typical of Latin America's experience since the beginning of the industrialization process emerge with all clarity. Latin American politics has been more about participation than democratic forms of representation, more about passion than about interests. The picture, in short, is one of a political system in which high levels of participation and integration coexisted with high levels of violence, defining a peculiarly Latin American style of collective action which Touraine calls the national-popular model. Hence the title of the book, palavra for participation and sangue for violence (p. 175). The power of Touraine's argument, as his book's methodology assumes, does not depend on all political systems or every aspect of them corresponding to the national-popular model. Rather, as Touraine himself states, what is important is that it remained a "center of reference" needed to understand all features of Latin American politics during the 1930-80 period (p. 189).
The Colliers and Touraine Compared: Two Different Styles of Analysis The ambitiousness of both Shaping the Political Arena and Palavra e Sangue, together with their sustained attempt at theoretical argumentation, makes them indispensable sources in the ongoing debate on Latin American politics. The intriguing issue, given the notable contrasts between many aspects of these two books, is how to derive a research agenda
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which incorporates their most fruitful contributions. A preliminary step in this effort is to compare and contrast these two books, with an eye for a common ground. Theoretically, there are important differences between the two models advanced in these works, which should be readily apparent from this review. In spite of their different conceptual frameworks, however, both works put a premium on actors and agency. Touraine's "collective action" model is more elaborate on this point. Being first and foremost concerned with not transposing western concepts to different realities, he opens his book by outlining a "dependent mode of development," combining political, societal, and economic elements peculiar to Latin America. In a manner reminiscent of the dependency approach, the global economic environment is turned into a key factor. Thus, even if internal actors are clearly the focus of analysis, as in Cardoso and Faletto's classic work, the presence of foreign forces leads Touraine to posit a regional reality and to make an argument that is seen to apply to the entire region. The analysis of collective action that follows is very clearly structured by the regional mode of development and takes place within it. The Colliers' "critical juncture" model focuses on agency in a different manner. Very basically, they conceptualize agency in terms of the choices of political elites in response to an external reality defined by socioeconomic developments. Instead of operating within a structural matrix, as in Touraine, action takes place against a contextual background. This influences the issue of the unit of analysis. Specifically, while international factors enter the Colliers' account at several points, in contrast to Touraine they are not seen as shaping a regional reality. The unit of analysis firmly remains the country, while the region disappears as an analytical category. Their model thus posits the efficacy of the choice of national elites. After identifying these choices, they gear their main effort to tracking the effect of these choices, especially as they are reproduced through institutions. Agency, in short, is to be studied through the choices of national political elites, which affect the historical paths of their countries. Regardless of their different conceptual apparatuses, however, both books are densely historical. In this respect they are very similar and fit squarely in the tradition of comparative-historical analysis or historical sociology. 25 Both works are truly bewildering efforts to integrate a tremendous wealth of secondary literature, without which they would not have been possible. This type of work, indeed, is dependent upon a prior and well developed historiography. These similarities aside, there are important differences in terms of how all this data is used. These differences account for the different style and texture of the two books. Using the region as a unit of analysis allows Touraine to employ a fairly lax methodology. Touraine's argument is advanced by finding examples which clearly illustrate a modal pattern. This is done very effectively, especially in dealing with cases which traditionally appear to observers as very distinct from the modal Latin American pattern; they are reinterpreted as fitting the modal pattern or as a reaction within this pattern. The amply documented rarity of social movements, which would exemplify a mode of collective action outside of the national-popular model, serves as negative evidence which further supports the argument. All of Touraine's cases, in sum, are examined as a way of documenting the key importance of the national-popular model in understanding collective action in Latin America during the half century from 1930 to 1980. The power of the argument is demonstrated by the sheer number of national cases and political movements that are shown
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to exemplify the national-popular model. Thus, even if data on particular cases are used quite literally to "illustrate" a broad argument, the amount of history Touraine is able to fit in his argument is very persuasive. If Touraine is concerned with not transposing European categories on to Latin American realities, the Colliers are preoccupied with the equally frequent tendency to talk about the entire region on the basis of knowledge of one or a few cases (p. 14). Touraine is well aware of the danger of conceptual stretching (p. 189) but to a certain extent remains guilty of this kind of methodological slippage. The Colliers, on the other hand, avoid this problem by stressing variations in the general process of labor incorporation and by showing the different paths followed as a result of different types of incorporation. This more fine-grained argument, in turn, requires a more rigorous methodology. Rather than seeking a modal pattern and finding cases that fit the pattern, as Touraine does, the Colliers stress variations within a broadly similar process and select their cases in such a way as to "test" their theory. The factors explaining variations in the process of labor incorporation and the expectations concerning the legacies of different modes of incorporation are clearly spelled out and subsequently matched with the historical data from evolving cases. In sum, if both works put forth a massive amount of historical data to support their arguments, they do so in different ways. Touraine garners as evidence information about more actors and events, from a larger number of countries and a broader time span, than do the Colliers. His methodological requirements, however, only posit that they must fit quite loosely within a broad and overarching theoretical argument. In the Colliers' work, on the other hand, a more nuanced argument calls for a tighter fit between their theory and the complexities of the realities they study. In part due to their effort at conceptual clarification, the Colliers are able to meet this challenge and provide a path dependent analysis of unrivaled methodological sophistication. As a result of such a rigorous testing of their argument, the Colliers arrive at stronger explanatory conclusions. The root of these differences is linked to the distinct goals the Colliers and Touraine pursue in their books. These different goals can be clarified by drawing upon W. G. Runciman's persuasive distinction between three modes of understanding: reportage, explanation, and description. 26 Touraine clearly seeks to go beyond reportage and causal explanation to give the reader a sense of what it is like to participate in the situation being reported and explained. Written in an engaging and entertaining style, the reader is impressed by the insight, the depth of understanding, the subtleties, and the feeling of tenderness that pervade the text. As in the writings of Barrington Moore and E. P. Thompson, issues of values, costs, and suffering are not seen as misplaced in a scholarly work. In Runciman's terms, then, Touraine is clearly aiming at "description." And it is precisely his loose methodology that allows him to pursue this aim with great success. Indeed, the richness and liveliness of Touraine's descriptions appear to be directly related to the looseness of his use of data within a broad theoretical framework. The contrast between Touraine's goal and the Collier's is quite stark. While Touraine seeks to open up a continent to his readers' eyes and to provoke them to discover new and creative ways of thinking, the Colliers push their readers to rethink what they believe they already know. They are thoroughly persuasive in making their case, providing a high degree of closure on a historical period. The different style of these two books, in short, has to do with Touraine's aim of providing a descriptive model, in contrast to the Colliers' concern
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with elaborating an explanatory model. 27 The point of this comparison, it should be underlined, is not to rank one as better or worse. Indeed, as David Collier himself has pointed out, we would be wise to view developments in the social sciences as part of a "research cycle. " 28 These works should thus be seen as two different products, from very different intellectual environments, which can jointly provide us with certain insights. The challenge is to derive certain complementary concepts and common themes, in the spirit of theoretical and methodological pluralism, which can shape a fruitful research agenda.
Concluding with a Research Agenda for the 1990s
In seeking to define an agenda for research, certain recent theoretical developments allow for the fruitful integration of the works by Touraine and the Colliers in the mainstream debates on Latin America since the early 1980s. Indeed, even though the concern of most scholars in the field of Latin American studies has shifted progressively from a concern with the origins of military rule to a focus on possible transitions from authoritarian rule and later the problems of democratic consolidation, while the Colliers and Touraine dug deep into the past, there has been a dovetailing of concerns around the need to rejoin structure and agency in conceptualizing the problems of "democratic consolidation." The key task facing Latin Americanists is to understand the nature of the changes undergone in the 1980s, the direction of events in the 1990s, and the prospects of democracy. In this task, the "strategic choice" models employed to explain the transitions from authoritarian rule are simply insufficient. Their main shortcoming is that their concern with being close to the events of the day leads to a loss of perspective. However, the recent concern with long-term historical sequences, as exemplified by the work of Terry Karl, points in the right direction. 29 If indeed there has been some break in Latin American history during the 1980s, it is only by stepping back and providing a long-term view that we will be able to start seeing with some clarity just what has been changing. Here the contributions of the Colliers and Touraine are indispensable. Both Shaping the Political Arena and Palavra e Sangue pinpoint the trends in the 1980s as a key break and give some important pointers on how to understand their significance. The first important contribution they make is the excellent account of the backdrop against which to understand the changes taking place in Latin America. In spite of their very different styles, the Colliers and Touraine agree substantively on how to characterize the pre-1980 period. The core point is that Latin American politics in the 1930-80 period was shaped by its experience with populism. Even though the Colliers move away from Touraine's conceptualization of a single national-popular model of regional applicability and argue for a distinction between at least four distinct experiences with populism, they agree that the incorporation of a key actor, labor, proceeded with a strong "top down" thrust. This conclusion deserves some discussion. One could point to the lack of concern with the methodology of history "from below" or the "new social history" in the Colliers' work and question whether their findings are not biased. But Touraine's long discussion of social movements is certainly not open to this criticism. Thus, it appears that one must beware of transposing the conclusions derived from the methodology of labor studies in advanced industrialized countries to Latin America. The Colliers portray labor as a fairly reactive actor
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during the incorporation phase, arguing that interelite politics had a defining impact.30 But Touraine, after searching high and low for evidence of autonomous labor movements or other social movements, likewise concludes that labor is better understood by its link to the state than in terms of capital-labor relations or of its links with the community. The portrayal of labor as a dependent actor thus does not appear to be linked to a methodological bias but rather emerges as a conclusion of two studies that adopt different models and methodological approaches. The implications of labor's subordinate status have been crucial for Latin American political developments and account for the peculiar contours of the problem of Latin American democracy. In Touraine's language, because participation in Latin America was channeled within the national-popular model, the form of politics to which it led was not representative. What democracy Latin America experienced prior to the crisis of the 1980s was thus defined more "in vague and too global terms of participation" rather than in institutional terms and was hardly truly democratic in the western sense of the word (pp. 443, 228, 231-32, 361). The political changes in the 1980s can not be fully understood, then, as a process of redemocratization. A characterization of the 1980s must therefore entail first and foremost a clear account of what came before. And the next step beyond broad statements about the 1980s as a postpopulist era is to positively characterize the emerging order. On this, the Colliers and Touraine have little to offer in terms of specifics. Touraine's broader account deals more directly with the changes in the 1980s; it discusses emerging groups, such as urban social movements, barely touched upon by the Colliers. But neither the Colliers, for whom the 1980s are clearly beyond the scope of their book, nor Touraine, who deals with the 1980s only in very global terms, attempts to say anything substantive. Instead, their contribution to the analysis of current trends and problems should be seen primarily in terms of how to conceptualize the changes in the 1980s and early 1990s. Touraine offers, above all, some important clues concerning the conceptualization of democracy. He proposes that the nature of democracy be understood in terms of a three level model, consisting of the state, the political system, and social actors (p. 523). In this framework, democracy depends on nothing less than the avoidance of the collapse of the three levels, under the primacy of the state, as was characteristic of the national-popular model (pp. 494-95, 506). Very starkly put, the possible emergence of representative democracy in the current period depends upon a clear break with Latin America's experience with populism and the emergence of strong social actors who are formed independently of the state and subsequently represent their interests at a political level. 31 The Colliers, on the other hand, suggest the application of their "critical juncture" model to the current situation, a task that would entail studying the cleavages resulting from the social and economic changes since 1974, the various responses to the new challenges, and the legacies of key choices in terms of their institutionalization in a party system. The prospects of democratic consolidation in those countries which were under military rule in the 1960s and 1970s would thus be studied in terms of various "modes of transitions," the kinds of linkages developing between social movements and political parties, and the relationship between key emerging political institutions and the state. The Colliers and Touraine challenge Latin Americanists to confront this task. In conclusion, Shaping the Political Arena and Palavra e Sangue promise their readers an
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intellectual feast, quite unlike anything that has been written on Latin America for a decade or so. They answer the calls for an analysis of Latin America comparable to that provided by Barrington Moore in his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. In these terms, the Colliers' book more closely approximates the structure of Moore's argument by stressing the different paths followed by various countries; Touraine's work, on the other hand, is written in a characteristically Mooresian, engaged style. These differences aside, both are true masterpieces of rare and precious quality which provide the necessary basis for a positive characterization of the emerging order in Latin America and contribute in the process to nothing less than a new comparative perspective on Latin America. They deserve to be studied and debated in full.32
NOTES I would like to thank Deborah Norden and the members of the plenary session organized to assess the Colliers' work at the Seventeenth International Congress of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), Los Angeles, September 24-27, 1992, for their helpful comments and suggestions. I. Touraine's book was originally published in French as La Parole et le Sang: Po/itique et Sociite en Amerique Latine (Paris: Editions Odile Jacob, 1988), and is also available in Spanish as America Latina: Polftica y sociedad (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1989). 2. On the study of Latin America during the past twenty-five years, see Christopher Mitchell, ed., Changing Perspectives in Latin American Studies (Stanford: Stanford University Fress, 1988). 3. On the overlap between modernization and dependency, see Manuel A. Garret6n, "Political Redemocratization in Latin America and the Crisis of Paradigms," in James Manor, ed., Rethinking the Third World (New York: Longman, 1991), IOI. 4. See Guillermo O'Donnell, Modernization and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, 1973); David Collier, ed., The New Authoritarianism in Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Fress, 1979). S. On O'Donnell's contribution to the field, see David Lehmann, "A Latin American Political Scientist: Guillermo O'Donnell," Latin American Research Review, 24 (1989), 187-200, and David Lehmann, Democracy and Development in Latin America: Economics, Politics and Religion in the Post-war Period (Philadelphia: Temple University Fress, 1990), pp. Sl-9. 6. See, especially, the three main comparative projects on regime transformation of recent date. Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes, 4 vols. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Fress, 1978); Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe Scbmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, eds., Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy, 4 vols. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Fress, 1986); Larry Diamond, Juan J. Linz, and Seymour Martin Upset, eds., Democracy in Developing Countries, 4 vols. (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1989-92). 7. Fernando H. Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Fress, 1979); Tulio Halperin Donghi, " 'Dependency Theory' and Latin American Historiography," Latin American Research Review, 17 (1982), 115-30. 8. David Collier, "The Bureaucratic-Authoritarian Model: Synthesis and Priorities for Future Research," in Collier, ed., The New Authoritarianism in Latin America, pp. 363-97. 9. The problems with applying the bureaucratic-authoritarian model beyond the Brazilian (1964) and Argentine (1966) cases to the military regimes in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina which came to power in the 1970s have been pointed out by Hector Scharnis, "Reconceptualizing Latin American Authoritarianism in the 1970s: From Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism to Neoconservatism," Comparative Politics, 23 (January 1991), 201-20. On the applicability of the bureaucratic-authoritarian model to Mexico, see J~ Reyna and Richard Weinert, eds., Authoritarianism in Mexico (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues Fress, 1977). 10. The thesis was originally developed in the western European context and was initially explored by Ruth Collier in an article comparing Brazil and Mexico. See Seymour M. Upset and Stein Rokkan, "Cleavage Structures, Party
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Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction," in Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, eds., Party Systems an4 Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York: Free Press, 1967); Stein Rokkan, Citizens, Elections, an4 Parties (New York: David McKay, 1970); and Ruth Collier, "Popular Sector Incorporation and Political Supremacy: Regime Evolution in Brazil and Mexico," in Sylvia Ann Hewlett and Richard Weinert, eds., Brazil and Mexico: Patterns of Late Development (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1982). See also R. Collier and D. Collier, "Inducements versus Constraints: Disaggregating 'Corporatism'," American Political Science Review, 73 (1979), 967-86. 11. See Edgar Kiser and Michael Hechter, "The Role of General Theory in Comparative-Historical Sociology," American Journal of Sociology, 97 (1991), 1-30. On strategic choice models, see David Collier and Deborah Norden, "Strategic Choice Models of Political Change in Latin America," Comparative Politics, 24 (January 1992), 229-43. Dietrich Rueschemeyer, Evelyne Huber Stephens, and John D. Stephens, in turn, criticize voluntaristic explanations and provide a defense of structural arguments in Capitalist Development and Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.) 12. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 3-5, 18. 13. While the style of analysis advanced by Barrington Moore and now the Colliers had no place in the best known study of transitions, history returned as concern with transitions from authoritarian rule gave way to the study of democratic consolidation. An approach which is closer to that used by the Colliers can be found in the work of Terry Karl, which breaks with the standard emphasis in the transitions literature. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe an4 Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 95-99; Terry Lynn Karl, "Dilemmas of Democratization in Latin America," Comparative Politics. 23 (October 1990), 1-21. Still, the influence of rational choice theory in the "new institutionalism" literature has led to a debate on the relative merits of presidential and parliamentary systems of government, which more or less assumes that political elites will "choose." This is very different from the Colliers' work, which provides an explanation of the origins of institutions that highlights the historical and contextual shaping of choices. 14. Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord an4 Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966). 15. The clearest statements of this challenge are Charles Ragin, The Comparative Method: Moving beyond Qualitative an4 Quantitative Strategies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), and Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens, ch. 2. 16. A similar argument is considered by Rueschemeyer, Stephens, and Stephens. The dependent variables of the studies are broadly similar in that both deal with changes in regime types but differ in that the Colliers explicitly focus on regime dynamics over a long period of time while Rueschemeyer et al. seek to explain the emergence of authoritarian and democratic regimes at distinct points in time without stressing the dynamic evolution of regimes. Moreover, the latter place greater stress on the economic process of capitalist development and play down the aspect of agency central to the Colliers' work. The interesting point, nonetheless, is that Rueschemeyer et al. find variations in the degree of labor's power to be central to the different outcomes they seek to explain and thus place greater emphasis on the ability of labor to "push" for certain outcomes and not only to occupy certain "coalitional spaces" left open by the weakness of the oligarchy, though they do use this type of argument as well. For my review of their book, see Gerardo Munck, "Capitalism and Democracy: The Importance of Social Class in Historical Comparative Perspective," Journal of lnteramerican Studies and World Affairs (forthcoming). 17. These three features serve to distinguish among four types of party systems: integrative party systems, multiparty polarizing systems, systems characterized by electoral stability and social conflict, and stalemated party systems. In contrast to Moore's Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, the mechanisms by which the critical juncture is reproduced over time are carefully specified, thus avoiding the problematic status of the time lag between the crucial event and the studied outcomes in Moore's analysis. Moore breaks off his account in some cases forty years before the final outcome. That there should be such a time lag between the critical development and the regime outcome being explained does not necessarily have to be a problem, but it does demand more careful analysis than in cases where the time lag in short. Though Moore is very thin on this, John D. Stephens has attempted to fill in some of the gaps in Moore's argument. See John D. Stephens, "Democratic Transition and Breakdown in Europe, 1870-1939: A Test of the Moore Thesis," American Journal of Sociology, 94 (1989), 1019-77. 18. One could ask whether the coups in Argentina and Peru are comparable, given that they led to two fairly different types of regimes, a bureaucratic-authoritarian regime in Argentina and a military populist regime in Peru. Indeed, one could ask a similar question about the cases of Mexico and Venezuela, which had authoritarian and democratic
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Gerardo L. Munck regimes. respectively, during the heritage period. But I believe that it would be simply too much to ask from the explanatory framework provided by the Colliers. More pertinent is the issue of historical interpretation. There is the question whether 1968 represented a break in the legacy of Peruvian populism. Touraine, for example, presents Peru after 1968 as another case fitting his "national-popular" model (pp. 192, 341). Likewise, given the return of Peron in 1973, maybe 1976 is a more appropriate cut-off date for the Argentine case. 19. As Stanley Lieberson forcefully argues, however, there are certain problematic assumptions made in small N macrocomparative studies which are extremely hard to meet and which seriously undermine the validity of deterministic propositions. Stanley Lieberson, "Small N's and Big Conclusions: An Examination of the Reasoning in Comparative Studies Based on a Small Number of Cases," in Charles Ragin and Howard Becker, eds., What ls a Case? Exploring the Foundations of Social Inquiry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 105-18. 20. A comment on the link between historical and comparative analysis is of value here. The specific dates the Colliers assign to their various analytical phases can be debated. But two points are worth noting. Fust, as a comparative work, Shaping the Political Arena provides a new way of seeing Latin American history, which invites and is open to a dialogue with historically oriented research. Second, one must retreat from asking too much from this work. There are many variations among cases and historical peculiarities that historians would stress more than the Colliers do. But to ask them to explain all these variations would be to ask the wrong question. At most, a fair criticism is that certain sections of the Colliers' book suffer from being a bit top heavy, a fact that makes history sit uncomfortably in parts of their account. But to hold them accountable for every historical trend in eight countries over some five decades is to ask a question they never set out to answer. Their research aimed at showing that there are certain similarities in the course of history of pairs of countries that had similar types of labor incorporation which are surprising given the vast differences within the pairs in socioeconomic terms. In these terms, they very clearly succeed. 21. This neat dovetailing with O'Donnell's work and the debate on bureaucratic authoritarianism certainly lends greater credence to the notion of a research program than some are willing to concede. I necessarily disagree with Barbara Geddes, who bemoans the rapid rise and fall of paradigms and the lack of "accumulation of knowledge." She takes the bureaucratic-authoritarian model to task, but this model clearly sparked a very welcome and illuminating debate. The Colliers' work can be read, indeed, not only as an elaboration of the critical juncture model but also as a refinement of O'Donnell's early work. While the notion of accumulation of knowledge is somewhat vague, we can certainly say that the literature on Latin America has built upon previous efforts. On the rapid rise and fall of paradigms, she is in many ways too quick to assess the situation. The recent work by Diamond and Lipset reflects back on modernization theory from the perspective of the democratization wave of the 1980s. But even more important, it is simply not fair to compare the manner in which the literature on Latin America has developed compared with the field of American politics, as Geddes does. Given the comparatively higher number of scholars who define themselves as Americanists and the resources at their disposal, and given the relative stability of the political system they attempt to explain, one would naturally expect a greater accumulation of knowledge. It does not follow from this, however, that the study of Latin America is somehow more primitive or that the relative peripherality of rational choice theory within the field accounts for a more backward stage of development. Rational choice itself has not produced a similarly fertile agenda, comparable to the macro literature which seeks to incorporate history and context and does not give an overriding importance to deductive models. Barbara Geddes, "Paradigms and Sand Castles in Comparative Politics of Developing Areas," in William Crotty, ed., Political Science: l.LJoking to the Future, Volume 2: Comparative Politics, Policy, and International Relations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), pp. 45-75. 22. See, for example, Alain Touraine, Las sociedades dependientes: Ensayos sobre America Latina (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1978); and Alain Touraine, Michel Wieviorka, and Fran~ois Dubet, The Workers' Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 23. The distinction between party-led and state-led cases broadly resembles the one elaborated by the Colliers. Touraine, however, sees Argentina under Peron as a state-led example and does not see the 1968 coup in Peru as representing the kind of break the Colliers posit. 24. Social movements are defined as the conflictive participation of a social category around the uses of a society's resources and cultural values and over the direction of the historical process of development. For his more theoretical writings on social movements, see Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye (New York: Cambridge University Press, 198 I), and The Return of the Actor: Social Theory in Postindustrial Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). 25. See Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982); Theda Skocpol, ed., Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Dennis Smith, The Rise of Historical Sociology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
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Comparative Politics July 1993 26. W. G. Runciman, A Treatise on Social Theory, Volume I: The Methodology of Social Theory (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 27. In Dennis Smith's tenns, Touraine is an "examining magistrate," close to Barrington Moore, while the Colliers arc "scientists," closer to Theda Skocpol. Smith, pp. 15~. 28. David Collier, "The Comparative Method: Two Decades of Change," in Dankwart A. Rustow and Kenneth Paul Erickson, eds., Comparative Political Dynamics: Global Research Perspectives (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), p. 13. 29. See note 14 as well as the recent work by Marcelo Cavarozzi, "Beyond Transitions to Democracy in Latin America," Journal of Latin American Studies, 24 (1992), 665-84. 30. In the Colliers' account, labor autonomy always suffered in the process of incorporation. Even in the more mobilizational cases, such as Mexico and Venezuela, the Colliers make the point that it was not autonomous mobilization (p. 197). 31. Seen in these terms, the prospects of democracy in Latin America in the 1990s arc not very bright. For while Touraine sees signs of an increasing differentiation of the three spheres, as an involuntary effect of military rule (pp. 508, 517), the transition to democracy in a context of economic crisis has also weakened social actors and made them more subordinate to the intervention of the state. This lack of autonomous social actors, a legacy of the national-popular model, remains the greatest weakness of the new democracies (pp. 504--05, 518). 32. Touraine's books originated in a smaller PREALC-ILO (Latin American and the Caribbean Program of Employment) project as Actores sociales y sistemas polfticos en America Latina (Santiago de Chile: PREALC/OIT, 1987). The long version was published first in French and has established itself as a classic, through Portuguese and Spanish translations, in Latin America. It would be a shame if this work was not translated into English and thus was ignored until some later time, as was the fate of Cardoso and Faletto's Dependency and Development in Latin America.
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